Environmental governance on the street

Global environmental agreements and national policies do not move automatically from political decision-making to practical implementation. They are enacted and interpreted by local planners, enforcement officers, technical experts and community engagement workers who conduct the everyday work of bringing policies into being on the ground.

Researchers therefore suggest that a new research agenda can help shed more light on the everyday nature of environmental governance, and why global and national agreements may turn out differently than they were originally framed or intended.

In their article in Earth System Governance, Kirsty Holstead of University of St Andrews, Caroline Upton of University of Leicester, and DIIS researcher Mikkel Funder provide an overview of selected literature on the importance of ‘street-level’ civil servants. On this basis they suggest three key research areas through which insights into the role of these actors in environmental governance could be further developed, namely (i) the agency and practices of street level bureaucrats as they enact global and national environmental agendas, (ii) their personal perceptions and how this affects environmental governance and (iii) the outcomes of their activities on state-citizen relations. 

The article is Open Access and can be downloaded free of charge at the journal’s website here.