Claim: Good Environmental Stewardship Leads to Good Governance

Good Environmental Stewardship Leads to Good Governance

This is a strong claim that can be illustrated by examples but not proven.

The basic premise is that communities can address the problem of environmental protection, resource allocation and environmental sustainability from a point of view of shared values. Once they do this in a open and transparent manner (inviting all stakeholders and making all the workings apparent), this will probably lead to a fair solution for the use of environment resources that simultaneously honors social equity. This basis of shared governance, based on trust, can be used to build into other areas and eventually lead to better, democratic governance. Simply, people share their interest in protecting environmental resources for the use of all and by doing so they build a platform to address other related issues.

This claim is intersting in that there is a reasonable counter claim, i.e. that you need established strong governments to have environmental protection.

The claim and counter claim pair is similar to the dilemma we face as a nation when we try to help in the process of "nation building". The official US stance seems to be that promoting democracy will lead to open markets and the benefits of capitalism. But Putman's work in Italy (Putnam 1993) that a region needs to establish trust, then commerce and finally democracy follows. The importance of this difference is that what are the necessary conditions that need to be established first, is it some abstract democratic national process or is it important to establish trust first. These ideas relate to philosophies about how we try to manage complex systems.

Consider the implication of the claim, that we should help communities improve their use of resources in an equitable and sustainable way and that will also build stong institutions to deal with other problems. This means helping communities use renewable energy to pump water and managing watersheds for continued water availability could spill over into those communities using those metaphors to address other issues related to food, housing, education and civic engagement. In this case, the initial actions of the community and the tools/technology that they use is not neutral but very important.

Examples:

Portland's watershed programs led to citizen activism which led (in turn) to Portland having a unique level of civic engagement in regional government.

• (Putnam et al. 2003)

The Green Belt Movement -

• Wangari Maathai
• taking care of the environment lead to civic engagement and empowerment of women in Kenya

Chemical spill in far east Russia required local control.

• Khabarovk, Russia
• Thomas Benke
• Some of the institutional structures that were put in place were modelled after those in Portland because of a sister city arrangement.
• -
• http://trbenke.qwestoffice.net/Html/report%20to%20mayor%20potter%20re%20khabarovsk.pdf

Costa Rica may not be an example of the directionality of this relationship, but their history certainly demonstrates how sustainable goals reinforce both the environment and government.

• leadership draws on international repertoire
• Steinberg, P. F. (2001). Environmental Leadership in Developing Countries: Transnational relations and biodiversity policy in Costa Rica and Bolivia. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.
  

Cody Jone's thesis and Dave Ervin's work show that businesses who are already pursuing sustainable practices welcome regulation and enforcement of environmental laws.

"Environmental Stewardship as a new form of fisheries governance"

"epistemic communities" of knowledge communities who are empowered to take action, for example for environmental protection

quoting Haas -

"transnational networks of knowledge based communities that are both politically empowered through their claims to exercise authoritative knowledge and motivated by shared causal and principled beliefs"

Tim S. Gray and Jenny Hatchard, ICES Journal of Marine Science
http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/64/4/786

insert several examples from chapters from Berkes and Folke 1998

The "tragedy of the commons" is not that common

• Although it is presented as if every common pool resource degrades into the tragedy of the conflict between individual utility and group benefit, research shows that most resources are used under sets of community rules that limit exploitation.
  • chapter by Berkes and Folke (1998b)
• there are scale effective social institutions that have developed to control the use of natural resources and inappropriate interference from larger scales can destroy the effectiveness of these solutions
  • other references in this book

References:

Berkes, F., and Carl Folke, Ed. (1998). Linking Social and Ecological Systems. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Berkes, F., and Carl Folke (1998b). Linking social and ecological systems for resilience and sustainability (Chapter 1). In: Linking Social and Ecological Systems. F. and C. Folke. Berkes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1 - 25.

Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making Democracy Work: Civic traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

Putnam, R. D., and Lewis M. Feldstien, with Dan Cohen (2003). Better Together: Restoring the American Community, Simon and Schuster.