The Dynamic of Corporate Self-Regulation: ISO 14001, Environmental Commitment, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

This article examines the institutional impact of environmental management systems (EMSs), focusing on ISO 14001. It develops a pluralistic framework for thinking about the dynamic of corporate self-regulation that we term the polyphonic model. It argues that the adoption of ISO 14001 can move the firm into a new equilibrium trajectory, which enmeshes together environmental and economic goals and reflects greater sensitivity to ecological concerns. There is a positive reciprocal cycle between the pro-environmental structural changes induced by ISO 14001 and the employees' attitudes toward the firm and the environment. In order to examine ISO 14001 institutional impact, we conducted a series of interviews with managers and administered questionnaires to employees in 24 Israeli firms with and without certification. The findings indicate that the perceived environmental commitment of certified firms was higher than that of noncertified firms and was higher among employees that perceived the EMS as more highly integrated in the firm. Perceptions of the standard's integration were also found to be positively correlated with personal environmental commitment. The results also indicate that the increase in the firm's environmental commitment was positively associated with employees' organizational citizenship behavior within certified firms. Further indications of the pro-environmental dynamic induced by ISO 14001 were found in the in-depth interviews.     

Democratic Global Internet Regulation? Governance Networks,International Law and the Shadow of Hegemony

Abstract: The field of global Internet Regulation serves as a prime example for the rise of global ‘a‐centric’ and ‘self regulatory’ governance structures. The most prominent private organisation in this field is the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN was founded as a private non‐profit organisation comprising private and public actors that run the Internet domain name system, a crucial part of the Internet technical infrastructure. It claims to be a participatory network that enables deliberation among the ‘relevant’ commercial and non‐profit actors in the Internet field. This normative aspiration of a legitimate sectoral polity beyond governmental and intergovernmental policymaking can also be isolated as the driving force behind a certain strand within the literature on global governance. The paper undertakes a critical analysis of this claim within the ICANN context.     

司法在环境治理中的作用:德国之考量

保护性法律理论和制度限制了当事人就环境争议诉诸司法,但德国司法通过判例解释和发展环境法,赋予第三方当事人和扩张环境团体起诉资格,司法同时发挥对环境立法和环境行政的测试和控制,对行政决定进行实体和程序上的充分司法审查。     

Developing Countries and Global Environmental Governance: From Contestation to Participation to Engagement

Developing countries did not start off as demandeurs of global environmental governance. Although they are still rather skeptical about the global environmental enterprise, they have come a long way from being the vigorous contestants that they were three decades ago. This fascinating evolution has not only changed the views of developing countries but has also transformed the shape of the global environmental discourse, most significantly by turning what used to be global environmental politics into what is now the global politics of sustainable development. This paper charts this evolution by using the twin conceptual lenses of effectiveness and legitimacy and the heuristic markers of the three key global conferences on the global environment (Stockholm 1972; Rio de Janeiro 1992; Johannesburg 2002). The paper argues that the pre-Stockholm era was exemplified by a politics of contestation by the South; the Stockholm-to-Rio period was a period of reluctant participation as a new global compact emerged around the notion of sustainable development; and the post-Rio years have seen the emergence of more meaningful, but still hesitant, engagement by the developing countries in the global environmental project but very much around the promise and potential of actualizing sustainable development. The author is grateful to an anonymous review, and to Steinar Andresen, Ellen Hey, and Jessica Green for valuable comments.     

Environmental Governance: The Role of Institutions in Causing and Confronting Environmental Problems

This article describes and explains in accessible terms major findings arising from the work of the long-term international research project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC). In analyzing the roles institutions play in both causing and confronting environmental problems, the project directs attention to three analytic themes – known as the problems of fit, interplay, and scale – and seeks to illuminate these concerns through empirical studies of marine, terrestrial, and atmospheric systems. IDGEC science has highlighted the pervasiveness of institutional misfits and begun to identify the reasons why misfits often prove difficult to eliminate, even when their existence becomes widely known. Research conducted under the auspices of the project demonstrates the growing impact of national and even international institutions on the effectiveness of local resource regimes. Similarly, IDGEC research has identified reasons why policy instruments that work well at the national level (e.g., tradable permits) are frequently difficult or impossible to transfer to the international level. To make the discussion of these findings concrete, the project has explored the problem of fit with particular reference to the performance of Exclusive Economic Zones, the problem of interplay through an analysis of the fate of tropical forests, and the problem of scale through an account of the limits of emissions trading as a policy instrument in the climate change regime.     

