Collaborative approaches to governance are being used to address some of the most difficult environmental issues across the world, but there is limited focus on the challenges of practice. Leading scholars from the United States, Europe and Australia explore the theory and practice in a range of contexts, highlighting the lessons from practice, the potential limitations of collaboration and the potential strategies for addressing these challenges.

This book takes a practical approach to understanding and describing collaborative governance for resolving environmental problems. It introduces a new collaborative governance assessment model and recognizes that collaborations are a natural result of organizations converging around complex issues. Rather than identifying actors by their type of organization, the actors are identified by the type of role they play. This approach is aligned with how individuals and organizations interact in practice, and their dependance on collaborations to solve emerging environmental problems. The book discusses real cases with governance issues and creates new frameworks for collaborations. Features: Addresses communities at all levels and scales that are gravitating toward collaborations to solve their environmental issues. Prepares and enables individuals to participate in collaborative governance and design collaborative governance frameworks. Introduces the first simplified and standardized model to assess governance using governance actors and styles. Explains governance in simple terms and builds governance frameworks from the individual’s perspective; the smallest, viable unit of governance in a collaboration. Describes "tools of convergence" for collaborative leaders to organize and align activities to create shared-governance outcomes and outputs.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Prior to the Nixon administration, environmental policy in the United States was rudimentary at best. Since then, it has evolved into one of the primary concerns of governmental policy from the federal to the local level. As scientific expertise on the environment rapidly developed, Americans became more aware of the growing environmental crisis that surrounded them. Practical solutions for mitigating various aspects of the crisis - air pollution, water pollution, chemical waste dumping, strip mining, and later global warming - became politically popular, and the government responded by gradually erecting a vast regulatory apparatus to address the issue. Today, politicians regard environmental policy as one of the most pressing issues they face. The Obama administration has identified the renewable energy sector as a key driver of economic growth, and Congress is in the process of passing a bill to reduce global warming that will be one of the most important environmental policy acts in decades. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy will be a state-of-the-art work on all aspects of environmental policy in America. Over the past half century, America has been the world's leading emitter of global warming gases. However, environmental policy is not simply a national issue. It is a global issue, and the explosive growth of Asian countries like China and India mean that policy will have to be coordinated at the international level. The book will therefore focus not only on the U.S., but on the increasing importance of global policies and issues on American regulatory efforts. This is a topic that will only grow in importance in the coming years, and this will serve as an authoritative guide to any scholar interested in the issue.

A bold and profoundly new way of governing environmental problems is palpable around the globe and aims to overcome the limitations of the interventionist state and its market alternative to offer more effective and legitimate solutions to today's most pressing environmental problems. The 'new environmental governance' (NEG) emphasises a host of novel characteristics including participation, collaboration, deliberation, learning and adaptation and 'new' forms of accountability. While these unique features have generated significant praise from legal and governance scholars, there have been very few systematic evaluations of NEG in practice, and it is still unclear whether NEG will in fact 'work', and if so, when and how. This book offers one of the most rigorous research investigations into cutting edge trends in environmental governance to date. Focusing its inquiry around some of the most central, controversial and/or under researched characteristics of NEG, the book offers fresh insights into the conditions under which we can best achieve successful collaboration, effective learning and adaptation, meaningful participatory and deliberative governance and effective forms of accountability. The book synthesizes its findings to identify seven key pillars of 'good' NEG that are central to its success and will provide useful guidance for policymakers and scholars seeking to apply new governance to a wide range of environmental and non-environmental policy contexts. The book also advances our understanding of State governance and will be a valuable reference for scholars, researchers and students working in law and regulation studies - especially in the field of environmental law.

Whether the goal is building a local park or developing disaster response models, collaborative governance is changing the way public agencies at the local, regional, and national levels are working with each other and with key partners in the nonprofit and private sectors. While the academic literature has spawned numerous case studies and context- or policy-specific models for collaboration, the growth of these innovative collaborative governance systems has outpaced the scholarship needed to define it. Collaborative Governance Regimes breaks new conceptual and practical ground by presenting an integrative framework for working across boundaries to solve shared problems, a typology for understanding variations among collaborative governance regimes, and an approach for assessing both process and productivity performance. This book draws on diverse literatures and uses rich case illustrations to inform scholars and practitioners about collaborative governance regimes and to provide guidance for designing, managing, and studying such endeavors in the future. Collaborative Governance Regimes will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in public administration, public policy, and political science who want a framework for theory building, yet the book is also accessible enough for students and practitioners.

Collaboration has become a popular approach to environmental policy, planning, and management. At the urging of citizens, nongovernmental organizations, and industry, government officials at all levels have experimented with collaboration. Yet questions remain about the roles that governments play in collaboration--whether they are constructive and support collaboration, or introduce barriers. This thoughtful book analyzes a series of cases to understand how collaborative processes work and whether government can be an equal partner even as government agencies often formally control decision making and are held accountable for the outcomes. Looking at examples where government has led, encouraged, or followed in collaboration, the authors assess how governmental actors and institutions affected the way issues were defined, the resources available for collaboration, and the organizational processes and structures that were established. Cases include collaborative efforts to manage watersheds, rivers, estuaries, farmland, endangered species habitats, and forests. The authors develop a new theoretical framework and demonstrate that government left a heavy imprint in each of the efforts. The work concludes by discussing the choices and challenges faced by governmental institutions and actors as they try to realize the potential of collaborative environmental management.