The environmental state as a model for the world? An analysis of policy repertoires in 37 countries

Abstract

Scholars have proposed the analytical concept of the environmental state, a state where government actively addresses negative environmental externalities of economic activities. The mapping of environmental regulatory expansion in Western countries has been central in recent attempts to identify the environmental state empirically. Surprisingly little is known, however, when it comes to the environmental regulatory expansions in non-Western countries. Are there similar trends towards the emergence of environmental states in the non-West as well? From analysing data covering 25 policies in 37 countries, it appears that regulatory expansion has also occurred in the non-Western world, and the distinction between the West and the non-West has been reduced over time. There are non-Western countries among environmental pioneers, and there is some evidence for the trend of global convergence. Future research on environmental states should take into account emerging environmental states in the non-West.

Keywords:

• environmental state
• policy repertoires
• environmental pioneers
• policy convergence

Notes

1. Also see Al-Mulali et al. (2015, pp. 124–126) for a summary of results of the empirical studies conducted between 2003 and 2014.

2. It also has been suggested that material prosperity is what engenders post-materialism (Inglehart 1995), which in turn, encourages citizens to cherish clean environment as one of the core post-materialist values.

3. There is a wide literature on the environmental performance of industrialised countries (for an overview, see Fiorino 2011). Although these studies give a clear indication on how successful different nations are in fighting environmental degradation, their use of outcome indicators does not allow for systematic insights into domestic policy portfolios – too many intervening variables are at play. The same criticism applies to studies that use other proxies, such as the number of ratified international treaties (Cao and Prakash 2012).

4. Environmental pioneers are defined as first movers that set a regulatory trend. Pioneering is issue specific, and pioneer countries can be laggards in certain fields (Jänicke 2005).

5. Information on 21 policies from the ENVIPOLCON data is limited to 2005. Our own data collection complements this for 13 countries and the period from 1970 to 2010, and adds information on four new policies for all 37 countries (1970–2010).

6. We acknowledge that during the four decades covered in our analysis, some countries have caught up with Western countries in terms of the political and economic development. However, we decided not to change their affiliation to facilitate comparisons over time.

7. See Figure 4 for an overview of the list of 25 policies.

8. Figure 4 provides information on both the absolute number of adoption and the adoption rate. We use two different scales for the number of adoption to compensate for the difference in the group size (21 vs. 16 countries).

9. For each year, we first generate a matrix consists of all our sample countries (in rows) and their environmental policies (in columns). Each row is then a binary vector, or binary bits, where non-zero elements indicate ‘on’ (i.e. policy in place) and zero elements are ‘off’ (no policy). The asymmetric binary distances are then calculated between all pairs of countries as the proportion of bits in which only one is on among those in which at least one is on.

10. Likewise, the level of within-region dissimilarity is higher than G in Middle East and Africa (Israel and South Africa) and Oceania (New Zealand and Australia), indicating lack of regional convergence in these regions as well. They are not plotted to maintain the Figure’s readability.

11. The following policies are excluded: sulphur in gasoil (diesel), lead in petrol, car emissions, power plant emissions, coliforms in bathing water, detergents, landfill quota, refrigerators energy use, CO₂ tax/trading, noise from lorries, EIA, eco label, eco audit.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council - Vetenskapsrådet (VR) [Governing the Anthropocene: Causes and effects of environmental governance in a comparative perspective].