Environmental Policy and Governance: Bringing the State Back In (Again)?

This contribution follows the introductory chapter of Capano, Howlett and Ramesh, arguing that the study of governance both requires a multi-variable explanation and an awareness that governing in the current age has not abandoned the issues and mechanisms of government. The chapter explores the utility of a fourfold governance framework that explores structural, ideational and instrumental levels of political interaction. To empirically challenge the framework, the contribution studies the environmental policy sector. It investigates whether new forms of state-society networks (and the policy styles that they encompass) and new policy instruments are transforming traditional state arrangements, or whether national institutions continue to shape path-dependent dynamics of how actors behave and how instruments operate. Do federal (as opposed to unitary) structures, the orientation of the legal/constitutional structure and the national political economic structures continue to limit the direction and nature of governance?