Environmental Governance

Abstract

▪ Abstract  This chapter reviews the literature relevant to environmental governance in four domains of scholarship: globalization, decentralization, market and individual incentives-based governance, and cross-scale governance. It argues that in view of the complexity and multiscalar character of many of the most pressing environmental problems, conventional debates focused on pure modes of governance–where state or market actors play the leading role–fall short of the capacity needed to address them. The review highlights emerging hybrid modes of governance across the state-market-community divisions: comanagement, public-private partnerships and social-private partnerships. It examines the significant promise they hold for coupled social and natural systems to recover from environmental degradation and change and explores some of the critical problems to which hybrid forms of environmental governance are also subject.