Political Decoupling: Private Implementation of Public Policy

Where policy goals can be achieved through regulation of private firms, private provision of public services allows governments to separate public policies from their political costs by shifting those costs to the private sector. Over the past three decades, financial decoupling has emerged as a regulatory strategy for promoting conservation, especially in the energy sector. Decoupling refers to the separation of a firm’s revenues from the volume of its product consumed, which allows companies to pursue resource efficiency free from financial risk. Similarly, when private firms provide public services, they separate public policies from their political costs. This political decoupling allows governments to pursue controversial policies while avoiding their attendant political risks. Applied to environmental policy, this theory implies that potentially unpopular conservation policies are more likely to be adopted and succeed when implemented through private firms. As an initial test of the theory, we analyze California water utilities and their responses to that state’s drought from 2015–2017. Analysis shows that, compared with those served by local government utilities, private utilities adopted more aggressive conservation measures, were more likely to meet state conservation standards, and conserved more water.     

Voluntary Environmental Programs: A Canadian Perspective

In light of the increasing number of environmental problems necessitating government's attention and the limited scope and budget for addressing these issues, environmental protection has, and continues to evolve as more flexible approaches to regulation are being sought and embraced by governments throughout the world. Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) are a pragmatic response by both governments and business to find a more flexible way to protect the environment. We discuss the theoretical motivations for firms to adopt VEPs in general and examine Canada's experience with three types of VEPs, public, negotiated, and unilateral agreements, to assess whether the motivating factors are present. We then argue that the institutional, political, and regulatory framework governing environmental policy in Canada does not provide the conditions necessary to effectively promote superior corporate environmental protection across jurisdictions. Despite the lack of government‐directed VEPs, there has been considerable interest by both the private sector and civil society who have taken the lead by developing unilateral agreements. Using existing literature and our current research, we examine the factors that motivate firms in Canada to participate in unilateral agreements and the characteristics of firms with the higher environmental performance and suggest some policy implications.     

Corridors of Power: Assembling US Environmental Foreign Aid

Using the US Agency for International Development's environmental program in Madagascar as a lens, I offer a historically grounded, relational, and multi-sited methodology for understanding the transnational processes that constitute political forests in the contemporary era. I argue that neoliberal reforms conditioned the emergence of a public–private–non-profit alliance, which promoted biodiversity conservation as a US foreign aid priority. As these reforms weakened state capacity and liberalised economies, the downsized Madagascar and US governments became reliant on conservation actors to mobilise political support for their programs. This reinforced the need to maintain strategic relationships with capital-city actors, undermining prior efforts to devolve forest management to local communities. By isolating deforestation as a peasant problem “over there” and by expanding protected areas to meet global biodiversity targets, the conservation alliance created an avenue to be green that did not threaten extractive industries or key constituents. In this manner, saving the environment via protected areas expansion offered politicians a pathway through the inherent contradictions of green neoliberalism.     

Evaluating social sustainability in historic urban environments

Government policies aimed at the alleviation of poverty and social exclusion have been moving toward a multi-faceted approach that includes community capacity building and collaborative partnerships. This implies greater community consultation and the involvement of public and private institutions and the voluntary sector in the democratic management of local affairs. While these are established theoretical concepts, implementing localised social policy and measuring the outcomes are notoriously difficult, particularly in historic urban areas where democratic decision making has the potential to conflict with the management of heritage value. Drawing on recent policy and academic literature, this paper explores the concept of social sustainability and the characteristics of its evaluation. The paper illustrates how social sustainability indicators favour multi-dimensional themes that support national political agendas. The tension between this and the rise of participatory governance is highlighted. The paper concludes with a suggested approach to the evaluation of social sustainability in historic urban environments.     

Motivations for Voluntary Environmental Management

This article examines the motivations for firms to participate in voluntary environmental programs and to adopt environmental management practices using data gathered from a survey conducted in 2005 of facilities located in Oregon operating in six industrial sectors. It is one of the first studies of voluntary environmental management to include small‐, medium‐, and large‐sized facilities as well as to include both privately and publicly owned facilities. In particular, we examine the effects of both external factors such as regulatory, consumer, and investor pressures, and internal factors such as technical and resource capacity, in influencing voluntary environmental behavior. The intent is to describe potential influences that have implications for designing and implementing private and public policies that foster effective voluntary environmental management by firms. We find that larger facilities are more likely to participate in more voluntary environmental programs, but are likely to adopt more environmental management practices only if environmental issues are of significant concern to them. Presence of an R&D department stimulates the adoption of more environmental management practices, particularly if environmental issues are of significant concern to the facility, but does not have a statistically significant impact on participation in voluntary programs. We also find that while regulatory pressures are significant in motivating participation in voluntary programs and adoption of environmental management practices, competitive pressures are only important in motivating the former. Pressure from final good consumers or from investors in publicly traded facilities is not found to have a significant influence on voluntary environmental behavior of facilities in this study.     

