Environmental policy
Lecture slides Reading Video Quiz
Overall objectives
The overall aim of the ERM master program is to enable you to develop abilities and multidisciplinary techniques
which will allow you to apply to societal problems relating to natural resources and the environment. The
Environmental Policy course contributes to this overall aim by introducing you to the actors, institutions and
instruments relevant in the design and implementation of environmental policies at the local, national and
supranational levels. By the end of this course, you should be able to:
1. Understand how state, non-state and sub-national actors and institutions engage in environmental
governance at local, national and supranational levels.
2. Differentiate between hierarchical, market-based and networked environmental policies and
governance, including their key strengths and weaknesses.
3. Identify the main steps for evaluating an intervention that addresses an environmental problem.
4. Explain, analyze and propose solutions regarding the complexity of decision-making structures,
procedures and negotiations of environmental issues.
Overall structure
Division into 3 types of governance for environmental issues: hierarchy, markets and networks.
Hierarchical environmental governance relies on 'top-down' decision-making and authority. It is primarily
connected to public policy at the international, national, regional and local level. Power is needed to engage in
hierarchical governance and is exercised through rule-setting, monitoring, reporting, and possibly, and
sanctioning. Hierarchical governance generally depends on chains of ‘command and control’. Steinzor (114:1998)
suggests that “Command and control rules impose detailed, legally enforceable limits, conditions, and affirmative
requirements […], generally controlling sources that generate pollution on an individual basis.”. Traditional areas
of environmental policy making where hierarchical models of governance are used are: air and noise pollution,
waste management, and environmental standards on technologies. We will also compare command and control
policies with self-regulation policies, which outsources responsibility to the targets of the policy.
Market-based environmental governance relies on the power and logics of markets to induce change. The
primary driver of change are prices and in the environmental realm, it primarily means ‘putting a price on nature’.
Market-based approaches generally assume that individuals and companies are rational utility maximizing
entities that respond to price-incentives. For instance, if it becomes more expensive to emit greenhouse gas
emissions by putting a price on carbon, then individuals and organizations will reduce their carbon emission
levels by avoiding certain activities or invest in new less polluting technologies. However, individuals and
organizations can also decide to pay the price for creating an environmental problem if they consider the
expected benefits to outweigh the costs. Market-based approached have become increasingly popular in
environmental governance over the past 25 years and applied to address issues such as climate change, water
scarcity, nitrogen pollution, and ecosystem services degradation.
Networked environmental governance relies on collaborative arrangements between public, private and civil
society actors. It marks a shift away from hierarchies and markets by bringing in different societal actors in
collaborative networks. Networked governance relies on reciprocity and trust between participants in the
networks in order to deliver services or address environmental problems. Compared to hierarchical governance,
networks are based on horizontal decision-making procedures and governance logics. A central idea is that
complex environmental problems – such as climate change, biodiversity loss, or river-basin management –
demand qualities and capacities beyond those of one actor (a national government for instance). Instead,
different actors need to engage in resource exchange, bringing different specializations to the table. Several
prominent examples of networked governance arrangements for environmental issues will be addressed in the
course, such as roundtables on sustainable palm oil, public-private partnerships for sustainable development,
and governance through disclosure mechanisms such as the Global Reporting Initiative.
,Lecture 1: Introducing environmental policy and governance
Objectives
1. Understand how state, non-state and sub-national actors and institutions engage in environmental
governance at local, national and supranational levels.
2. Differentiate between hierarchical, market-based and networked environmental policies and
governance, including their key strengths and weaknesses.
3. Identify the main steps for evaluating an intervention that addresses an environmental problem.
4. Explain, analyze and propose solutions regarding the complexity of decision-making structures,
procedures and negotiations of environmental issues.
Environmental policy (and governance) is a rich and diverse academic field, spanning across several social
sciences. It is not a homogenous discipline ruled by common definitions, methods, or problem-descriptions.
Instead, it will often be the background of the teacher that determines the perspective that will be presented. For
example, an economist might have a quite different view on how to teach environmental policy compared to a
lawyer. This course tries to provide you with a broad perspective but since I start from a political science and
international relations perspective, it means that questions and concepts such as governance, effectiveness,
legitimacy, accountability, equity and justice will be central.
Getting everyone on the same page is important for the course discussions and readings and in this first section
we’ll do two things. First, it introduces three basic concepts: policy, institutions and governance. These concepts
will frequently come back through-out the course and everyone should have an idea of what is meant. Second, it
discusses the ‘environment’ compared to other policy fields, in particular the idea of problem-structure and the
role of science. Finally, the section briefly sketches the modern history of environmental policy to the scene for
everything we will discuss in the course. The history is important in order to understand why environmental policy
looks like it does.
