
Contents
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1 Introduction 1 Introduction
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2 Trends in Environmental Governance 2 Trends in Environmental Governance
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3 Normative Approaches to Environmental Governance 3 Normative Approaches to Environmental Governance
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3.1 Presumption against Centralization 3.1 Presumption against Centralization
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3.2 Approaches that Favour Centralization 3.2 Approaches that Favour Centralization
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3.2.1 Externalities 3.2.1 Externalities
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3.2.2 Game Theoretic Approaches 3.2.2 Game Theoretic Approaches
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3.2.2.1 Prisoner’s Dilemma 3.2.2.1 Prisoner’s Dilemma
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3.2.2.2 Tragedy of the Commons 3.2.2.2 Tragedy of the Commons
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3.2.3 Regulatory Competition 3.2.3 Regulatory Competition
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3.2.4 Public Choice 3.2.4 Public Choice
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3.2.5 Polycentric Governance: Multi-Level and Multi-Regime Models of Environmental Governance 3.2.5 Polycentric Governance: Multi-Level and Multi-Regime Models of Environmental Governance
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4 Advancing Debates over Environmental Governance 4 Advancing Debates over Environmental Governance
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4.1 Comparative Institutional Analysis 4.1 Comparative Institutional Analysis
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4.2 Explaining the Incidence, Stringency, and Evolution of Environmental Governance 4.2 Explaining the Incidence, Stringency, and Evolution of Environmental Governance
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4.3 Disaggregating Environmental Governance 4.3 Disaggregating Environmental Governance
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4.4 The Elusive Quest for Optimality: The Limits of Environmental Governance Debates 4.4 The Elusive Quest for Optimality: The Limits of Environmental Governance Debates
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5 Conclusion 5 Conclusion
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Recommended Reading Recommended Reading
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5 Levels of Environmental Governance
Get accessJeffrey L. Dunoff is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. He has served as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Before joining the Temple faculty, Professor Dunoff clerked for a federal court judge and practiced law in Washington, DC, where he specialized in the representation of developing state governments.
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Published:18 September 2012
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Extract
Introduction
Who should make the decisions that determine the planet’s ecological health? Which groups or institutions—local, national, regional, or global—are best placed, and have the greatest claim, to manage the earth’s resources? Questions about how environmental decisions are made and who makes them—that is, questions of environmental governance—lie at the heart of environmental law and policy. This chapter focuses on one important aspect of governance, namely the allocation of authority over environmental issues among different levels of governance. The fundamental question is which political community should govern which environmental issues, and, more specifically, when should responsibility over particular environmental issues be vested at the local, national, regional, or global level?
A large body of scholarship attempts to identify and explain general principles to determine when more, or less, centralized environmental governance systems are most appropriate. The arguments have been developed in diverse literatures, including writings on federalism, de-centralization, European integration, globalization, and regional and multilateral regimes. It is not possible to do justice to these rich literatures in this chapter; instead I shall try to summarize and abstract the most recurrent and influential arguments that are found in this scholarship. To do so, this chapter proceeds as follows. The first section sets the stage by briefly reviewing the trends that are moving towards more centralized environmental governance and describes some of the factors explaining this trend. The next section examines, from a normative standpoint, several leading approaches to debates over the appropriate level of environmental governance. The third section identifies analytic inquiries that can advance current debates over environmental governance and the final section offers a brief conclusion.
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