Central and Eastern European Agriculture and Environment: The Challenges of Governance at Multiple Levels

Abstract

AbstractBuilding institutions of sustainability which are able to govern the many resource problems in Central and Eastern European agriculture and environment requires time and coordination. Time is needed to respond to the complexity and diversity of agri‐environmental resource problems and coordination is required to make the institutions work across different levels of decision‐making. The efforts for building such institutions took place within the field of tension between accession and evolution. Accession related institutional change took place within the time frame foreseen by politicians to meet accession criteria. Most local agri‐environmental problems, however, require more time for matching agri‐environmental conditions, with the interests, goals and skills of the different actors involved. Such problems of multiple governance have been successfully addressed in many Western European countries, which calls for an exchange of knowledge between Western and Eastern European resource managers. Partnership is recommended as a particularly useful concept during transition for solving many of the problems faced by the different actors and authorities involved in the challenge of sustainable resource management. This paper demonstrates the challenges of governance at different levels of decision‐making and identifies factors which hamper and promot this process