Introduction: The Challenges of Green Change
Environmental problems are among the most serious, complex, and difficult political challenges in societies all over the world. Knowledge about those problems and their potential solutions is limited and value-laden, and is regularly contested. How they are framed varies according to the perspectives and knowledge of the actors involved, making it impossible to develop âoptimalâ and definitive solutions based on scientific evidence. Instead, only more or less acceptable and provisional knowledge, ideas, and solutions are possible (Rittel and Webber 1973, p. 155). In addition, actor preferences and priorities are often ambiguous as environmental policy and politics involve multiple and frequently conflicting values and goals (Voss et al. 2007). Environmental problems are intimately interrelated with fundamental economic and social dimensions. Essentially, the challenge of green change is about conflicting values in terms of allocation of benefits and burdens, making it a highly political process that generates winners and losers in different respects.
Furthermore, complex environmental problems often transcend established political and administrative boundaries. Governing capacity is dispersed and fragmented, involving a greater number and diversity of actors. As a result, networking with business and civil society is believed necessary to increase the quality and effectiveness of green public policy by incorporating additional resources, alternative forms of knowledge, and different perspectives; forestalling gaps in implementation ; and producing a more legitimate and responsive government (BĂ€ckstrand et al. 2010). Given the cross-sectoral character of many environmental problems, responsibility also needs to be shared across sectors, integrating environmental issues and objectives within other policy sectors such as transport, agriculture, and trade so that public policies and practices may be re-appraised (or at least re-formulated). Many environmental problems extend across national borders and thus challenge the capacity, autonomy, and reach of even the most powerful nation-states. As a consequence, environmental governance needs to take place on multiple levels of nested institutions , including both global environmental governance and local environmental initiatives and actions.
Sustainable development is âthe dominant global discourse of ecological concernâ (Dryzek 2013, p. 147), which, rather than portraying environmental protection as a sole objective in constant competition with economic growth, instead frames environmental problems and governance as a search for a proper balance between environmental protection, economic growth, and social justice across time and space. It has immensely influenced the way people talk and think about environmental issues (Hajer 1995), and it has been integrated into political rhetoric and policymaking all over the world. Since the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro (the so-called Earth Summit), a majority of states have subscribed to the concept of sustainable development (at least rhetorically) and many advanced liberal democracies have adopted sustainable development as a core policy goal at the center of environmental policy (Lafferty and Meadowcroft 2000). It has also expanded far beyond the realm of government into the world of international institutions , business, and civil society (BĂ€ckstrand 2006).
However, under the surface of this catch-all rhetoric, sustainable development is an essentially contested concept, beset by fundamental disagreement over its meaning and importance as well as the scale of necessary reforms (Jordan 2008, p. 18; Banerjee 2003; Thiele 2016, Chap. 1). Following Galliesâ (1956) characterization of an essentially contested concept, sustainable development is generally supported as valuable; it has a multi-dimensional character and an internal complexity; it is open to unpredictable changes and new interpretations; actors are aware of the contested character of the concept and are prepared to argue and compete for their own interpretations. Sustainable development is, in this perspective, about the creation of meaning through contested interpretations in different social and political contexts . Considering the contested nature of sustainable development, it is hard to use it in a coherent, instrumental way to change society in a green direction. Rather, it is a visionary, political concept that needs to be interpreted and applied in relation to certain problems and issues within specific contexts.
The problems of continued unsustainability are not only a failure of social habits and the operation of markets (Stern 2007), but also a governance failure and governance challenge. First of all, sustainable development does not simply happen through market mechanisms and social self-governance; society needs to be governed into sustainability (Adger and Jordan 2009) by âreforming practices of sociopolitical governance to encourage shifts toward a more environmentally sustainable and equitable pattern of developmentâ (Meadowcroft 2009, p. 323). Such efforts of environmental governance concern not only the formulation and implementation of public policy, but also âthe design and logic of political institutions , since they determine much of the actual policies for sustainable development â (Lundqvist 2004, p. 3; italics in original). Second, many of todayâs environmental problems have been attributed to failures of traditional state governance , which have provoked increasing interest in governance reforms and commitments to new modes of governance such as market-based policy instruments and governance networks . As a consequence, it has almost become a truism within both policy and academic debate that we need to look beyond the state to find effective and legitimate governance arrangements for collective action capable of handling the complex, dynamic, and diverse challenge of sustainable development . This view extends across radical and moderate environmentalists as well as across the rightsâleft ideological political divide.
More recently, however, the importance of state action in environmental governance has received increasing recognition and spurred calls for a reinvention and re-theorization of the state as an important object of study (Barry and Eckersley 2005; BĂ€ckstrand and Kronsell 2015; Duit 2014; Eckersley 2004; Meadowcroft 2009). It is now widely held that the state remains important and that the âgovernance turnâ in political science indicates that the role of the state has transformed rather than declined (Bell and Hindmoor 2009; Lundqvist 2001; Pierre and Peters 2000). However, bringing the state back in again is not enough (cf. Skocpol 1985); we also need to open the black box of the state. Even in studies that do not disregard the state, it is often treated as a passive and anonymous set of structures or as a single, unitary actor (Jacobsson et al. 2015, p. 1). To understand the limitations and prospects of environmental governance , we need not only to take due consideration of the state but also to scrutinize what happens within the state apparatus. Thus, we need better insights about the people populating it, in particular public officials of great relevance to green institutional change .
Public Officials as Political Agents
Public officials are largely neglected in studies of environmental governance despite the fact that many of them have the potential to be important actors in policy processes. Regardless of preferred modes of governance, be they traditional state governance, market mechanisms, or civic engagement , public officials are at the center of the efforts to address the green challenge. Public officials do not only interpret, implement, and supervise public policy; they are also involved in framing issues, producing knowledge, setting agendas, and formulating policy. They can work strategically to meta-govern networks (SĂžrensen and Torfing 2007), to facilitate deliberation in processes of citizen participation and interaction (Forester 1999; Laws and Forester 2015), and to oversee and interpret regulatory frameworks on which markets rely. Rather than being hierarchically subordinated to elected politicians , their relationships with them are more often characterized by reciprocal influence, interdependency, and overlapping functions (Svara 2006). Furthermore, the importance of public officials has increased as environmental policy and politics have shifted toward more complex challenges of sustainable developme...