Pathways and Obstacles to Sustainable Environmental Governance
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sustainability and Applications".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 6641
Special Issue Editors
Interests: political regulation; applied democratic theory; representation and state politics; environmental governance
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Governance plays a critical role in protecting natural resources, achieving environmental sustainability, and dealing with climate change. Governance refers not only to the actions of government officials but also to the entire political ecosystem of interest groups, businesses, nonprofits, and others who help to determine environmental policy. This Special Issue will examine the pathways and obstacles to successful environmental governance practices. We are particularly interested in the following questions:
- What roles do different political actors play in environmental governance and how does that vary in different institutional settings?
- What are some of the "best practices" and examples of instances where governance (e.g. through economic incentives, regulation, or collaboration with communities) contributed to achieving sustainability goals?
- NIMBYism, human inertia, misperceptions, and various forms of self-interest can contribute to myopic policies that undermine long-term environmental sustainability goals. How can governments better align private incentives with pro-environmental policies?
- In the U.S. and many western democracies, how does hyper-partisanship and political polarization undermine the effective functioning of environmental governance. What are some of the ways to promote bipartisan policy support for a sustainable environment?
- In the U.S. and many western democracies, structural, and functional governmental fragmentation complicate the task of creating effective environmental governance? What are some of the innovative ways to overcome these problems?
- In other countries characterized by stronger central control, does the concentration of power facilitate or simply produce different types of environmental governance problems? What are some of the ways these systems attempt to address those challenges?
We are open to research methodology and orientation. We welcome papers that advance our existing theoretical framework, as well as empirical works that expand our current understanding. We also welcome papers that examine environmental governance in other realms that are not covered by our research questions.
Prof. Dr. Bruce Cain
Dr. Iris Hui
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- environmental governance
- institutional settings
- fragmentation
- centralization
- partisan polarization
- bipartisan support
- policy incentives
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