The New Collaborative Environmental Governance: The Localization of Regulation

This article examines the new collaborative environmental governance, an enterprise that involves collaboration between a diversity of private, public, and non-government stakeholders who, acting together towards commonly agreed goals, hope to achieve far more collectively, than individually. Such an approach appears to blur the familiar sharp boundaries that separate 'the state' from civil society, yet we still know very little about exactly what this blurring of public and private adds up to, and what its implications are. This new form of governance is examined through the lens of three Australian case studies. Each of these studies involves participatory dialogue, flexibility, inclusiveness, transparency, institutionalized consensus-building practices, and, at least to some extent, a shift from hierarchy to heterarchy. The paper examines the relationships between new and old governance, the architecture of these new initiatives, the role of the state, and the importance of negotiating in 'the shadow of hierarchy'.     

Early and late adopters of ISO 14001-type standards: revisiting the role of firm characteristics and capabilities

Environmental management standards (EMS) are important voluntary management tools that aim at reducing the environmental impact of firms’ activities. From ethical motivations through increasingly high pressure from regulatory authorities to expected financial returns, reasons to adopt an EMS are manifold. While they all certainly matter, it is still unclear from the literature which firm-specific organisational capabilities and structural characteristics significantly drive adoption. Using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) on two samples of French firms, we identify firm-specific factors associated with the early or late adoption of ISO 14001-type EMS and we test whether adoption increases labour productivity. We find that adopters are moderately large manufacturing firms that rely on ISO 9001 standards or Total Quality Management. In addition, according to the first sample, early adopters tend to be more technologically complex firms that are active in the European market. These differences are attenuated in the second sample, which may be biased towards more innovative firms. Both samples however concur with the conclusion that, whether early or late, adoption is associated with a higher labour productivity compared to non-adoption. This result still holds when we use fully interacted linear models instead of PSM, and seems to be consistent over time. Thus, implementing EMS might provide win–win opportunities to adopters, without giving any premium to “early birds”.     

Can Non-state Governance 'Ratchet Up' Global Environmental Standards? Lessons from the Forest Sector

The failure of the worlds' governments to agree on a binding global forest convention at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit led many leading environmental groups to advance eco-labelling 'forest certification' programmes that, they hoped, would achieve greater success in implementing sustainable forest management. Eschewing traditional State-centered authority, supporters of this 'non-State market driven' (NSMD) approach turn to customers of wood products to create compliance mechanisms, either through positive incentives such as market access or price premiums, or negative incentives such as 'direct targeting' or 'boycott' campaigns. Understanding how such systems might 'ratchet up' global forestry standards, we argue, requires that existing scholarship place greater attention on the role of public policies in helping to facilitate the impacts of private solutions. Specifically, we argue that scholars and practitioners need to assess strategic decisions not only on the basis of their appropriateness at present, but what they might do to trigger a global 'race to the top' at a later time.     

The Proliferation of Human Rights in Global Health Governance

Human rights play an integral role in the global governance of health. Recently, both structural and normative aspects of human rights have proliferated across multiple levels and within multiple contexts around the world. Human rights proliferation is likely to have a positive impact on the governance of health because it can expand the avenues through which a human rights framework or human rights norms may be used to address and improve health.     

Global Politics of Mercury Pollution: The Need for Multi-Scale Governance

This article analyses international legal and policy developments on mercury from the 1970s to the present time, and examines options for continued abatement. Multiple scientific assessments have demonstrated that mercury is an environmental pollutant that can pose a serious threat to human health and development. Currently, the international community is engaged in extensive debate about options for improved mercury governance. This article will critically examine three major policy options under discussion: the creation of a global mercury convention; the regulation of mercury under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants; and the development of voluntary partnerships. It is concluded that expanded and better integrated policy efforts are needed across global, regional and local governance scales to address mercury pollution and contamination effectively.     

Between Law and Social Norms: The Evolution of Global Governance

Abstract.  It is commonplace that economic globalization poses new challenges to legal theory. But instead of responding to these challenges, legal scholars often get caught up in heated yet purely abstract discussions of positivist and legal pluralist conceptions of the law. Meanwhile, economics-based theories such as "Law and Social Norms" have much less difficulty in analysing the newly arising forms of private and hybrid "governance without government" from a functional perspective. While legal theory has much to learn from these approaches, we argue that they fail in one crucial point: They cannot uphold the analytical distinction between law and non-law. The reasons for this shortcoming are theory-immanent in that the economic theories' focus on efficiency and their actor-based perspective are necessarily blind to "law's own rationality." We therefore propose to further develop those functional approaches to the study of global governance by complementing them with elements from Niklas Luhmann's systems theory of law. This will provide us with a conceptual framework for analyzing the workings of global governance regimes without ignoring their potential for "legalisation" and "constitutionalisation." As we will show in three concrete examples (Corporate Social Responsibility, lex mercatoria , and internet regulation) we can thus describe the evolution of new forms of legal regulation beyond the nation-state. This will also allow us to draw some preliminary conclusions on the role of law in the context of globalization and, at the same time, show the direction for further empirical research.     

