Can Non-State Certification Systems Bolster State-Centered Efforts to Promote Sustainable Development through the Clean Development Mechanism

Increasing economic globalization has coincided with the emergence and escalating influence of non-state actors and organizations in domestic and international policymaking, from shaping policy agendas to promoting private authority. The latter phenomenon has arisen, at least in part, from a critique of states\u27 failures to adopt effective and enduring environmental policies. Rather than contest command and control institutions, non-state strategies embrace market approaches built around incentives and price mechanisms. Several forms of non-state authority have emerged, including corporate social responsibility, provision of information through labeling, and self-reporting

Re-Visiting the New Orthodoxy of Policy Dynamics: The Dependent Variable and Re-Aggregation Problems in the Study of Policy Change

The new orthodoxy in studies of policy dynamics, including those of Baumgartner and Jones, Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, and Hall, is that policy change occurs through a homeostatic process. “Perturbations” occurring outside of an institutionalized policy subsystem, often characterized as some type of societal or political upheaval or learning, are critical for explaining the development of profound and durable policy changes which are otherwise limited by ‘endogenous’ institutional stability. These homeostatic assumptions, while useful for assessing many cases of policy change do not adequately capture the historical patterns of policy development found in many sectors. The roots of this problem are traced back to the origins of the new orthodoxy in comparative policy research whereby different levels (orders) of policy-making have been incorrectly juxtaposed, providing a parsimonious, but sometimes empirically incorrect, view of policy change. Revising existing taxonomies of policy levels provides a superior identification of the processes of change, and uncovers more than one mechanism through which significant policy change can occur. Three of these alternative mechanisms - a “neo-homeostatic” one in which paradigmatic changes occur through endogenous shifts in goals; a ‘quasi-homeostatic’ in which exogenous factors influence changes in objectives and settings; and a ‘thermostatic’ one in which durable policy objectives require that settings adapt to exogenous changes - are discussed

Designing stakeholder learning dialogues for effective global governance

A growing scholarship on multistakeholder learning dialogues suggests the importance of closely managing learning processes to help stakeholders anticipate which policies are likely to be effective. Much less work has focused on how to manage effective transnational multistakeholder learning dialogues, many of which aim to help address critical global environmental and social problems such as climate change or biodiversity loss. They face three central challenges. First, they rarely shape policies and behaviors directly, but work to ‘nudge’ or ‘tip the scales’ in domestic settings. Second, they run the risk of generating ‘compromise’ approaches incapable of ameliorating the original problem definition for which the dialogue was created. Third, they run the risk of being overly influenced, or captured, by powerful interests whose rationale for participating is to shift problem definitions or narrow instrument choices to those innocuous to their organizational or individual interests. Drawing on policy learning scholarship, we identify a six-stage learning process for anticipating effectiveness designed to minimize these risks while simultaneously fostering innovative approaches for meaningful and longlasting problem solving: Problem definition assessments; Problem framing; Developing coalition membership; Causal framework development; Scoping exercises; Knowledge institutionalization. We also identify six management techniques within each process for engaging transnational dialogues around problem solving. We show that doing so almost always requires anticipating multiple-step causal pathways through which influence of transnational and/or international actors and institutions might occur

Forests for the New Millennium - MAKING FORESTS WORK FOR PEOPLE AND NATURE

THE WAYS IN WHICH FORESTS ARE PERCEIVED AND USED HAVE CHANGED DRAMATICALLY OVER RECENT YEARS. FORESTS ARE NO LONGER SEEN SIMPLY AS A SOURCE OF TIMBER, BUT AS COMPLEX ECOSYSTEMS WHICH SUSTAIN LIVELIHOODS AND PROVIDE A RANGE OF PRODUCTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES. IT IS NOW WIDELY RECOGNISED THAT FORESTS CAN CONTRIBUTE TO RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND POVERTY ALLEVIATION.Forest, economics, livelihoods