Article

Navigating Regional Environmental Governance

BALSIGER, Jörg, VANDEVEER, Stacy D.

Abstract

Global environmental governance is growing increasingly complex and recent scholarship and
practice raise a number of questions about the continued feasibility of negotiating and
implementing an ever-larger set of global environmental agreements. In the search for
alternative conceptual models and normative orders, regional environmental governance
(REG) is (re)emerging as a significant phenomenon in theory and practice. Although
environmental cooperation has historically been more prevalent at the regional than at the
global level, and has informed much of what we know today about international environmental
cooperation, REG has been a neglected topic in the scholarly literature on international
relations and international environmental politics. This introduction to the special issue
situates theoretical arguments linked to REG in the broader literature, including the nature of
regions, the location of regions in multilevel governance, and the normative arguments
advanced for and against regional orders. It provides an overview of empirical work; offers
quantitative evidence of REG's global distribution; advances a [...]

Reference
BALSIGER, Jörg, VANDEVEER, Stacy D. Navigating Regional Environmental Governance.
Global Environmental Politics, 2012, vol. 12, no. 3, p. 1-17

DOI : 10.1162/GLEP_e_00120

Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:34247

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

[ Downloaded 12/05/2016 at 22:34:44 ]

Navigating Regional Environmental Governance
Jörg Balsiger and Stacy D. VanDeveer*

To cite this article: Balsiger, Jörg, and Stacy D. VanDeveer (2012), Navigating Regional
Environmental Governance, Global Environmental Politics 12 (3): 1–17.

Abstract. Global environmental governance is growing increasingly complex and recent

scholarship and practice raise a number of questions about the continued feasibility of
negotiating and implementing an ever-larger set of global environmental agreements. In
the search for alternative conceptual models and normative orders, regional
environmental governance (REG) is (re)emerging as a significant phenomenon in theory
and practice. Although environmental cooperation has historically been more prevalent at
the regional than at the global level, and has informed much of what we know today
about international environmental cooperation, REG has been a neglected topic in the
scholarly literature on international relations and international environmental politics.
This introduction to the special issue situates theoretical arguments linked to REG in the
broader literature, including the nature of regions, the location of regions in multilevel
governance, and the normative arguments advanced for and against regional orders. It
provides an overview of empirical work; offers quantitative evidence of REG's global
distribution; advances a typology of REG for future research; and introduces the
collection of research articles and commentaries through the lens of three themes: form
and function, multilevel governance, and participation.

It is time to bring the regional back in to the study of global environmental politics. The field
of international environmental politics—now oft-called global environmental politics (GEP)
—advanced significantly in the 1980s and early 1990s with the emergence of popular
concepts such as international regimes and epistemic communities.1 These concepts were
originally illustrated through cooperation to prevent marine pollution in the Mediterranean,
safeguard the Antarctic for peaceful uses, or support the conservation of North Pacific fur
seals. They have proven invaluable to a generation of scholars seeking to delimit and define
* The authors would like to thank Matthew Paterson, Jennifer Clapp, and Susan Altman for their valuable
comments. This special issue builds on the 16–18 June 2010 workshop “Regional Environmental
Governance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Theoretical Issues, Comparative Designs” held in Geneva,
Switzerland (Balsiger and Debarbieux 2011). The authors wish to thank the Swiss Network for International
Studies, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the University of Geneva Faculty of Social Science and
Economics, the Mountain Research Initiative, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and
Technology, and the University of New Hampshire for their financial support. Jörg Balsiger additionally
wishes to thank the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research for its support to the project
“Ecoregional Territoriality: Rescaling Environmental Governance.”
1 Haas 1990, Young 1980.