Collective Action through Voluntary Environmental Programs: A Club Theory Perspective

Voluntary environmental programs are institutions that seek to induce firms to produce positive environmental externalities beyond what government regulations require. Drawing on club theory, this paper outlines a theoretical perspective to study the relationship between program design and program effectiveness. Effective programs have rule structures that mitigate two central collective action problems inherent in producing positive environmental externalities: attracting firms to participate in the program and ensuring that participating firms adhere to program obligations. Because program efficacy can be undermined by collective action problems associated with free riding and shirking, effective voluntary clubs should be designed to mitigate these challenges.     

The Sydney 2000 Olympics and Urban Entrepreneurialism: Local Variations in Urban Governance

Hallmark events are important redevelopment tools utilised by entrepreneurial governments. The features of these events are analogous to those of entrepreneurial urban governance. This study examined the local impacts of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, particularly in relation to its social and political legacies, in three local government areas which hosted Olympic venues. It also investigated the nature of urban governance in Sydney, Australia, as it was manifested in the planning of the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Examples of entrepreneurialism in planning for the Olympics included the centralisation of planning powers, the increasing involvement of the private sector in government activities, and the relaxation of planning processes, resulting in reduced openness, accountability and public participation. Examples of resistance to the anti–democratic tendencies of entrepreneurialism were however evident in some areas, with managerial and democratic concerns remaining important to some local governments. Local community activism was imperative to achieving civic participation and ensuring commitment by local government to these managerial and democratic concerns. Activism also enabled some local communities to secure significant benefits from the Olympic Games.     

HISTORY,INSTITUTIONS, AND CITIES: A VIEW FROM THE AMERICAS*

ABSTRACT Every nation, formally or informally, defines and establishes the lines of political and fiscal authority among its national, regional, and local governments. Historically, centralized governments tend to restrict the power and autonomy of provincial and local governments. In this paper, we exploit the quasi‐experimental distribution of political institutions in the Americas caused by variation in European colonial experience to examine the impact of institutions on urban and local development, specifically on the degree of urban primacy, the size distribution of cities, the number and density of local government units, and the fragmentation of metropolitan areas. We argue that centralization of political power at the national level, as experienced in many countries in Latin America, contributes to urban primacy and a size distribution of cities favoring large cities. Additionally, even in more politically decentralized countries such as Canada and the U.S., variance in political centralization at the provincial (state) level over local governments led to significant divergences in urban primacy, the distribution of city sizes, as well as the form, number, and density of local governments. While we cannot rule out the importance of other factors, our findings suggest that political centralization affects spatial economic development.     

The politics of decentralizing national parks management in the Philippines

International donors and state bureaucrats in the developing world have promoted decentralization reform as the primary means to achieve equitable, efficient and sustainable natural resource management. Relatively few studies, however, consider the power interests at stake. Why do state agencies decentralize power, what political patterns unfold, and how do outcomes affect the responses of resource users? This paper explores decentralization reform by investigating the political processes behind the Philippine state's decisions to transfer authority over national parks management to local government units. Drawing on a case of devolved management at Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park, Palawan Island, we examine how political motives situated at different institutional scales affect the broader process of decentralization, the structure of management institutions, and overall livelihood security. We demonstrate how power struggles between the Philippine state and City Government of Palawan over the right to manage the national park have impacted the livelihood support offered by community-based conservation. We conclude that decentralization may offer empowering results when upper-level policies and political networks tie into sufficiently organized institutions at the local level.     

