Governance
Governance relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists either of a separate process or of a specific part of management or leadership processes. Sometimes people set up a government to administer these processes and systems.
In the case of a business or of a non-profit organisation, governance relates to consistent management, cohesive policies, processes and decision-rights for a given area of responsibility. For example, managing at a corporate level might involve evolving policies on privacy, on internal investment, and on the use of data.
There is a clear distinction between the concepts of governance and of politics. Politics involves processes by which a group of people with initially divergent opinions or interests reach collective decisions generally regarded as binding on the group, and enforced as common policy. Governance, on the other hand, conveys the administrative and process-oriented elements of governing rather than its antagonistic ones. Such an argument continues to assume the possibility of the traditional separation between "politics" and "administration". Contemporary governance practice and theory sometimes questions this distinction, premising that both "governance" and "politics" involve aspects of power.
In general terms, governance occurs in three broad ways:
- Through networks involving public-private partnerships (PPP) or with the collaboration of community organisations
- Through the use of market mechanisms whereby market principles of competition serve to allocate resources while operating under government regulation
- Through top-down methods that primarily involve governments and the state bureaucracy
These modes of governance often appear in terms of hierarchy, markets, and networks.
Governments play a crucial role in managing environmental public goods such as the atmosphere, forests and water bodies. Governments are valuable institutions for resolving problems involving these public goods at both the local and global scales (e.g., climate change, deforestation, overfishing). Although in recent decades the economic market has been championed by certain quarters as a suitable mechanism for managing environmental entities, markets have serious failures and governmental intervention and regulation and the rule of law (governance) is still required for the proper, just and sustainable management of the environment.
Governance is a multi-facetted, and therefore complex concept to analyse. In the environmental field, factors related to governance include matters such as the distribution of powers between and within jurisdictions, coordinating mechanisms, the delegation of authority, the responsibilities of independent advisory institutions, financial resources, the mandates and organization of environmental agencies, the legal regime, and the extent of public participation. In an analysis of two systems of environmental governance, the environmental protection functions of the agencies and on the distribution of responsibilities between environmental agencies, a report given to the Canadian Government on Environmental Governance found that at the level of government as a whole, environmental responsibilities are packaged differently among agencies, depending on the jurisdiction.
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Some jurisdictions combine environmental protection and environmental conservation within a common agency (e.g., Wisconsin, Alberta, British Columbia, New Jersey);
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Some jurisdictions combine environmental protection and environmental conservation under a common minister but under distinct agencies (e.g., Sweden, Denmark, Norway);
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Some jurisdictions break out these responsibilities into different agencies (e.g., California, New South Wales, Massachusetts, New Zealand);
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Some combine environmental protection with other non-environmental responsibilities (e.g., housing in the Netherlands; energy in Denmark).
Where environmental responsibilities are distributed across more than one agency within the same level of government, coordination usually takes place at the cabinet level. Massachusetts, for example, has an Executive Office of Environmental Affairs that oversees the coordination of environmental and natural resource policy between five state-level departments.
There seem to be two primary models for the organisation of environmental protection functions in the jurisdictions which are:
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Jurisdictions that centralise the full suite of functions (e.g., policy development, risk assessment, standard-setting, technical assistance and enforcement) within one agency. These include New South Wales, Wisconsin, British Columbia and Alberta.
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Jurisdictions that split enforcement from policy development and standard-setting (in Massachusetts, standard-setting and enforcement are split between different agencies of the same government). These broad categories are far from homogeneous as differences in priorities, resources, instrument choice and the degree of political support mean that each agency functions in unique ways.
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