RETHINKING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: FROM GLOBAL GOVERNANCE TO TRANSNATIONAL NEOPLURALISM
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12189 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Author | PHILIP G. CERNY,GABRIELA KÜTTING |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12189
RETHINKING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY:
FROM GLOBAL GOVERNANCE TO TRANSNATIONAL
NEOPLURALISM
GABRIELA KÜTTING AND PHILIP G. CERNY
Originally focused on seeking policy solutions through international cooperation, transnational
administration, and global governance, the study of global environmental policy has become
increasingly diverse and fragmented. Complex, crosscutting variables ranging from a wider
constellation of non-state actors to diverse critical perspectives, along with a focus on narrower
sub-elds and the changing nature of environmental challenges themselves, have left the eld in a
state of ux. A broader, more process-oriented explanatory framework is needed. Institutionalist,
global governance and civil society approaches, as well as middle-range concepts such as policy
networks, are insufcient, while critical analyses, although a step in the right direction, are overly
deterministic. Transnational neopluralism, which focuses on struggles for power and inuence
among material interest groups, social movements, and political actors in diverse issue-areas,
provides a more robust framework for developing a more insightful research agenda and more
constructive policy-making strategies in an increasingly complex and interdependent world.
SHIFTING PARADIGMS IN GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
The study of global environmental policy (GEP) has evolved signicantly over recent
decades. Environmental challenges have grown and debates about environmental policy
have moved to a much more prominent place in global politics generally, while the struc-
ture of global policy-making is being challenged too. However, analysis of GEP has not
kept pace. It has become mired in paradigmatic assumptions that are less effective both in
explaining the empirical pathways that policy processes and outcomes have taken and, as
a result, in pursuing normative policy goals. Global governance approaches in particular
are awed, while attempts to move away from that paradigm are partial and fragmented.
In this article we argue that the underlying structure of constraints and opportunities in
the international system, as understood through the prism of transnational neoplural-
ism, continues to stymie attempts at developing effective global policy and transnational
administration in the environmental issue-area.
Transnational neopluralism focuses not on the more institutional or managerial dimen-
sions of public policy such as global governance, neoinstitutionalism or policy network
analysis, but rather on the dynamic interaction – the ongoing conict, competition, manip-
ulation and jockeying for inuence – of specic sets of actors in key policy-making pro-
cesses. The neopluralist approach not only analyses uneven and shifting power relation-
ships among interest groups and ‘value groups’ (Key 1953) but also brings in regularized
relationships between those groups and state and intergovernmental actors in diverse,
structurally differentiated issue-areas. Rather than seeing institutional structure as the
main independent variable, neopluralist analysis looks at the political processes that char-
acterize diverse issue-areas and the key actors that interact within them – their objectives,
resources, strategies and tactics, both explicit and implicit.
Gabriela Kütting is at the Department of Political Science, Rutgers University-Newark, USA and from 2016 at Cardiff
University,UK. Philip G. Cerny is at the Division of Global Affairs, Rutgers University-Newark, USA and the University
of Manchester, UK.
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (907–921)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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