The major premise of this edited collection based on a series of presentations given at three European workshops held in 2006 and 2007 is that traditional approaches to understanding the provision of global public goods rest on two antiquated assumptions. The first is that these goods, including policy remedies to abate climate change, protect biodiversity, equitably manage natural resources, and prevent pollution, are largely defined by protagonists in accordance with public choice criteria such as perceived material benefit and avoidance of burdensome costs. The second deficiency is that these goods are principally managed through formal, multi-lateral agreements negotiated by nation-states and implemented by national bureaucracies.
Reflexive governance refers to the processes by which actors frame and define public goods in a new, much changed global environment that has witnessed a veritable explosion of participation in decisions regarding how to more broadly define, as well as manage, global public goods by non-governmental actors and sub-national governments. The authors demonstrate how a participatory revolution has occurred largely due to changing values regarding what constitutes a public good as articulated by networks of local, regional, and national leaders, and by NGOs that adhere to a wide array of ideological and ethical views. As a consequence, the disposition of public goods is now subject to decisions formulated through interactions among diverse coalitions of civil society groups, and implemented through a series of complex, interwoven partnerships among various levels of governance. Most importantly, the contributors to this collection contend that these partnerships manifest a far more de-centralized foundation of policy-related knowledge than was formerly the case when nation-states alone governed these goods. This is because co-production of knowledge regarding the sources and solutions to trans-boundary problems is now commonly performed by citizen groups, scientific associations, and others.
The twenty contributors are an eclectic mix of economists, urban planners, political scientists, and philosophers. To achieve coherence around the central theme of reflexive governance, the editors sought to engage in what they describe as a “highly interactive and quite demanding (process) for the authors” (p. xi) that required considerable interaction during and after the three above-noted conferences. The result is that the fifteen chapters are arranged around a handful of critical topics, ranging from how to define public goods (with contributors concluding they may be any ubiquitous commodity, amenity, or technology that is in high demand and subject to dispute over management, control, availability, or allocation), to how to design incentive schemes, evaluate compliance tools, and co-generate knowledge.
On the whole, the contributors effectively explore how many trans-boundary environmental, resource, and science and technology problems have evolved from being state-centered objects of high politics to subjects of highly iterative, deliberative, and often decentralized collaborations involving citizen-activists, local knowledge purveyors, and practitioners of translational science. In all of these collaborative activities, however, the various cases reveal that national governments' authority in these issues has not waned—but has, instead, become transformed. Nation-states now occupy a decisional domain which requires mediating public goods controversies. Essentially, they occupy the policy space between sub-national governments—which, for instance, often independently act to try to mitigate climate change, or regulate biotechnology—and international intergovernmental organizations that vigorously espouse globally-equitable solutions. The latter may also co-generate information regarding problems as varied as agriculture and biodiversity protection.
Three chapters devoted to multi-stakeholder coordination in environmental decision making, and which focus on collaboration among heterogeneous NGOs, offer the book's most intellectually ambitious and innovative contribution. Cases on forest management, watershed management, and ecosystem sustainability feature a series of novel meta-analyses that compare and evaluate decisional outcomes along several process and outcomes-related criteria. The cases themselves—mostly set in European and Latin American contexts unfamiliar to many political scientists in the US—are trenchant and illuminating.
Most of all, these chapters illuminate the reasons why infusion of more participatory methods into decisions, while helping to broaden the legitimacy of policies agreed to by protagonists, assures neither that adopted policies are effective in solving problems nor useful in improving the quality of useable policy knowledge. In all cases, it seems, meeting the interests and aspirations of the various protagonists remains the ultimate litmus test for policy acceptability. This suggests that even reflexive governance cannot overcome strongly held stakeholder expectations.
In knitting together the voices of diverse disciplinary adherents, such an ambitious collection is bound to suffer some unevenness. This is apparent in the topics and literatures omitted. For example, the discussion of cross-national regulatory reform of environmental public goods excludes discussion of ISO 14000—an EU innovation that has been widely cited as a common framework for ensuring voluntary compliance and information sharing (e.g., Aseem Prakash and Matthew Potoski, The Voluntary Environmentalists—Green Clubs, ISO 14000, and Voluntary Environmental Regulations, 2006). Meanwhile, the chapter on the evolution of biotechnology research-and-development governance focuses mostly on industrial collaboration but, surprisingly, ignores the considerable literature on international networking for converging nano-, bio-information, and cognitive science technologies and the unique reflexive experiences that have been emerging in this area.
Likewise, chapters on the co-production of knowledge and managing global risks are so case-focused as to ignore theoretical contributions offered in the political science literature on path dependency and resistance to incorporating new information in decisions, as well as the comparative uses of the precautionary principle in risk regulation. The first omission is surprising given the widely-recognized importance of knowledge co-production in global environmental policy debates and demands for better two-way communication between scientists and local policy makers—for instance, on how to use information distilled from climate change models for meeting local community needs for long-term resource planning (e.g., Sheila Jasanoff, States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order, 2004). Regarding the precautionary principle, the omission of recent comparative politics investigations of its use in diverse environmental and health policy contexts (e.g., David Vogel, The Politics of Precaution, 2012) is also surprising.
Finally, while the book's contributors acknowledge the importance of ensuring policy acceptability by adapting adopted policy measures to the moral norms and collective preferences of society, the editors' abbreviated conclusions fail to discuss lessons from these intriguing cases regarding how to do this more effectively. In particular, how do co-production of knowledge and collaborative processes that seek to articulate a consensus around policy reform change the preferences of protagonists over time? Political scientists who have examined the evolving agendas of local and regional governments relative to global environmental issues (e.g., Henrik Selin and Stacy VenDeveer, Changing Climates in North American Politics, 2009) have, for instance, noted the importance of value change, community capacity, and shifting agendas in explaining the emergence of multi-level governance of these issues.
These are probably unavoidable shortcomings in an ambitious, multidisciplinary collection such as this. Nevertheless, given the enormous effort the contributors invested in the volume's production, its usefulness to political scientists who study the governance of global public goods could have been strengthened by better linking contributors' findings to other recent work, as well as by connecting these findings to cases studied by scholars outside of this volume's network of contributors.
