Progress from Blue to the Green World: Multilevel Governance for Pollution Prevention Planning and Sustainability

Abstract

The saying that prevention is better than cure is also true of environmental pollution. In addition, how pollution can be prevented is becoming an important challenge in the contemporary globalized world. Policymakers and practitioners increasingly more often see pollution prevention as a crucial global health issue. There is substantial agreement as to the need to prevent pollution in cooperation with manufacturing firms. However, today, there is a lack of understanding of what governance practices are the most effective and should be implemented to achieve the zero-pollution target. Multilevel governance framework has been proposed to facilitate pollution prevention planning. To deal with pollution prevention challenges, practitioners must shift towards a more multilevel governance approach that can build a with coalition of different organizational units. In the current study, we review relevant literature to identify the most optimal taxonomies that highlight understudied areas in pollution prevention and use them as a basis for developing a multilevel governance (MLG) framework. MLG framework is essential as it not only offers help to practitioners to participate but also takes a systematic approach. The successful transition from blue to the green world requires focusing on multilevel governance aimed to achieve zero-pollution targets. This work contributes to the emerging debate on what is the most effective pollution prevention planning framework for manufacturing firms to achieve zero-pollution.