Greening a Machiavellian State? Insights for International Environmental Governance

Abstract

The age of climate change that we live in has forced scholars and policymakers to rethink fundamental tenets of international environmental governance [1]. Moving beyond the ‘pure modes of governance, in which either state or market actors play a leading role, scholars now recommend co-management, public-private partnerships, or social-private partnerships [2], each of which accord significant space to non-state actors. Such propositions and the numerous ongoing attempts to implement them have in turn led to concerns about the accountability of the non-state actors involved. Others have put forth proposals for ‘stakeholder democracy’, with an added emphasis on democratic representation and accountability of civil society participants in international environmental governance [3]. In this article, I argue that important as these proposals are, they have detracted from a critical scrutiny of the continuing dominance of the state, and the need to hold the state to account. I argue that to aid the agenda of state accountability, scholars and policymakers will need to address two fundamental aspects of contemporary international environmental governance: first, the dominant discourses of environmentalism that inform policies of international environmental governance need to be questioned; second, the top down efforts of international agencies must give way to interventions that aid politically mobilized groups of citizens capable of pressuring governments to adopt nationally suitable environmental action.