The neoliberalization of water in Lima,Peru

Neoliberalization of the water sector in Lima, Peru, is analyzed using an innovative conceptual framework with three interrelated dimensions: techno-environmental improvements, the monetization of water services and the search for political legitimacy. Application of this conceptual framework to the recent reforms of the public water services of Lima, a city historically fraught with social inequalities and water management problems, shows that there have been two distinctive phases: firstly, emphasis on techno-environmental improvements and monetization in the 1990s (when the privatization of the local water utility was the ultimate, but unfulfilled, goal); secondly, a focus on monetization and legitimization in the 2000s (marked by more flexible mechanisms of private sector involvement). Fieldwork in Lima reveals that positive results from increased investment in water services have been undermined by the discriminatory and short-term basis of neoliberalization of water. Problems of debt financing, neglect of equity of access to services and weak environmental sustainability threaten the long-term future.     

Changing public accountability mechanisms in the governance of Dutch urban regeneration*

Contemporary urban planning dynamics are based on negotiation and contractual relations, creating fragmented planning processes. On the one hand, they trigger technocratic forms of governance, which require the ‘legal instrumentalisation’ of planning in a piecemeal approach ensuring legal certainty. On the other hand, these processes require flexibility to enable easy, fast and efficient forms of implementation due to the increasing involvement of private sector actors in urban development. This article unravels the influence of these conflicting dynamics on the fundamentals of urban planning practices by focusing on changing public accountability mechanisms created through contractual relationships between public and private sector agencies. Dutch urban regeneration has demonstrated changing governance principles and dynamics in the last three decades. Representing instrumental and institutional measures, we connect accountability mechanisms to these changes and argue that they ‘co-exist’ in multiple forms across different contexts. This article embeds this evolution in wider theoretical discussions on the changing relationships between public and private sector actors in urban governance relative to the changing role of the state, and it addresses questions on who can be held accountable, and to what extent, when public sector actors are increasingly retreating from regulatory practices while private sector actors play increasingly prominent roles.     

Local Community Characteristics and Cooperation for Shared Green Reputation

This article examines how basic socioeconomic and political factors are associated with higher levels of cooperation to garner a local community's shared green reputation. We analyze panel data on participation efforts in a collective voluntary environmental program, the Ecological Blue Flag Program, by the entire population of beach communities in Costa Rica between 2001 and 2009. Collective voluntary environmental programs are relatively new and aim to improve environmental performance and shared “green” reputation through joint participation and certification of multisector groups comprising businesses, governmental institutions, and nongovernmental organizations. Our results indicate that higher levels of within‐community cooperation for shared green reputation are more likely in seashore localities with lower income inequality and/or a higher number of businesses. These findings run counter to research suggesting these same characteristics are associated with lower levels of cooperation in the management of common pool natural resources such as fisheries and forests. We also find that within‐community cooperation is positively correlated with a greater proportion of expatriates from industrialized countries and/or with higher levels of democratic political participation.     

Competing entanglements in the struggle to save the Amazon: The shifting terrain of transnational civil society

Transnational civil society has often been conceptualized as a third sector, buffered from the power politics of nation-states and global capital. The relative autonomy of this sector has been seen as key in empowering the voices of marginalized peoples and in advocating new counter-hegemonic agendas on the world stage. Recent research, however, has begun to explore power imbalances within the transnational civic sphere, and how different transnational NGOs' modes of articulation with political institutions and market actors inform those power dynamics. We suggest here that the concept of “entanglements,” recently introduced within political geography, can offer a useful spatial imagery in assessing the effects of these varied lines of influence. The article first traces the evolution of the Amazon Alliance, a transnational network of environmental and human rights NGOs and Amazonian indigenous federations. It then examines a countervailing nexus of governmental and corporate entanglements that have been drawing conservation NGOs away from indigenous eco-political engagement in recent years. To understand the waning salience of the eco-indigenous conservation agenda, we argue, requires analysis of the shifting terrain of civil society, and of the articulation of different NGOs with institutions beyond the frontiers of the third sector.     

Assessing the Performance of Voluntary Environmental Programs: Does Certification Matter?

The promotion of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) as alternative approaches to traditional environmental regulation has fueled numerous researchers to evaluate VEP performance. However, these studies have focused on assessing the environmental performance of a single VEP. As yet, we know little about the overall environmental benefits of these programs. Moreover, questions remain about whether VEPs designed with different monitoring regimes—related to whether programs are self‐monitored or undergo external certification—vary in their ability to improve environmental conditions. Using meta‐analysis methodology, this article evaluates the aggregated environmental outcomes of U.S. VEPs drawing on data from nine studies and over 30,000 firms. We show that collectively VEP participants do not improve their environmental performance over nonparticipants. Rather, nonparticipants improve their environmental performance by 7.7 percent more than VEP participants. Additionally, nonparticipants improve the environment 24 percent more than participants in self‐monitored VEPs, whereas participants in International Standards Organization 14001 as a group exhibit inconclusive environmental performance improvements.     