1
their objects of research, and to understand their formation, evolution, and consequences.2
Regime theory in particular has inspired an enormous body of research, which promptly
embraced newer global agreements on the ozone layer, biological diversity, climate change,
and countless others.
More recently, the regime concept’s once dominant status has been challenged by historical
trends, notably the transformation of the nation state and the accompanying diffusion of
governing authority, as well as a theoretical reorientation to notions of multilevel governance,
transnational collective action, and public spheres.3 The regional dimension so important to
early theoretical work has scarcely surfaced in these discussions, however, despite the breadth
and dynamism readily observed in international environmental cooperation.4 While the
“global” and the “regional” have been lumped together under the rubric of international
environmental politics, we contend that more sustained attention to regional cooperation can
help shed light on contemporary developments in the realms of research and practice.
This introduction situates a number of theoretical arguments linked to regional environmental
governance (REG) in the broader literature of international relations (IR) and international
environmental politics (IEP). Such debates include the nature of regions, the locations of
regions in multilevel governance, and the normative arguments advanced for and against
regional orders. The article also endeavors to provide an overview of empirical work on REG
by focusing on theoretical debates and on comparative empirical work, thereby connecting
REG research to the emerging subfield of comparative environmental politics.5 The section
below outlines a number of reasons for the scholarly community around global environmental
politics to pay more attention to REG, and offers some quantitative evidence for the
prevalence and global distribution of REG. We then further develop a recent typology of REG
that identities variables along three axes—coordinating agency (state to nonstate), thematic
focus (single issue to cross-sectoral), and nature of territoriality (state-centered to ecoregional)
to delineate an analytical space in which regional initiatives can be located.6 Here, we attempt
to provide a model designed to better serve empirical purposes, and thereby facilitate future
comparative research. The final section offers a brief overview of the research articles in the
special issue by situating them in the theoretical debates and analytical typology just
presented.

Why the Regional Focus?

Surveys of recent scholarship and practice raise a number of questions about the continued
feasibility of negotiating and implementing an ever-larger set of global environmental

2 O’Neill, Balsiger and VanDeveer 2004; and O’Neill, 2010.

3 Conca 2006; Doyle and Doherty 2006; and Keck and Sikkink 1998.
4 Balsiger and VanDeveer 2010.
5 Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012.
6 Balsiger and VanDeveer 2010.

2
agreements.7 The transaction costs of servicing international regimes, weak compliance and
effectiveness records, lowest common denominator approaches, equity and justice challenges,
and creeping global convention fatigue have helped to intensify the search for alternative
conceptual models and normative orders. At the same time, international coordination through
governance arrangements that aim at regional rather than universal participation continues to
proliferate, largely under the scholarly radar.
Evidence of REG initiatives can be found around the globe (albeit unevenly) in a variety of
issue areas. Moreover, new knowledge about the spatially explicit distribution of global
environmental change may be expected to generate further regional cooperation, or cause
regional conflict.8 Even the climate change regime, which suffered a significant setback at the
Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in 2009, is in many ways regionalized, as seen in the
multitude of regional emissions trading schemes.9 Global chemicals and hazardous waste
regimes illustrate similar regionalizing dynamics. These shifts in impetus, implementation,
and innovation to regional levels call for more concentrated scholarly attention.
Compared to global approaches, initiatives with a regional focus may benefit from enhanced
commonalities in a particular environmental challenge, greater familiarity with key actors,
and the ability to tailor mitigating action to a smaller than global constituency.10 In contrast to
global approaches, many regional agreements also take seriously the implications of scalar
misfits, focusing on ecologically defined regions such as river basins, aquifers, or mountain
regions rather than political-administrative entities.11 Lack of understanding about how these
factors vary between global and regional agreements are a second important rationale for the
special issue.
Mainstream work in international relations has periodically produced state-of-the-art
assessments of regional politics, yet their thematic focus has been dominated by regional
economic integration and security dynamics.12 Research on international environmental
politics has generated a significant body of case studies, particularly on regional seas and river
basins, but overviews and comparative analyses are rare.13 Moreover, standard texts in
international environmental politics scarcely make a mention of regional dynamics and
typically lump “global,” “international,” “multilateral,” and “regional” agreements together.
As a consequence, we have several different estimates and databases of international
environmental agreements, but lack a reliable count of regional environmental agreements.
The failure to draw this empirical-analytical boundary more clearly is a third rationale for a
special issue on REG, as it may provide some of the conceptual foundations for future
research.
7 JIU 2008.
8 Matthew et al. 2010.
9 VanDeveer and Selin 2005.
10 Balsiger and VanDeveer 2010.
11 Balsiger 2008, 2009; and Debarbieux and Rudaz 2010.
12 Balsiger and VanDeveer 2010.
13 Elliott and Breslin 2011.

