Environmental Governance and Decentralization

The complexity of nature poses a difficult problem of assignment of powers: at what level of government – federal, state, local – should the responsibility over the various environmental issues be placed? Are there governments at different jurisdictional levels that have a comparative advantage in dealing with long term, spatially intertwined, uncertain or irreversible environmental issues? Through what mechanisms can coordination be achieved? Scope of this book is to investigate the state of the art in environmental governance worldwide – how different countries actually define and address environmental issues – with special attention to intergovernmental relations: what institutions have been created, what assignment of powers have been chosen, what has been done when these assignments needed to be changed, what solutions have been tried and with what success. Coverage includes sixteen countries in six continents and the European Union, analyzed by scholars from different disciplines – economics, political science, environmental science and law.