The four faces of the environmental state: environmental governance regimes in 28 countries

Abstract

The primary task for the environmental state is to address problems related to the market’s externalisation of environmental costs. It has four main resources at its disposal: regulation, redistribution, organisation, and knowledge generation. The way these four resources are deployed make up a state’s environmental governance arrangements. Using data on environmental regulation, taxes, public administrations, and knowledge production from 28 countries, and a hierarchical cluster analysis, four different types of environmental states are identified: established, emerging, partial, and weak. This is followed by some suggestions for further research on the environmental state in a comparative perspective.

Keywords:

• environmental state
• comparative environmental governance
• typology
• cluster analysis

Notes

1. The data used in this analysis have three sources. The policy adoption data used in this paper have two sources. The first source is the ENVIPOLCON data set. The original ENVIPOLCON data (Holzinger et al. 2008) and its update (Holzinger et al. 2011, Holzinger and Sommerer 2011) have recorded the presence of 21 environmental policies in 24 countries for a complete time series from 1970 to 2005. The second data source is the GRACE data set developed by the Governing the Anthropocene projected hosted by the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. The GRACE data set adds time series data on the same set of policies for 13 new countries, primarily emerging economies and non-European countries, and for the period from 1970 to 2010. The GRACE data set also adds four new policies for the full sample of 37 countries, and updates the ENVIPOLCON to 2010.

Data for environmental taxes and environmental R&D spending were extracted from OECD’s Green Growth online data collection, see http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=GREEN_GROWTH and OECD (2014). Both variables represent the mean value for each country during the period 1995–2005, but the number of data points within this time span varies between countries.

The administration data are based on the data appendix in (Weidner and Jänicke 2002), which summarises key points from capacity building case studies in 30 countries carried out by country experts. See Weidner and Jänicke (2002) for more details.

2. The first-generation policies index is based on the following 14 policies: sulphur content in gasoil (diesel), lead content in petrol, passenger cars emissions, large combustion plant emissions, coliforms in bathing water, hazardous substances in detergents, efficient use of water in industry, industrial discharges surface water, contaminated sites, soil protection, noise emissions standard for lorries, motorway noise emissions, DDT ban, and endangered species policy. The second-generation index contains these 11 policies: energy efficiency of refrigerators, recycling of construction waste, target for landfill waste, target for glass recycling, target for paper recycling, eco-labelling policy, environmental impact assessment policy, eco-auditing policy, environmental sustainability plan, feed-in tariffs policy, and CO₂-tax or trading policy.

3. Income tax data from OECD I-library; see DOI: 10.1787/20758510-table4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Sweden’s National Research Council [grant no. 2012-5514].