3
Recent Activity in Regional Environmental Governance
Regional environmental cooperation has a long history and continues to be a highly active
venue of international cooperation, as shown by the negotiation of new conventions and the
growth in membership or extension through protocols of existing ones. April 2010, for
instance, marked the entry into force of the Carpathian Convention’s Protocol on
Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biological and Landscape Diversity. In March 2011, the
parties to the Convention for Co-operation in the Protection and Development of the Marine
and Coastal Environment of the West and Central African Region (Abidjan Convention)
agreed to create an Oil Spill Contingency Plan, establish a regional center for cooperation in
case of oil spills and other emergencies, and develop a Marine Protected Areas Protocol.14 In
June 2011, European ministers decided to launch negotiations for a legally binding agreement
on forests in Europe, to be completed by mid-2013.15 In 2010–2011 alone, the United Nations’
monthly Statement of Treaties and International Agreements included more than three dozen
records for action on regional environmental agreements.16 Numerous states ratified such
agreements as the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution and its protocols,
the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Waterbirds, and the European
Landscape Convention.
The UN Statements reveal action on well-known treaties. One example concerns the 2003
Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment (Kyiv or SEA Protocol) of the 1991
Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context (Espoo
Convention), which entered into force in July 2010.17 According to a recent review, the Espoo
Convention is regularly invoked and applied by numerous parties to the agreement, and is
often seen as a model for international law development.18 The SEA Protocol, ratified by
twenty-three parties, enlarges the Convention’s scope beyond projects to plans and programs,
thereby influencing decision-making much earlier and serving as a potential tool for
sustainable development. Building on the 1998 Aarhus Convention, the Protocol requires
extensive public participation in government decision-making. Another example relates to the
entry into force in March 2011 of two protocols of the 1976 Convention for the Protection of
the Mediterranean Sea against Pollution (Barcelona Convention): the 2008 Protocol on
Integrated Coastal Zone Management in the Mediterranean, and the 1994 Offshore
Protocol.19 The latter signals how the Barcelona Convention has gradually broadened its scope
from its initial focus on the prevention of marine pollution to integrated planning and
management of coastal zones.
14 UNEP 2011.
15 Forest Europe 2011.
16 The analysis of the Statements covers January 2010–October 2011. The Statements are available at
http://treaties.un.org/Pages/MSDatabase.aspx, accessed 24 April 2012.
17 United Nations 2010.
18 UNECE 2011.
19 United Nations 2011.

4
Regional Environmental Governance is Globally Common
Due to the long history of regional cooperation in North America and Europe, as well as the
European Union’s (EU) strong regulatory portfolio in the environmental domain, REG is
sometimes seen as a predominantly Western phenomenon. Yet numerous examples exist
elsewhere. In their analysis of the international environmental agreements database,20
Balsiger, Prys, and Steinhoff define regional agreements as those bilateral or multilateral
agreements which are signed by at least two countries that share territorial or maritime
borders, or that govern a contiguous, transnational region.21 This definition highlights that a
regional agreement’s membership and spatial ambit need not perfectly coincide, nor be
adjacent. Many regional agreements cover all or parts of only a limited number of signatories,
especially in the case of access to marine resources; other regional agreements are signed by
countries addressing a problem beyond their territorial or maritime sovereignty altogether, for
instance the regulation of high seas driftnet fishing.

Table 1
Distribution of Regional Environmental Cooperation, 1945–2005

World (Sub) Number of Arrangements Including at Least One Of Which

Region Signatory from That Region Regional
Africa 707 391 (55.3%)
Americas 1,142 727 (63.7%)
Asia 1,058 577 (54.5%)
Europe 1,671 1,012 (60.6%)
Oceania 502 238 (47.4%)
Note: The assessment is based on 2,546 multilateral and bilateral agreements and non-agreements concluded
1945–2005 (Mitchell 2001–2012). The delineation of world regions is available at
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm.

The data in Tables 1 and 2 illustrate the widespread nature of the REG. Table 1 shows that the
largest number of the more than 2,500 international environmental governance arrangements
included in this analysis involve countries from the UN-defined world region of Europe.
However, the level of participation by countries from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania
is also quite high. The data show that the majority of international arrangements fall under the
domain of REG in all but one region. Table 2 shows that almost half of all international
environmental governance arrangements concluded between 1945 and 2005 involve countries
20 Mitchell 2002–2012.
21 Balsiger, Prys, and Steinhoff 2012.

