Understanding the Democracy-Environment Interface
by Achim Halpaap
Environmental 324 Policy and Law, 38/6 (2008) © 2008 IOS Press
How can democracy and environmentally sustainable development be made compatible and mutually supportive? This question was at the centre of discussions at the UNITAR-Yale Conference on Environmental Governance and Democracy. Institutions, public participation and environmental sustainability: Bridging research and capacity development, at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, at the margins of the sixteenth Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). Some 150 environmental governance scholars and practitioners from more than 65 developed, developing and transition countries met to discuss the topic, reflecting the growing demand for research, teaching and capacity building in the field of democratic environmental overnance.
Conference Overview
Speaking on the theme of international environmental governance during the opening session, James Gustave Speth, Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and former Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) observed that “while civil society frequently enjoys participation opportunities in national and local level processes, mechanisms for meaningful stakeholder engagement at the international level, as well as knowledge about their effectiveness is
lacking”. Carlos Lopes, Executive Director of UNITAR, emphasised that although democratic participation in environmental governance has become an internationally agreed principle, “it is the socio-economic context and local capacities which essentially determine how civic participation can effectively contribute to good governance and environmental sustainability”. Daniel Esty, Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, highlighted that public participation can foster transparency,
accountability and sound environmental outcomes, citing pollution reduction along the Mexican-American border as a case in point. He also encouraged participants to identify best practices. Susan Rose-Ackerman, Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale Law School, discussed the diverse nature of national administrative cultures and the challenge this creates for conducting comparative research on the democracy-environment interface. In a subsequent plenary session, two panel discussions provided introductory perspectives of academic scholars and government officials, respectively.
Conference discussion mainly took place in working groups, which considered papers on two topics: i) public participation at different levels of the governance hierarchy, including: international, national, regional, local and corporate environmental governance, as well as interdependencies across levels of governance;6 and ii) the democracy-environment interface, including democratization of knowledge generation, democratising institutions (i.e., regularising participatory procedures), access to justice, and public interest mobilisation and capacity.7 Papers, presentations and working group outcomes can be accessed through the UNITAR/Yale Conference website.8
Notes
The event was organised through the UNITAR/Yale Environment and Democracy Initiative, launched in March 2007 by UNITAR and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The initiative is executed jointly through the UNITAR Environmental Governance Programme and the Yale Center for Environment Law and Policy, a collaboration of the Yale School of Forestry and Environment Studies and Yale Law School. Partners of UNITAR and Yale University in the Conference included the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the University of Cape Town, the French Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Environmental Engineering (ENGREF-AgroParisTech), the World Resources Institute (WRI), and the Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future. Financial support for the Conference was provided by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund of the MacMillan Center at Yale, the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund of Yale Law School and UNITAR.
See, for example, Fiorino, D. 2006. The new environmental regulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; or Beierle, T.C. 1999. “Using social goals to evaluate public participation in environmental decisions”. Policy Studies Review 16(3&4): 75–103.
3) Examples of multi-stakeholder processes catalysed through these international
processes include, for example, the development of National Strategies for Sustainable Development, National Capacity Self-Assessments (NCSAs) for implementation of the three Rio Conventions, Global Environment Facility (GEF) Country Dialogues, and Local Agenda 21 processes.
4) For a contribution from the perspective of the UNECE Aarhus Convention Secretariat, see conference paper of Jeremy Wates. For a case study on the implementation of the Aarhus Convention see conference paper of Amy Forster Rothbart.
5) The UN Global Compact promotes, for example, new forms of good governance
by corporations, which include multi-stakeholder dialogue and collaboration.
6) Conference papers on international environmental governance were presented
by Eric Dannenmeier, Osvaldo Álvarez Pérez, Tatjana Rosen and Donald K. Anton; on national environmental governance by Georg Winkel and Metodi Sotirov, Guy Salmon et al., Amando Tolentino and Amy Forster; on sub-national environmental governance by Debra Emmelman et al., Sigrid Vascónez, Alfred Marcus and Adam Fremeth, and Noela Eddington and Ian Eddington; on local environmental governance by Wilson Akpan, Hua Wang, Daniel Sherman and Marc Hufty et al.; on corporate environmental governanceby Frank de Hond, Robert Repetto, Carmit Lubanov and Harris Gleckman; and on interdependencies across levels of governance by Sonja Walti, James Kho, Patricia Cavanaugh, and Alessandro Bonifazi and Carmelo M. Torre.
7) Conference papers on democratising institutions were presented by Stuart White, Ralph Hallo, Suparek Janprasat and Vanessa Schweizer; on democratising knowledge generation by Douglas Kysar, Sofia de Abreu, Remi Chandran et al. and Edwin Camp; on public interest mobilisation and capacity by Olya Melen, Araya Asfaw and Kenneth Kakaru; and on access to justice by Louis Kotzé, Juan Martin Carballo, Vasiliki Karageorgou and Meredith Wright.
8) http://www.unitar.org/eg/UNITAR_Yale/index.html or http://www.yale.edu/envirocenter/envdem.
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