Networked Governance:  China’s Changing Approach to Transboundary Environmental Management
Erik Nielsen, PhD (2007)

Not long ago, China’s environmental problems would have barely mattered beyond its borders. Now, while Chinese policy-makers have begun to tackle a wide range of domestic environmental challenges, the transboundary impact of China’s domestic environmental difficulties deserves greater attention.

Although China has historically neglected the transboundary impacts of its environmental problems, state actors are increasingly focusing on transboundary environmental relations. Based upon extensive field research in the Mekong Region, I have identified a number of situations in which China has sought to engage in transboundary environmental management. However, at the same time, in the same region, I have identified other situations where it has not been willing to take its transboundary environmental management responsibilities seriously. This dissertation seeks to explain this pattern of behavior. In particular, my assumption is that under certain circumstances, non-state actors, including civil society organizations and multilaterals, operating both inside China and in the world-at-large, through a process I call networked governance, are able to influence China's willingness to take its transboundary environmental responsibilities seriously. This research suggests it is increasingly important for these external non-state actors to better understand the mechanisms they can utilize to engage China’s decision-makers in collaboratively managing transboundary natural resources.

The Chinese central government is slowly relinquishing its role of supreme decision-maker. The Mekong Region is a complex web of inter-organizational networks that reach out, formally and informally, to China’s environmental policy and decision-makers, at both the provincial and national levels. Based on an analysis of four detailed case studies, I conclude that these networks exert ‘extra-bureaucratic’ influence over China’s policy and decision-making, generating a specific form of environmental governance in the region. China appears to be slowly shifting its approach to the management of transboundary natural resources.

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Sheltering in Place: The Limits of Integrative Bargaining Following Industrial Accidents
Gregg P. Macey, PhD (2007)

This study grew out of an interest in environmental justice and the unique problems faced by neighborhoods located near petrochemical facilities. It also focuses on negotiation theory and how it can be applied under an increasingly diverse array of circumstances. I sketch the roots of the concept of integrative bargaining and how it emerged as a powerful yet limited tool for meeting the interests of stakeholders in multi-party contexts. Specifically, I demonstrate how research into the structure of conflict, with origins in contract and game theory, encouraged a new profession that focuses much of its time, paradoxically, on matters of agency, such as the strategic elements widely viewed as conducive to a Pareto efficient outcome. In an effort to encourage a renewed focus on structure, I show how in a highly institutionalized setting, which for my dissertation included the causes and immediate consequences of an accidental toxic emission by a chemical processing facility, much of the integrative potential of the negotiations that follow is removed from potential discussion or even discovery before mediators and the parties involved begin to address root causes. New roles for mediators, and why it is as important to focus on limiting the narrowing effects of structuration as it is to try and expand the initial offer space, are discussed. Data for my dissertation include semi-structured interviews with over 90 agency and industry representatives, residents and community organizers, and the lawyers and mediators who were also a part of the conflicts that followed accidents such as the Unocal Catacarb spill. I also collected primary documents, including environmental data, deposition transcripts analyzed to determine the organizational roots of the accidents, plant management and government agency records, media accounts, and drafts of community-corporate agreements.

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Localizing public dispute resolution in Japan: Lessons from Experiments with Deliberative Policy-making
Masahiro Matsuura, PhD (2006)

Can consensus building processes, as practiced in the US, be used to resolve infrastructure disputes in Japan? Since the 1990s, proposals to construct highways, dams, ports and airports, railways, as well as to redevelop neighborhoods, have been opposed by a wide range of stakeholders. In response, there is a growing interest among Japanese practitioners in using consensus building processes, as practiced in the US, in order to resolve infrastructure disputes. Scholars and practitioners in the field of negotiation and dispute resolution, as well as policy transfer theorists, have raised concerns about cross-border transfers by referring to a variety of contextual differences between the “importing” and “exporting” countries. This dissertation investigates the relationship between the context and the introduction of consensus building processes from two perspectives: the adaptation of consensus building processes for the Japanese context and the organizational changes that seem to be required to allow processes from the US to work in Japan.

Without process adaptation and organizational change, consensus building processes are unlikely to be helpful in resolving infrastructure disputes in Japan, considering the breadth and depth of the contextual differences -- in organizational, normative, and regulative realms -- between Japan and the United States. The Japanese context for infrastructure planning was investigated through in-depth interviews with 40 practitioners in Japan. In order to explore possible strategies for adaptation and organizational change, I have closely observed an 18-month pilot test of a consensus building process for road intersection improvements in Tokushima, Japan as an instance of adaptation and organizational change. My close observation of this experiment identified a range of creative adaptation. Based on these observations, I argue that process adaptation and organizational change must occur simultaneously when consensus building processes are transferred to a foreign location.