5
from one UN world region only. Among these, almost 80 percent concern cooperation in
which membership and/or ambit are contiguous.
The recent examples and the empirical data showcased above point to a number of features
increasingly characteristic of REG, and offering much to mainstream work on global,
international, and comparative environmental politics. First, although single-issue
environmental agreements continue to be the norm, a growing number of regional
environmental agreements have begun to embrace a broader sustainable development agenda,
thus raising theoretical and empirical questions concerning the link between vertical scale and
thematic breadth. Second, regional environmental cooperation is typically situated in
multilevel contexts. Extensive substantive, organizational, or operational connections link
regional initiatives to each other (e.g., the UNECE Conventions), to overarching regional
integration efforts (e.g., the EU), and to global treaties (e.g., mountain conventions and the
Convention on Biological Diversity).

Table 2
Inter-regional Environmental Cooperation

UN World Regions Included in a

Cooperative Arrangement Number of Arrangements Of Which Regional
1 1,201 (47.2% of 950 (79.1% of agreements
n=2,546) in 1 UN world region)
2 826 (32.4%) 464 (56.2%)
3 156 (6.1%) 96 (61.5%)
4 56 (2.2%) 36 (64.3%)
5 307 (12.1%) 127 (41.4%)
Note: The assessment is based on 2,546 multilateral and bilateral agreements and non- agreements concluded
1945–2005 (Mitchell 2001–2012). The delineation of world regions is available at
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm.

The complexity of these links provides a rich ground for refining understandings of
institutional interplay.22 Third, many examples of REG have been at the forefront of
enhancing participation in international environmental cooperation, both in terms of access to
nonstate actors and in terms of involving subnational governments. Each of these features is
highlighted in the articles of this special issue.

22 Oberthür and Stokke 2011; Oberthür and Gehring 2006; and Selin and VanDeveer 2003, 2009.

6
Navigating Regional Environmental Governance
Although scholars of international relations have long traced and theorized the role of regions
in different parts of the world, and from different theoretical perspectives, regional economic
integration and regional security have dominated their substantive agenda. Environmental
concerns, while enshrined in numerous international agreements, have largely eschewed
scholarly attention from those focused on the regional. In the study of international
environmental politics, on the other hand, REG has recently played a small role within the
field’s general focus on international regimes built around global issues such as climate
change and biodiversity conservation. This focus has generated much of what we know about
the emergence, negotiation, institutionalization, compliance, and effectiveness of
contemporary international environmental politics; however, the concomitant failure to
distinguish and locate the regional vis-à-vis the international (or global) has served to conflate
what IR scholars consider different phenomena, and therefore concealed a series of important
analytical questions. As theoretical critiques of the regime concept multiply and the
willingness and ability of statist actors to create and sustain new regimes lose steam,
developing an enhanced understanding of REG emerges as an important scholarly task as a
response to both analytical and empirical developments.
The term regional environmental governance joins three essentially contested concepts, which
differing varieties of social scientists have long understood and defined quite differently.
Combining these concepts in one term entails a number of definitional implications. Most
importantly, the regional and the environmental are principally of interest as they relate to
governance, which is broadly understood here as “the processes and institutions, both formal
and informal, that guide and restrain the collective activities of a group.”23
Through governance, questions of “what is a region” and “what is the environment” are
debated and constructed within social processes, institutions, and organizations (rather than
primarily via the minds and interactions of scholarly researchers). Governance may concern
the environment if its primary purpose is managing or preventing human impacts on natural
resources, plant and animal species, the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, lakes, terrestrial habitats,
and other elements of the natural world that provide ecosystem services.24 Similarly, regions
may be understood as all or part of at least two countries that serve as the focus of cohesive
and sustained action by state and nonstate groups, yet governance participants will differ
widely in how (and whether) they mobilize the biophysical, political-administrative, socio-
economic, or cultural-symbolic dimensions of a region. REG is thus a concept that is open to
examination from realist and constructivist perspectives.
Specific instances of REG can vary with three dimensions, with axes for agency, substance,
and territoriality.25 The axes are conceptualized as continuous ranges between ideal-typical

