IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/ufzdps/152008.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Environmental governance: Participatory, multi-level - and effective?

Author

Listed:
  • Newig, Jens
  • Fritsch, Oliver

Abstract

Current international and European Union environmental policies increasingly promote collaborative and participatory decision-making on appropriate and multiple governance levels as a means to attain more sustainable policies and a more effective and lasting policy implementation. The entailed shifts of geographical scale of governance can be exemplified by the EU Water Framework Directive in that higher-level policies are devolved not only to the member states but to local collaborative decision-making bodies on natural as opposed to territorial scales. To date, empirical evidence and theoretical considerations have remained ambiguous about the environmental outcomes of such modes of governance. At the same time, the relationship between multi-level governance and non-state actor involvement remains a largely uncharted terrain. Accordingly, a twofold research agenda is mapped out: How does public participation work in different governance contexts? And what potential do multi-level governance environments have to foster the effectiveness of participatory governance? Drawing on scholarly literature on multi-level governance, policy implementation, public participation and complex systems, we develop five sets of hypotheses on how the number of policy levels and geographical rescaling affect citizen participation, actor interests and policy outcomes. We present empirical results based on a comparative meta-analysis of 47 case studies in environmental governance in North America and the EU, combining qualitative and quantitative methods.

Suggested Citation

  • Newig, Jens & Fritsch, Oliver, 2008. "Environmental governance: Participatory, multi-level - and effective?," UFZ Discussion Papers 15/2008, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Division of Social Sciences (ÖKUS).
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:ufzdps:152008
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/44744/1/604559410.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Qiang He & Xin Deng & Chuan Li & Zhongcheng Yan & Yanbin Qi, 2021. "Do Internet Skills Increase Farmers’ Willingness to Participate in Environmental Governance? Evidence from Rural China," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 11(12), pages 1-18, November.
    2. Álvarez, X. & Valero, E. & Santos, R.M.B. & Varandas, S.G.P. & Sanches Fernandes, L.F. & Pacheco, F.A.L., 2017. "Anthropogenic nutrients and eutrophication in multiple land use watersheds: Best management practices and policies for the protection of water resources," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 1-11.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:ufzdps:152008. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/doufzde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.