Social Aspects of Environmental Governance

Promoting good environmental governance is a commitment of IUCN, particularly of its programmes dealing directly with natural resource management. In the context of environmental governance, matters related to public participation and human rights issues deserve special consideration.

The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation described ‘good’ governance as being “essential for sustainable development”. Governance is the means by which society defines goals and priorities and advances cooperation. It includes policies, laws, decrees, norms, instruments and institutions. Governance is not the province of governments alone, and includes informal institutional arrangements like voluntary codes of conduct for private businesses, professional procedures and partnerships among all sectors. These include numerous and varied arrangements, but an essential element is that they mobilise diverse constituencies to agree on common goals and help realise them.

In order to most effectively achieve conservation and sustainable development, governance at all levels – local, national, regional, and global – should be mutually reinforcing. International governance does not produce results in the absence of effective national governance, and effective national governance is essential for meaningful results at the international level.

At the global level, all states, large and small, should be able to participate effectively, and it is essential to build civil society and the private sector into intergovernmental decision-making and devise new opportunities for innovative partnerships, while at the same maintaining the sovereignty of nation states and recognising the mandate of democratically elected governments.

The importance of effective national governance may, as a result of globalisation, be greater now than it has been at any time in the past. The type of foreign investment that is likely to promote sustainable development flourishes in a stable environment, where rights and obligations are clear and are fairly and uniformly applied.

Most fundamentally, governance is the means to an end, not an end in itself. ‘Good’ environmental governance should be based on the principles of:

• Transparency - openness in decision making
• Access to information and justice - accurate and open communication, and effective exercising of environmental justice
• Public participation - genuine involvement in decision making
• Coherence - a consistent approach within a complex system
• Subsidiarity - decisions taken as closely as possible to the citizen
• Respect for human rights - civil, political, developmental and environmental rights
• Accountability - for economic, social and environmental performance

Read IUCN’s Statement on Environmental Governance