Three concepts you need to know
Studying environmental policy and governance requires that you familiarize yourself with a few basic concepts. At
first, some of these concepts might feel fuzzy and abstract, but the more you work with them, the more they will
start make sense. It’s a bit like following a recipe with new ingredients and cooking techniques. You first need to
taste and try before knowing how they combine into a delicious meal.
1. Policy
The first concept is policy. A policy is a statement made by a government, company or other organizations about
what it intends to do (Birkland, 2019). Public policy studies focus on governmental policy, i.e. what national,
regional, or local governments, intend to do in a policy field such as the environment. For instance, if the national
government proclaims that it will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions with 80 % by 2050, it states its intentions
regarding climate policy. What counts as a policy? Commonly we think of policies as being put forward in official
documents, but policy is also announced in speeches, interviews and social media posts. Organizations other
than governments also have policies that might be relevant for environmental issues. An increasing number of
companies are publishing corporate social responsibility principles and sustainability reports with clues about how
the think about their environmental impacts. Also the absence of a policy could be a policy. An organization can
choose not to make any statements on how they want to deal with an issue, having a policy not to engage.
2. Institutions
The second concept is institutions. What is understood as an institution very much depend on the academic field.
For example, sociologists tend to think about social institutions such as the institution of religion or family.
Economists tend to see institutions in more transactional terms as means to lower transaction costs by building
trusts. Political scientists and international relation scholars talk about political institutions, e.g. the United
Nations. Institutions is thus a broad term but Douglass North, an American economist, put it succinctly when he
wrote “[i]institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction.
They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and
formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights)” (1991, p. 97). One may also think of institutions as sets of
formal and informal rules that guide social behavior. Institutions determine what is appropriate behavior in a
,certain situation, including consequences for not conforming with the rules. Creating institutions that steer society
towards more environmentally sustainable behavior is pivotal for students and practitioners of environmental
policy.
3. Governance
The third concept is governance. Governance encompasses all the actors and institutions (including policies) that
govern an issue area. Environmental governance, for example, includes all the institutions, policies and
processes that govern the environment. Mark Bevir (and Wikipedia) defines governance as “all processes of
governing, whether over a family, tribe, formal or informal organization, or territory, and whether through laws,
norms, power, or language.” (Bevir, 2012, p. 1). The definition appear to include everything (which might seem
problematic since definitions are expected to also help us determine what to exclude) but governance must be
seen in its historical context. Governance was popularized in the 1980s as a reaction to the concept of
government. The concept moves us away from focusing on public authorities as central actors, to also include
businesses, civil society organizations, individuals and other actors when thinking about governing. “Private
governance”, for example, refer to situations when private actors such as companies and non-profit organizations
devise institutions for governing a policy field (see e.g. Pattberg, 2005). Similarly, “hybrid governance” generally
refers to situations when public (e.g. national governments or cities) collaborate with private (e.g. companies or
non-profit organizations) actors in developing institutions. Importantly, governance also encompass different
modes of governing. Hierarchical modes of governance refers to top-down rule-setting, enforced by the threat of
hard punishment, conducted nearly exclusively by national governments (e.g. emission limits on car exhaust);
Market-based modes of governance try to harness the power of market-mechanisms such as price incentives
and nudging (e.g. payment for ecosystem services and carbon pricing); and, Network-based modes of
governance refers to collaborative arrangements where different actors jointly try to solve a problem through
collaboration (e.g. public-private/multi-stakeholder partnerships). Each mode of governance has its pros and
cons, and studying environmental policy and governance is much about figuring out under what conditions
different modes (or combinations of modes) of governance can generate effective, legitimate and fair outcomes.
What is special about the ‘environment’?
Since we have to make priorities in the environmental policy course, we don’t dedicate much time to discussing
interesting and important issues such as environmental "problem-structures". We also don’t discuss the special
role (natural)science plays in environmental decision-making, the science-policy interface is a vast research field
on its own. However, both these aspects will tangent other discussions we have throughout the course and
understanding them will help you better position some of the debates we have in a wider context. The following
section provide you with a very short summary on some basic ideas and recommended literature if you want to
explore further on your own.
Are environmentalists watermelons?
Environmental policy and governance try to manage human’s relationships and impacts on the natural
environment. The list of topics is long: biodiversity loss, air/water/soil/noise pollution, climate change, forests
degradation, waste treatment, fishery decline, plant genetic resources, release of toxic substances, etcetera.
Environmental policy is trying to address problems that are closely linked to economic activity such as industrial
growth and unsustainable consumption patterns. Even the impacts of natural hazards (e.g. floods or droughts)
are closely linked to how humans have decided to settle down in areas leaving us exposed to danger. Hence,
environmental policy is often closely linked and even dependent on adjacent policies on energy, health, and
education.