23 Keohane and Nye 2000, 12.

24 Daily 1997.
25 Balsiger and VanDeveer 2010; see also Schoenfeld and Rubin 2011.

7
constellations along which multitudes of combinations can be located. The particular
positioning of any governance arrangement may evolve over time, for instance when a state-
based coordinating agency opens its membership to non-governmental organizations, or when
a single-issue agreement expands its mandate to other environmental or nonenvironmental
problems.
The first axis relates to the coordinating or rule-making agency of a regional initiative, which
may range from formal intergovernmental cooperation such as in the case of the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as explored by Elliott, to more informal arrangements
such as transnational networks of state and nonstate actors. NGO-led initiatives have a long
history. Ducks Unlimited started promoting a transboundary ecoregional approach to
governing the Mississippi flyway for migratory waterfowl in the 1930s,26 and the International
Commission for the Protection of the Alps began its efforts to create an international treaty for
the Alps in the 1950s, as discussed by Balsiger. Although their influence has grown in recent
years, nonstate actors have not typically played a major role in the coordinating agencies of
REG. The second axis refers to the scope of issues addressed under the auspices of REG, with
single-issue arrangements such as for chemicals management or water quality (explored by
Selin and Klinke respectively) at one end of the continuum, and broader sustainable
development mandates such as those for mountain ranges or regional seas at the other end.
Owing to the influential notion of crosssectoral integration, a trend toward greater substantive
scope can be observed, though regional initiatives expressly oriented toward sustainable
development remain in the minority. The third axis relates to territoriality, or the jurisdictional
nature of an agreement’s spatial ambit. While correspondence with nation-state borders
remains an important approach, REG has increasingly sought to align political and ecological
boundaries, as in the case of the Baltic Sea, the North American Great Lakes, or the European
Alps.
The three axes constitute a three-dimensional space that serves three main purposes. First, it
demonstrates that international regimes as the traditional remit of IR is too narrow a category
to encompass the varied empirical domain that is REG.27 Second, it provides a means to
systematically differentiate REG research and experience, demonstrate its diversity, and
isolate more precisely the nature and role of key dependent and independent variables.
Finally, the diversity that becomes apparent in the three-dimensional space amounts to an
urgent call for more comparative research. Differentiating REG by agency, substance, and
territoriality reveals significant typological diversity. Examining REG arrangements, however,
also reveals a number of recurring analytical themes that can render comparative research
more productive: REG form and function; regional environmental cooperation in multilevel
governance; and the links between environmental regionalization, democracy, and civil
society.

26 Stunden Bower 2011.

27 See also Conca 2006.

8
Form and Function
Although international environmental politics began at the regional level, little systematic
work has addressed the different forms REG takes or the functions it performs (or ought to
perform).28 River commissions for the Rhine and the Danube were established in the
eighteenth century, US-Canadian wildlife conservation dates from the early twentieth century,
numerous agreements were established in the 1970s, and new ones continue to be signed.
Some forms of REG have emerged under the auspices of global agreements such as the
chemicals treaties and often replicate the treaties’ intergovernmental logic.29 Others emanate
from established regional organizations such as the EU or ASEAN, where the parent
organization’s institutional characteristics influence the REG operation.30 Many agreements
address specific issues such as fishing, while others, such as the Alpine Convention, cover
sustainable development more broadly.31 Characterizing these empirical differentiations
analytically is a prerequisite to building a theoretical framework for the study of REG. Since
form and function concern all three axes in the above typology, key relationships can
fruitfully be hypothesized and examined, for instance the link between agency and jurisdiction
(are nonstate initiatives more likely to target ecoregional jurisdictions?) or between agency
and substance (is intergovernmental cooperation more prone to a single-issue orientation?).
Answering such questions in turn promises to contribute to questions of regime emergence,
institutionalization, and effectiveness that are of importance in the regime literature.

