Environmental governance: A practical framework to guide design, evaluation, and analysis

Abstract

Governance is one of the most important factors for ensuring effective environmental management and conservation actions. Yet, there is still a relative paucity of comprehensive and practicable guidance that can be used to frame the evaluation, design, and analysis of systems of environmental governance. This conceptual review and synthesis article seeks to addresses this problem through resituating the broad body of governance literature into a practical framework for environmental governance. Our framework builds on a rich history of governance scholarship to propose that environmental governance has four general aims or objectives -to be effective, to be equitable, to be responsive, and to be robust. Each of these four objectives need to be considered simultaneously across the institutional, structural, and procedural elements of environmental governance. Through a review of the literature, we developed a set of attributes for each of these objectives and relate these to the overall capacity, functioning, and performance of environmental governance. Our aim is to provide a practical and adaptable framework that can be applied to the design, evaluation, and analysis of environmental governance in different social and political contexts, to diverse environmental problems and modes of governance, and at a range of scales. K E Y W O R D Sconservation, effective governance, environmental governance, environmental management, equitable governance, responsive governance, robust governanceThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Local support for conservation is associated with perceptions of good governance, social impacts, and ecological effectiveness

“…Second, the analysis of individual indicators against levels of support points to specific factors related to conservation that may be more important determinants of support—these include transparency, conflict management, recognition, trust, and knowledge and education. Third, these results suggest that conservation practitioners and managers need to be attentive to the quality of governance (Bennett & Satterfield, ; Borrini‐Feyerabend & Hill ; Lockwood, ) and the social impacts of conservation (Jones et al., ; Kaplan‐Hallam & Bennett ; McNeill et al., ; Svensson et al., )—just as they need to attend to the ecological effectiveness of conservation. Fostering support through greater attention to good governance and social impacts may also have knock‐on benefits through increasing compliance, decreasing enforcement costs, and improving ecological outcomes (Bergseth, Gurney, Barnes, Arias, & Cinner, ; Rohe et al., ).…”

“…This research provides a multi‐sited study of how people's perceptions can be monitored using a quantitative survey to understand the social impacts of conservation (Jones et al., ; Kaplan‐Hallam & Bennett ; McNeill, Clifton, & Harvey, ; Svensson, Rodwell, & Attrill, ), ecological effectiveness (Leleu et al., ; Webb et al., ; Yasué et al., ), and conservation governance (Bennett & Satterfield ; Borrini‐Feyerabend & Hill ; Lockwood, ). This study extends previous research through employing quantitative methods and analysis to examine how perceptions are associated with support for conservation.…”

“…In particular, we focused on perceived impacts of the MPA on individual income (economic), livelihoods (economic), food security (health), knowledge and education (social), community well-being (social), connections to nature (cultural), and fairness of distribution of impacts and benefits (economic). Finally, the survey contained indicators focused on the normative assessment of good governance (Bennett & Satterfield 2018;Borrini-Feyerabend & Hill 2015;Lockwood, 2010) including indicators related to recognition, transparency, accountability, communication, participation, consultation and consent, conflict management, trust, rule of law, and legitimacy. The indicator for recognition was constructed using four items related to the extent to which small-scale fishermen's rights, livelihoods, traditional knowledge, and culture were considered in management (Zafra-Calvo et al, 2017).…”

“…Local people can also experience the social impacts of conservation initiatives, including on economic, social, cultural, health, physical, or political empowerment domains of human well-being (Biedenweg, Stiles, & Wellman, 2016;Breslow et al 2016;Jones, McGinlay, & Dimitrakopoulos, 2017;Kaplan-Hallam & Bennett 2017;Leisher, Samberg, Van Buekering, & Sanjayan, 2013). Governance refers to the policies, institutions, and processes that shape who makes decisions and how decisions are made in conservation planning and management (Bennett & Satterfield 2018;Lockwood, 2010). Stakeholders can evaluate "good governance" based on normative principles such as recognition, transparency, accountability, communication, participation, consultation, conflict management, trust, rule of law, legitimacy, coordination, and collaboration (Bennett & Satterfield 2018;Borrini-Feyerabend & Hill 2015;Lockwood, 2010).…”

“…Governance refers to the policies, institutions, and processes that shape who makes decisions and how decisions are made in conservation planning and management (Bennett & Satterfield 2018;Lockwood, 2010). Stakeholders can evaluate "good governance" based on normative principles such as recognition, transparency, accountability, communication, participation, consultation, conflict management, trust, rule of law, legitimacy, coordination, and collaboration (Bennett & Satterfield 2018;Borrini-Feyerabend & Hill 2015;Lockwood, 2010). Finally, local people can formulate judgments about the status, effectiveness, and appropriateness of management resources, plans, and actions based on their perceptions (Bennett, 2016;Ferse, Manez Costa, Manez, Adhuri, & Glaser, 2010;Hockings, Stolton, Leverington, Dudley, & Courrau, 2006).…”