The Global Financial Crisis: Learning from Regulatory and Governance Studies

Regulatory and governance studies help locate power and responsibility in the global financial crisis. I argue that corporate and state power worked together in centers like New York and London to shape regulation and that power was spread around the world. In the response to the crisis, responsibility for regulation will remain largely systems‐based rather than centrally directed. However, those systems should be located in the culture of the elites, which are socially and spatially based, as much as in the economics of the markets or the cognition of the firms. And that responsibility has limits, so there should be greater democratic control of finance and less dependence on finance capitalism for essential services, social security, and environment protection.     

The Global Governance of Communicable Diseases: The Case for Vaccine R&D

Fighting communicable diseases such HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB, and malaria has become a global endeavor, with international health authorities urging the development of effective vaccines for the eradication of these global pandemics. Yet, despite the acknowledged urgency, and given the feasibility of effective vaccine development, public and private research efforts have failed to address a response adequate to the magnitude of the crisis. Members of the academic community suggest bridging this gap by devising research pull mechanisms capable of stimulating private investments, confident that competition-based market devices are more effective than public intervention in shaping scientific breakthroughs. With reference to the economics of innovation, the paper argues that, whilst such an approach would lead to a socially suboptimal production of knowledge, direct public intervention in vaccine R&D activities would represent a far more socially desirable policy option. In recognition of the current financial and political fatigue affecting the international community towards communicable disease control, the paper resorts to the theories of global public goods (GPGs) to provide governments, both in the North and in the South, with a powerful rationale for committing to a cooperative approach for vaccine R&D. The paper encourages the creation of a Global Health Research Fund to manage such exercise and proposes enshrining countries' commitments into an International Health Treaty. The paper ends by providing a number of policy recommendations.     

习近平法治思想中的全球治理观

中国始终是世界和平的建设者、全球发展的贡献者、国际秩序的维护者,在"百年未有之大变局"中,中国前所未有地靠近世界舞台中心.习近平总书记在新的历史起点上,准确把握国际国内两个大局,针对全球治理这一重大课题,提出了以"构建人类命运共同体"理念为指引,以"走和平发展道路"和"中国走向世界,以负责任大国参与国际事务""构建以合...     

“数字税”全球治理改革的共识与冲突——基于实验主义治理的解释

数字经济全球化背景下的税收改革不仅体现为传统税收原则的失效与调整,更体现为传统税收治理体系的改革与变迁。有害税收竞争、税收规避等新治理挑战的凸显,使得旨在解决“多重征税”问题的传统税收治理体系难以为继。经合组织推动下的国际税收秩序改革共识与各国单边主义征税行为共同构成了当前“数字税”全球治理改革的复杂图景。如何对并行存在的共识与冲突提供整体性的理论解释框架,以分析不同机制的相互影响关系,既是全球治理理论发展并应用于具体领域的需要,也是实践方面探索“数字税”未来改革进程、实现多边共识的必要前提。文章基于全球税收治理体系演变历史的回顾与逻辑的梳理,总结了国际组织和各国参与“数字税”全球治理改革进程的多重行为,进而以实验主义治理为理论分析框架,从框架性目标设定、政策学习过程、改变现状机制这三个方面为“数字税”全球治理改革进程提供了整体解释。本研究不仅有助于全面理解“数字税”全球治理改革进程的复杂机制,也有助于为我国数字经济全球化战略提供政策参考。     

Global and Domestic Governance: Modes of Interdependence in Regulatory Policymaking

Abstract:  This article examines how the regulatory policies of countries are interdependent. In particular, it identifies three modes of interdependence: competitive, coordinative, and informational. In the competitive mode the essential structure of interdependence is for countries to attempt to have distinctive policies that provide some advantage over other countries, but where the equilibrium set of policies is suboptimal for all. In the coordinative mode, there is an advantage for all countries to adopt the same policy, but exactly which policy is adopted may have significant distributional consequences. Lastly, in the informational mode, the choices and experiences of countries produce informational externalities, pointing the way for other countries to policy decisions. This article examines the logic underpinning each of these modes of interdependence, and draws out the governance implications of each mode.