Regional Environmental Cooperation in Multilevel Governance

Governance structures for resources and the environment can be found on a multiplicity of
levels—global, regional, national, and local regimes, norms, and regulatory mechanisms are
linked into a complex institutional architecture.32 An important debate in international
environmental politics has therefore arisen with regard to the advantages and disadvantages of
an increasing fragmentation of environmental governance structures.33 This second theme
contributes to ongoing research by forging a better understanding of the role of regions in
vertically and horizontally linking different governance levels. Theoretically relevant in this
regard is the link between regime effectiveness and the “fit” and “scale” of environmental
regimes as suggested by Oran Young.34 Similarly, some have argued that regionally framed
multilevel governance may well be an appropriate response to globally framed challenges like
climate change, given that some regional political, economic, and energy-related institutions

28 Balsiger and VanDeveer 2010, but see Thompson 1973.

29 Selin 2010.
30 Selin 2007.
31 Balsiger 2009.
32 Ansell and Balsiger 2011; Betsill 2005; Keohane and Victor 2011; and Raustiala and Victor 2004.
33 Biermann et al. 2009.
34 Young 2002.

9
are generally more robust than global ones.35 Another perspective has been offered by game
theoretic and economic analyses that assess the effectiveness of different climate coalitions
working as complementary building blocks to the global climate change regime.36 Analogies
could further be drawn from discussions about security and economic integration at the
regional level, where regions have been perceived as stumbling blocks or building blocks to
global free trade and world peace,37 or by recent work that looks at environmental
displacement in international environmental governance.38 Multilevel governance, too, has
relevance for each of the three axes of the typology and relationships between them. For
instance, does the degree of multilevel embeddedness influence the substantive range of
regional agreements? Or, are ecoregional ambits more likely to involve a greater range of
local, national, and international actors?

Environmental Regionalization, Democracy, and Civil Society

Although the emergence, institutionalization, and evolution of environmental regions draw
heavily on ecological dynamics and technical knowledge, environmental regionalization is
inextricably tied to cultural developments and political processes.39 Environmental regions
such as mountain ranges or river basins have to become part of public imagination and debate,
which involves the use of symbolic, material, and organizational tools and techniques. For
this reason, the degree of legitimacy attached to environmental regionalization is linked to its
unfolding through participatory institutions. This presents special challenges in transboundary
regions, where the sovereign reach of democratic governance usually stops at a country’s
border, even in relatively integrated polities such as the European Union. In places such as the
Great Lakes region, civil society organizations have been successful in bridging political
frontiers and promoting environmental goals, yet often at the expense of democratic
accountability and legitimacy.40 Conversely, where nation states are fragile and democratic
traditions short-lived, such as in the Hindu-Kush-Himalaya region analyzed by Matthew, the
challenges of democratically attuned environmental regionalization are formidable.
The links between environmental regionalization, democracy, and civil society have clear
implications for the REG dimensions of agency and territoriality. The nature of coordinating
agency (and of coordination itself) by its very nature says much about the democratic and
participatory possibility of REG initiatives. Of greater interest, however, is the way that
particular combinations of agency and territoriality affect participation and democracy. For
instance, does ecoregional cooperation, which may be more likely to involve subnational
governments than cooperation based on state territoriality, foster participation? Or can

35 Patt, 2010; and Selin and VanDeveer 2009, 2011.

36 Eyckmans and Finus 2007.
37 Held et al. 1999; Hurrell 1995.
38 Vezirgiannidou 2011.
39 Debarbieux and Rudaz 2010.
40 Klinke 2009.

10
ecoregional initiatives serve political elites in weak states as a means to maintain control over
peripheral regions?
The ways in which the three themes outlined above link to agency, substance, and
territoriality is meant to demonstrate the usefulness of systematic differentiation in regional
environmental cooperation. A second benefit is that it highlights some areas in which REG
research can contribute to important questions and debates in the broader IR and GEP
literatures. These analytical themes are the common thread in this special issue. The following
section provides a brief outlook of the research articles and commentaries by situating them in
the above framework.