From institutions to events – structural change in Norwegian local cultural policy

In this paper we discuss the ongoing restructuring of local cultural policy in Norway. Since the 1990s, we argue, the local cultural sector has been undergoing a structural change, in the form of a movement from institutions to events. As public resources granted to traditional local cultural institutions such as libraries and culture schools decrease, there is a rise in resources granted to new arenas of local cultural life, such as cultural festivals and culture houses. We explain this shift of balance from institutions to events in local cultural policy with reference to three types of mechanism. First, we point to the ‘flexibilisation’ of the cultural sector, which ensues from its sensitivity to changes in the funding of the local governments. Second, new forms of earmarked state funding schemes pull local resources in the direction of cultural festivals and cultural events. A third mechanism that explains the shift from institutions to events is local policymakers’ adoption of theories of culture as a source of urban and regional regeneration.     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.     

Shifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World: US AID for Conservation

Abstract: By exploring the shifting and uneven power relations among state, market and civil society organizations in US environmental foreign aid policy‐making, this article forges new ground in conversations about conservation and neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, an evolving group of non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) has lobbied the US Congress to support environmental foreign assistance. However, the 1980s and 1990s rise of neoliberalism laid the conditions for the formation of a dynamic alliance among representatives of the US Congress, the US Agency for International Development, environmental NGOs and the private sector around biodiversity conservation. In this alliance, idealized visions of NGOs as civil society and a countering force to corporations have underpinned their influence, despite their contemporary corporate partnerships. Furthermore, by focusing on international biodiversity conservation, the group has attracted a broad spectrum of political and corporate support to shape public policy and in the process create new spaces for capital expansion.     

Managing Conservation of the Built Heritage in Post‐socialist Budapest: Evidence from the Old Jewish Quarter

Like other Eastern European countries, Hungary has undergone processes of societal and economic restructuring since 1990. This has given rise to a changed cultural‐political context shaped by forces such as (re)privatisation, strengthening of local government and growth of civil movements. This has led to new opportunities as well as challenges for managing conservation of the built heritage. In Budapest, protection of the built heritage is achieved either through state protection of outstanding ‘monuments’ or through conservation objectives dictated by planning authorities within a two‐tiered local government system. These different levels of conservation authority can sometimes lead to conflicting approaches, as in the case of recent urban renewal in the Old Jewish Quarter. This paper examines the approach to urban conservation taken in Budapest at the various official levels, as well as organised initiatives by the voluntary sector in the light of post‐socialism and associated cultural change.     

Stakeholder Involvement in the Design of U.S. Voluntary Environmental Programs: Does Sponsorship Matter?

Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) promise to provide firms and facilities additional flexibility in managing their environmental affairs while increasing internal efficiencies and improving their public image. Although stakeholder input is thought to improve program development, little is known about the extent that stakeholders are involved in the VEP design process. Based on a survey of 61 program managers, this research distinguishes between the intensity and diversity of stakeholder involvement and uses these two concepts to assess VEP development relative to government, industry, and third-party sponsorship. Even in the absence of a mandate, all three sponsors include a variety of stakeholders in program design. Although there is evidence that collaborative relationships are developing between sponsors and a range of stakeholder groups, variations in the intensity of involvement among sponsors suggest that some stakeholders may have disproportionate levels of influence in the design of VEPs.     

Social Service Delivery and the Voluntary Sector in Contemporary Australia

Continuing poverty, deprivation and unemployment in rich English-speaking countries have led governments to reconsider existing methods of delivering social services. In Australia, the Minister for Employment Services, Tony Abbott, has developed a doctrine of 'constructive compassion' to justify human service delivery through private firms and voluntary organisations. The McClure Report has also argued for 'social partnerships' involving governments, the business community and the voluntary sector. The limited purpose of this research note is to evaluate these arguments using the conceptual tools of market failure, government failure and voluntary failure and drawing on some of the theoretical literature on the voluntary sector, especially Billis and Glennerster (1998). We contend that considerable scope does indeed exist for social service delivery by voluntary organisations, subject to at least one important caveat.