Private Governance and the South: lessons from global forest politics

Abstract

Private governance beyond the state is emerging as a prominent debate in International Relations, focusing on the activities of private non-state actors and the influences of private rules and standards. However, the conceptual framework of governance has until recently been employed predominantly with reference to the oecd world. Despite this restricted view, a growing number of processes, organisations and institutions are beginning to affect developing countries and new institutional settings open up avenues of influence for actors from the South. In the context of a lively debate about global governance and the transformation of world politics, this article asks: what influences does private governance have on developing countries, their societies and their economies? What influence do southern actors have in and through private governance arrangements? I argue that we can assess the specific impacts of private governance, as well as potential avenues of influence for actors from the South, with regard to three functional pathways: governance through regulation, governance through learning and discourse, and governance through integration. Focusing in particular on private governance in the global forest arena, I argue that, while southern actors have not benefited so much economically from private certification schemes, they have been partially empowered through cognitive and integrative processes of governance.     

Agency in earth system governance: refining a research agenda

In the face of global environmental change, a key question for the social sciences is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their natural environment. In this context, a new long-term research program, the Earth System Governance Project, proposes several key issues to be examined: architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountability, and allocation and access. The contributions to this special issue have focused on the analytical problem of agency. For example, they have examined newly emerging or understudied agents of global environmental governance, or offered a fresh assessment of agency in the context of existing governance mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism. This concluding article outlines several insights provided by the contributions to this special issue regarding four key questions underlying the study of agency in global environmental governance. First, they call attention to the ingredients or processes that characterize agency in the first place and thus distinguish actors from agents. Secondly, the authors highlight the differences among agents and how they interact with each other. Thirdly, they point toward variation in the ways that agents may acquire authority. Finally, the contributions to this special issue suggest that there may be several approaches to evaluating agency, with different consequences. Thus, taken together, the contributions to this special issue provide a starting point for broadening our understanding of agency in earth system governance.     

20 Years of global climate change governance research: taking stock and moving forward

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state...     

Editorial

This special issue addresses the analytical problem of agency in earth system governance, an analytical problem that begins with the assumption that the credibility, stability, adaptiveness, and inclusiveness of earth system governance is affected by a wide range of actors, including national governments and their bureaucracies as well as the growing population of non-state actors such as environmental organizations, expert networks, and corporations. The articles included in this special issue engage with questions of agency in earth system governance from several different theoretical perspectives, complemented by unique empirical cases and/or methodological approaches. Along the way, the authors confront some of the conceptual challenges associated with the study of agency and advance our understanding of this important governance challenge.     

Beyond the public and private divide: remapping transnational climate governance in the 21st century

This article provides a first step towards a better theoretical and empirical knowledge of the emerging arena of transnational climate governance. The need for such a re-conceptualization emerges from the increasing relevance of non-state and transnational approaches towards climate change mitigation at a time when the intergovernmental negotiation process has to overcome substantial stalemate and the international arena becomes increasingly fragmented. Based on a brief discussion of the increasing trend towards transnationalization and functional segmentation of the global climate governance arena, we argue that a remapping of climate governance is necessary and needs to take into account different spheres of authority beyond the public and international. Hence, we provide a brief analysis of how the public/private divide has been conceptualized in Political Science and International Relations. Subsequently, we analyse the emerging transnational climate governance arena. Analytically, we distinguish between different manifestations of transnational climate governance on a continuum ranging from delegated and shared public–private authority to fully non-state and private responses to the climate problem. We suggest that our remapping exercise presented in this article can be a useful starting point for future research on the role and relevance of transnational approaches to the global climate crisis.