The Way Forward

This special issue brings together scholars in international and comparative environmental
politics who have worked on REG for many years. The contributions illustrate the developing
scholarly research agendas around REG and the dynamic nature of the empirical object under
examination around the globe. Collectively, they seek to map the breadth of contexts in which
REG matters, broadening the debate of earth system governance by raising and examining
important questions about form and function, multilevel governance, and democratic
accountability at the regional level.
Global environmental governance is growing increasingly complex, and the diversity of forms
and functions invoked through regional cooperation testifies to this trend. Indeed the diversity
of institutional forms found in REG is perhaps the most prominent feature emerging from the
collection of articles and other recent work.41 Selin’s analysis of international chemicals
management, politics, and institutionalization focuses on regional centers established under
the auspices of global environmental treaties. Elliott’s examination of ASEAN and Matthew’s
of the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) concern a regional
intergovernmental organization without a historical mandate or agenda for the environment.
Balsiger’s focus on European sustainable mountain development involves the Alpine
Convention as a regional treaty with protocols for environmental and non-environmental
issues. Finally Klinke takes into account experiences from transboundary governance in the
North American Great Lakes region, yet altogether eschews existing forms in favor of
proposing a new model. The REG characteristics vary not only in terms of organizational
architecture but also political-administrative scope. Whereas nation state perimeters are the
predominant institutional ambit for the Basel and Stockholm chemicals conventions, ASEAN,
and SAARC, REG in the European Alps and the Great Lakes region more closely evolves
around the territorialization of transjurisdictional ecoregions, which continues to be an
empirically and conceptually neglected governance level.

41 Balsiger and Debarbieux 2011.

11
From the perspective of form and function, the contributions offer important insights into the
relationship between the two. Conventionally, form is said to follow function. Selin views the
emergence of regional centers as a response to implementation gaps plaguing many
multilateral environmental agreements. Parties to the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control
of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal and to the 2001
Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants established these centers working on
awareness raising, strengthening administrative ability, and diffusing scientific and technical
assistance and information. Selin argues that they serve three functions: expanding regional
cooperation (both developing and industrialized countries); attracting more resources for
treaty implementation (mainly developing countries); and supporting implementation projects
across smaller groups of countries (mainly industrialized countries).
In Elliott’s article, the increasingly networked form of environmental cooperation under
ASEAN can be seen as a result of the organization’s state-centric, informal, and non-
interventionist understanding of its governance function. In a similar vein, Klinke’s
normative-analytical proposal for transboundary deliberative governance closely follows the
form-follows-function dictum, with institutions for public deliberation and participation
strictly modeled on the function they are to perform in overall interest aggregation.
By contrast, the argument of Balsiger (and less explicitly Matthew) suggests that function
sometimes follows form. Situating environmental regionalism in the broader realm of
sustainable development, he proposes two regional perspectives on how the environment can
be embedded in sustainable development. One focuses on the intersection of multiple and
overlapping transboundary functional spaces, and the other on regionalization as the domestic
manifestation of regional themes. Because the two perspectives highlight dissimilar aspects of
regional governance (form), they give rise to different insights into, and recommendations for,
regional governance (function). One perspective implies the integration of environmental
concerns in sustainable development policy at the transboundary regional level. The other
suggests a concentration of efforts at the domestic level. From his examination of challenges
facing the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region, and indeed the entire region of South Asia, in terms
of both human and national security, Matthew concludes that regional environmental
governance holds great promise; however, effective governance institutions and processes
would be extremely difficult to create. It may be more feasible to craft functioning regional
governance on the basis of already operational forms of local and transboundary initiatives. In
particular, he argues that the focus should be on effective approaches to managing
environmental stressors, coordinating climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies
required at various scales of social organization, and establishing better early warning,
response, and recovery systems.
Several of the articles in this collection directly speak to different aspects of the second theme
of multilevel governance. Our call to bring the regional back in to the study of global
environmental politics assumes special significance because not all regions easily fit into the

