Global Environmental Governance as Administration: Implications for International Law
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Description
This chapter argues for the analysis of global and transnational environmental governance as administration. This approach sheds light on some important but neglected themes in international environmental law scholarship. The chapter begins by outlining several basic administrative concepts that call for analysis under such an approach (section 2), then sets forth an analytical framework of five structures of administration in global governance (sections 3–6). The five structures include the following (these are archetypes—practice often combines them or blurs the divisions). Distributed administration is performed largely by organs of national governments, acting pursuant to international agreements or other transnational regimes. International administration is performed by a formal intergovernmental body with a defined organization and competence, usually established by treaty. Inter-governmental network administration is performed by networks of national government officials that operate with less formal definition. Hybrid administration is performed by a joint institution, or a less formal coordination, involving public and private actors in a transnational context. It will be considered together with private administration, conducted by actors that are not governmental or intergovernmental. It will be argued that governance of fundamental global and transnational environmental problems is being displaced from distributed administration, which has been the predominant model, towards direct administration by intergovernmental organizations or networks on the one side or towards hybrid or private administration on the other. Distributed administration is instead becoming part of the process of diffusion of national environmental law and policy approaches as well as a residuum for special inter-state situations. This change is having fundamental effects on international environmental law, but has not been sufficiently incorporated into scholarship in the field. Due to space limitations, this chapter must focus largely on positive law and analytic issues. However, these issues are bound up with fundamental normative questions, which the administrative approach opens up for consideration. Normative appraisal in administrative law is often conducted by reference to basic public law values, such as legality, proportionality, rationality, accuracy, effectiveness, efficiency, and respect for basic rights. Political theory inquiries into democracy and legitimacy in global governance may be given more applied purchase by distilling normative values and implicit trade-offs, embodied in such legal-administrative components as transparency, notification, participation, reason giving, and review. Inflections in the design and operation of different administrative systems may have impacts on distributive outcomes, procedural fairness, and other elements of justice. These considerations feed back into the normative theory of institutional design under conditions of power asymmetry, uneven information flows and filtering, and pervasive uncertainties in each governance unit about which policies to choose and what their consequences will be amid continuous mutual jostling, adjustment, and reclustering.
Source Publication
Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law
Source Editors/Authors
Daniel Bodansky, Jutta Brunnée, Ellen Hey
Publication Date
2007
Edition
1
Recommended Citation
Kingsbury, Benedict, "Global Environmental Governance as Administration: Implications for International Law" (2007). Faculty Chapters. 993.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/993