Since environmental problems are closely intertwined with economic activity, they tend to be complex. Consider
climate change, where cheap and dirty energy (primarily coal) fueled the industrial revolution which has enabled
unprecedented growth in material well-being. The same energy is now threatening to cause major disruption in
the global climate system, with possibly unimaginable consequences for our material and social well-being. Fossil
fuels are so deeply engrained into modern way of life that it is hard to imagine a world without coal, oil, or gas.
“...it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”
, Addressing environmental problem require changes in existing production and consumption patterns, introducing
potential trade-offs with economic growth or current “ways of living”. Changing production and consumption
patterns create contestation between status-quo players, that are benefitting from the existing system, and those
concerned about the environment and/or would benefit from an alternative system. Some environmental
advocates and scholars (e.g. Naomi Klein (2014)) argue that the fundamental problem is capitalism. According to
their perspective, the economic growth paradigm, which is the foundation of contemporary capitalism, is
incompatible with environmental sustainability. Consequently, addressing environmental problems require
revamping or even overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with some other ideology or normative framework.
Pessimists sometimes refer to the “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (Fisher,
2009), noting the perceived lack of viable alternatives to capitalism, whereas optimists have suggested various
degree of modification to modern capitalism, captured in concepts such as “circular economy”, “doughnut
economics”, or even “de-growth” (see e.g. Kallis, 2011; Morseletto, 2020; Raworth, 2017). It has caused
opponents on the right-wing of the political spectrum to claim that environmentalists are “watermelons” – green
on the outside and red on the inside – a left-wing socialist political agenda disguised by environmental arguments
(Delingpole, 2012; Hoffarth and Hodson, 2016).
Despite one’s political positioning, it is hard to deny that many environmental problems can be referred as
“wicked”. Such problems (and their solutions) are ill-defined, depend on individual perspectives and require
political judgment; they include several societal issues simultaneously; and, lack a straightforward response
(Rittel and Webber, 1973). To describe what type of problem climate change is, Levin and colleagues (2012)
even introduced a new category, “super wicked” problems, due to its urgency; that problem-creators and
problem-solvers are the same; the lack of central authority; and, irrational future discounting. Most environmental
problems – consider for instance air pollution, biodiversity loss, or waste management – are thus not clearly
delineated and do not lend them-selves to an straight-forward solution.
The importance of science and scientists
The complexity of addressing environmental problems increases by the important role of science, in particular the
natural sciences. Scientists play an important role in identifying new and emerging problems; proposing and
designing solutions; and, assessing and evaluating policy impacts. Unfortunately, predicting the future is difficult
since environmental science comes with few certainties about cause-effect relationships. Instead, scientists have
resorted to modeling the future, developing scenarios which connect biophysical models with the social world
(e.g. changing demographics, transport patterns and economic growth) that differ along a set of key parameters
and plausibility. It creates different story-lines (e.g. “if economic growth continues unabated, then emission levels
will be X at year Y”) and allows for “choosing” a route to reach a desired outcome, within some degree of
confidence. We have scenarios for just about every environmental issue: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) use the Special Report on Emission Scenarios for the relationships between greenhouse gas
emission pathways and temperature; The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) use
various fishery scenarios; and, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Services have scenarios for projecting ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss (Pulver and VanDeveer,
2009). These scenarios can be hugely influential as they provide decision-makers with a frame of reference, a
sense of what it possible, and the necessary fodder to legitimize new initiatives; for proposing and prioritizing
some problems over others; and, for estimating the impact of a policy on the environment.
Science and policy is co-constitutive however, as decision-makers also influence science. Politicians and other
decision-makers increasingly set research priorities and decide what research that will receive funding, they
decide which scientists to believe in and which scientific insights they consider most relevant, and they play a role
in interpreting scientific results to a broader public. This insight – that science is neither objective nor free from
influence from the society in which it is created – is sometimes referred to as the ‘co-production’ of knowledge
and has become an entire field of study looking at how knowledge is produced, interpreted and used, often under
the heading “science and technology studies or ”“the science-policy interface” (Huitema and Turnhout, 2009;
Jasanoff, 2004). Academics in this field have shown, for example, that the IPCC authorship is dominated by
scientists from the US and the UK, often from the same institutions and with similar backgrounds (Corbera et al.,
2015).
In sum, the environment as a policy field separates itself from other policy fields (e.g. security, housing, or
finance) due to the deep linkages between modern production and consumption patterns and environmental
degradation; and, the important role for science and scientists.
A very brief history of environmental policy and governance