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The Politics of Consensus Building: The Case of Diesel Passenger Cars and Urban Air Quality Management in South Korea
Dong Young Kim, PhD (2006)

I look at the three efforts to resolve public disputes over diesel passenger cars and urban air quality management in South Korea. I explore the main obstacles in nascent democracies to meeting the necessary conditions for successful dispute resolution prescribed by Western scholars of consensus-building theory and practice. The first two cases did not resolve the disputes even though they produced a consensus agreement through deliberation. The agreements were challenged and adjusted through regulatory processes. This type of unstable consensus building is regarded as one of pathologies of consensus building efforts in regulatory decisionmaking. This paper analyzes why these problem happened through the new analytic framework, which incorporates Kingdon’s multiple stream framework and theory of consensus building.
This paper found that the final dispute resolution was made in conventional politics stream by adversarial power game in politics rather than in consensus building stream. Most cases did not have necessary factors for successful consensus building effort. Most of all, the first two consensus building efforts were strategically initiated by policy entrepreneurs, who were not neutral in managing many other necessary factors of successful consensus building. As a result, the efforts of dispute resolution were actually the processes of conflict expansion rather than the authentic consensus building efforts. Non-neutral deployment of consensus building efforts were manifested in idiosyncratic features of policy process and politics in South Korea. Policy entrepreneurs strategic motives were a reaction to the unbalanced representation of weak environmental rationales in the existing policy making process of multi-level policymaking venues. Thus, main obstacles to successful consensus building in nascent democracies exist in institutional levels, which play against the neutral initiation of consensus building efforts. One way to secure the neutrality is to develop a new type of entrepreneurs, so-called ‘consensus-building entrepreneurs.

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Towards a Global Consensus on Matters of Science: How Process and Membership Can Generate Valid and Sustainable Science Advice in Multilateral Environmental Treaty Negotiations
Pia Kohler, PhD (2006)

In most multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), science advisory bodies (SABs) are tasked with producing guidance on scientifi c aspects of the problem. SABs are a necessary infrastructure of global environmental management because they provide a forum where experts come together to negotiate a consensus on matters of science relevant to a given MEA. This consensus, much more than merely an assessment of available information, creates new knowledge that feeds into decision-making. I propose, that to contribute effectively to implementation, this consensus must be both valid (scientifi cally accurate) and sustainable (acceptable to stakeholders and not requiring frequent renegotiation). This thesis identifi es two institutional design features of an SAB that are crucial for obtaining a valid and sustainable outcome: representative membership, and a transparent and flexible organization of work. A three-tier SAB design is recommended based on these findings, and its theoretical application to the provision of science in the Biodiversity regime is explored.
Representative membership describes the individual experts chosen to contribute to an SAB’s work. To maximize validity and sustainability, I identify several kinds of diversity which can enhance the SAB outcome, namely national, economic, institutional, disciplinary, regional and personal diversity. A process which is both transparent and flexible are also classifi ed into several types of transparency and flexibility, including: access to meetings; document release; and the establishment of norms and procedures. This thesis concludes that while all these types of diversity, fl exibility and transparency have the potential of improving the SAB consensus’ validity and sustainability, the relative importance assigned to each of these should be tailored to the MEAs needs to produce the best consensus. The thesis is based on the in-depth study of six MEAs: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Biosafety Protocol, the Vienna Convention and Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, and the Rotterdam Convention on a Prior Informed Consent Procedure for the transport of hazardous chemicals.

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The Potential for Trickle Up: How Local Actors’ Experiments Influence National Forest Policy Planning
Jill M. Blockhus, PhD (2006)

The loss of forests in Vietnam encouraged central government policy makers to consider new ways to manage forest resources. A major forest policy shift -- moving away from state-led management -- began in earnest in pilot provinces in 1998, with the handing over of forest land and management responsibility to communities. The initial outcomes of this switch and the policy learning that took place as a result of experimentation with community forestry are examined. I show that learning from and sharing these experiences contributed to policy-oriented learning and influenced the formulation of new policy. I review how lessons learned from the field (e.g. local experimentation, project learning and bottom-up planning) can redefine national forest policy priorities. I present preliminary lessons from adaptation of methods of forest land allocation, forest protection regulations and community forest management planning. I share experiences from pilot provinces where, with the involvement of policy innovators (local and external), the results led to the development of an enabling legal framework for community forestry, in the new Land Law and Forest Law.