12
nested local-national-global scheme. Selin points out that the ability of the regional centers to
function effectively depends on access to greater resources and stronger political support,
which can be found at more local or more global levels. He argues that expanding regional
centers’ mandates to include monitoring and compliance might improve multilevel
governance. Yet, the reality of national actors seeking support from regional centers outside
their own regions, or from multiple centers simultaneously, implies much more complex
regional dynamics than the usual hierarchically nested scheme can explain. This justifies
Selin’s conclusion that the regional aspects of global environmental politics deserve more
analytical attention. Klinke’s explicit focus on ecoregional deliberative governance similarly
undermines the nested scheme, since ecological boundaries famously cross the boundaries of
jurisdictions and therefore raise questions about multiple, sometimes competing systems of
vertical multilevel linkages. Indeed, Klinke concludes that multilevel governance necessitates
deliberative modes of governance that complement and supplement established modes of
planning and decision-making.
A second aspect of multilevel governance that comes to the fore in the contributions to this
special issue concerns the difference between horizontal embeddedness and vertical
interlinkages. Although both of these entail multiple levels, the latter prevails in most
multilevel governance research. Defining sustainable development as a procedural norm for
reconciling the tradeoffs between environmental, economic, and social dimensions of
wellbeing, Balsiger examines how horizontal topical embeddedness interacts with vertical
jurisdictional interlinkages. His analysis of sustainable mountain governance in the European
Alps reveals that analytically anchoring topical embeddedness at the transboundary level has
different regional governance implications than merely constraining it to domestic levels.
Finally, this collection addresses the theme of democratic participation in the context of
regional environmental governance. Over the last two decades, transboundary REG witnessed
institutional changes through an increasing shift from intergovernmentally constituted
political institutions to new, more complex structures of decision-making among a greater
diversity of actors and roles. These changes in REG parallel and augment those of interest to
scholars participating in the recent turn toward transnational governance, offering another area
of potential conceptual, empirical, and theoretical interaction between REG and GEP.42 Some
policy-making seems to be adapting to a new, more active role of societal actors at multiple
levels of political authority. Elliott draws attention to efforts at opening environmental
governance under a very state-centric ASEAN to engage civil society and enhance outcomes.
She proposes a framework that brings together analyses of the public space of formal regional
governance arrangements, the inter-subjective space of regional identity building, and the
private space of regional social practices. In particular, she poses the question if moves toward
“flatter” forms of regional governance have been accompanied by more democratic or
participatory forms of regionalism. She suggests that regional environmental structures under

42 Bulkeley et.al. forthcoming; and Hoffmann 2011.

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ASEAN can be described as “invited spaces,” which largely fail to offer effective channels of
communication for, or democratic representation of, a wide range of stakeholders.
Participation and deliberation are at the center of the Klinke contribution. Although he
reviews existing arrangements in different governance contexts, his approach evolves around
the development of a deliberative model for REG with three institutional levels, which he sees
as a guide to identify and appraise the potential of deliberative democratization in
transboundary environmental governance. Aware of the opportunities and risks inherent in
normative theorizing, Klinke pays special attention to the conditions under which public
deliberation and participation conveying discourse, argument, and persuasion can help to
democratize collective decision-making.
This special issue on regional environmental governance concludes with two commentary
pieces by Bernard Debarbieux, a geographer, and Ken Conca, a political scientist. The
commentaries aim to achieve two purposes: to bring a cross-cutting, interdisciplinary
perspective to the collection of research articles, and to reflect on the REG phenomenon in
broader political and historical terms. Debarbieux argues that the work of REG analysts is
notable for the diversity of their notions of region. Critically reviewing the articles in the
collection, he finds that “regionality” often refers to different orders of reality (ontology) and
that regions have a heterogeneous status in the production of knowledge (epistemology).
Although such a diversity of uses and meanings illustrates the rich potential of a regional
scope in environmental governance analysis, Debarbieux urges that scholars’ ontological and
epistemological positions be made more explicit so that they become subject to more
interrogation.
Conca returns to questions of how REG and global environmental politics are related. He
examines some of the reasons for the upsurge in interest in regional approaches to global
environmental challenges, including a growing sense of obstruction and drift at the global
level. With the rate of formation of new global environmental agreements lagging, with many
existing agreements seemingly stalled, and with the momentum of global summitry having
faded, regions may seem a more pragmatic scale at which to promote the diffusion of ideas,
the development of institutions, and social mobilization for change. Beyond political
pragmatism, there are also conceptually interesting if still debatable—arguments that regions
hold promise for strengthening global environmental governance. The regional scale may
offer superior conditions to the global for common-property resource management, although
the historical track record seems mixed at best, and formidable barriers to collective action
remain. Regions may be more conducive to promoting norm diffusion—although the causal
direction appears to be more strongly global- o-regional than vice versa. However the
conceptual promise of the regional scale plays out in practice, there is also a compelling
ethical argument for a regional focus, as mitigation failures at the global level condemn
particular locales to formidable challenges of adaptation.

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