This dissertation suggests how learning from experiments can lead to better policy options in developing countries. I explore the critical roles that development of methodologies (combined with networking and training) play in advancing the lessons learned from the district and province levels in two directions – first, sideways, with study tours between provinces and second, upwards, to the national level. I find that local communities are an essential part of the policy process, but it is critical to keep the government (the People’s Committee at different levels) and technical agencies abreast of and thoroughly involved in the policy learning and reform effort. In addition to access to community forest resources, I identify how a different type of ownership, that is generated by a sense of pride in the design of the work and creating the means for such ownership in the process -- is critical to this approach. I show how both mistakes and as well as successful examples are important learning tools.

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Trading Zones: Cooperating for Water Resource and Ecosystem Management when Stakeholders have Apparently Irreconcilable Differences.
Boyd W. Fuller, PhD (2005)

Disputes over the management of water resources in the United States often seem irreconcilable because stakeholders’ differences in values, beliefs, and identities are so hard to resolve. Yet, while many efforts to resolve such disputes fail to generate agreement, some do. Looking at these fundamental disagreements about how to manage water, this dissertation attempts to understand why stakeholders in some consensus building processes were able to generate and agree on specific solutions while in other they were not. Two extended disputes about how to manage regional water resources in California and Florida are the focus of this inquiry. In each case, decision-makers convened both collaborative efforts that reached agreement as well as efforts that failed.

The findings from this study show that consensus building theory provides some useful explanations for why stakeholders were able to reach agreement in the face of their entrenched value-based differences. The experiences in the two case studies described here show that trading zone theory offers some needed insights that complement consensus building theory’s focus on process structure, facilitation, and interest-based problem solving. In the processes that reached agreement in both cases, maps, words, spreadsheets, diagrams, expressions, and calculations were generated by stakeholders following procedures they agreed were valid to describe the natural, political, cultural, and administrative situation on the ground. Like pieces of a puzzle, these partial representations were then combined and manipulated until stakeholders had constructed a vision of a future situation that they agreed was both desirable and feasible.

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Street Science: The Fusing of Local and Professional Knowledge in Environmental Policy
Jason Corburn, PhD (2002)

Jason Corburn analyzed how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. Controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not just problems for professionals. Concerned lay publics, especially minorities, experience the greatest environmental health risks. They are now demanding a greater role in finding solutions for the hazards with which they must live. Commumity participation in environmental decisions is putting pressure on policy -makers to find new ways of fusing the knowledge of professionals with the insights derived from the local knowledge of community members. This dissertation asks how the local knowledge of community members can improve environmental decision making. The residents of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhoods of Brooklyn, NY were studied because of the way they are organizing and using their knowledge of local environmental and health hazards to both improve local conditions and influence the judgements of professionals. Corburn shows how local knowledge can ultimately improve environmental decision making.

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Environmental Resistance and Aboriginal Development: A Comparative Study of Mining Ventures in the United States and Canada
Saleem Ali, PhD (2001)

When and why does environmental resistance arise in native communities in the United States and Canada when they are faced with the prospect of mining development? Native people have endured widespread environmental harm due to mining ventures, yet sometimes they support new mining projects and sometimes they do not. Saleem Ali uses a variety of qualitative techniques to study four instances of mining development ? two in the United States and two in Canada. He finds that contrary to common belief, neither scientific studies nor the influence of civil society adequately explain the emergence of resistance to mining. Instead, the way negotiations are framed as well as worries about sovereignty are the key determinants of environmental resistance in Aboriginal communities.

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Negotiating Identity Within the Sustainable Agriculture Advocacy Coalition
Kathleen Merrigan, PhD (2001)

Kathleen Merrigan has examined the work of three prominent national coalitions involved in promoting sustainable agriculture. Her research included participant observation, interviews, and an extensive survey of the attitudes of farming activists and experts. Her findings are related to theories about advocacy coalitions, interest group formation and identity politics. Her results show evidence of an identity group within the sustainable agriculture advocacy coalition. The presence of such a group impedes the ability of sustainable agriculture advocates to pursue their interests in relevant policy subsystems, because participants focus on continuous internal coalition negotiations, avoid confronting conflicts that would clarify goals, and discount scientific evidence ? relying instead on information generated through group dialogue. Recommendations to improve the effectiveness of the sustainable agriculture advocacy coalition are presented.

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