اقتصاد نهادی محیط زیست

New institutional economics and its forerunners have, we argue made important contributions to the evolving agenda of ecological economics. The conceptualisation of environmental problems as instances of interdependence and the acknowledgement of positive transaction costs are key insights into the nature of environmental problems. We also discuss how plurality of behavioural motivations and limited cognitive capacity have important implications for environmental decision making and its analysis. We show how evolutionary and collective action theories offer complementary takes on the choice and change of environmental governance institutions and how the concept of social capital can enrich analyses of environmental governance. We conclude that an emerging institutional ecological economics has the greatest relative advantage in analysing the design, implementation and effectiveness of environmental governance solutions.

One of the major challenges of ecological economics has been how to understand and examine the design of environmental policies and governance institutions. Institutional economics in all its guises has been an influential source of ideas for ecological economics. Ecological economics has turned to institutional economics for sophisticated models and understanding of human behaviour (Dodds, 1997 and Söderbaum, 2000) and for explaining the role of institutions in collective action and environmental outcomes (Adger, 1999, Hodge and McNally, 2000, Randhir and Lee, 1996 and Spash and Villena, 1999). Institutional economics has also been a source of alternative views regarding policy analysis and the normative basis of policy prescriptions (Hukkinen, 1998, Söderbaum, 2000 and Bromley, 1998). While the influence of institutional economics has been profound, we believe that a comprehensive review of the conceptual foundations of institutional economics can provide new insights and important new directions for ecological economics. Ironically, environment has not been a central concern for new institutional economics which has focussed on industrial organisation, public choice, and economic history. However, new institutional economics has informed a significant body of interdisciplinary research on local common property arrangements and international environmental conventions (Baland and Platteau, 1996, Berge and Stenseth, 1999, Bromley, 1992, Keohane and Ostrom, 1995, Ostrom, 1990, Ostrom et al., 1994, Ostrom et al., 2002, Young, 1994 and Young, 2002). This interdisciplinary body of research encompassing economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology has demonstrated under what circumstances environmental governance institutions are likely to be effective. It has also identified a number of design principles that characterise successful governance institutions. We argue that this interdisciplinary body of new institutional literature offers a useful and widely applicable platform for research on environmental governance. By environmental governance we mean the management of all environmental resources, including conventional renewable and non-renewable natural resources such as forests, groundwater, and minerals; recently recognised environmental resources such as biodiversity, the ozone layer, and atmospheric sinks; and the quality of environmental media such as air and water. Environmental governance involves the establishment and enforcement of governance institutions for the resolution of environmental conflicts (Young, 1994, p. 15). Governance institutions range from informal to formal, and their scale varies from local to international (Adger et al., 2003). Environmental governance may entail the creation of new organisations such as environmental agencies to undertake governance activities or the delegation of authority to undertake governance activities to existing agents (Paavola, 2002a). Finally, governance is what governments do. Sometimes–as when resource users govern themselves under customary institutions–environmental governance does not involve the state. On the other hand, the state is intimately involved even in the establishment and operation of the so-called new voluntary measures for environmental protection. New institutional research on environmental governance has significant growth potential. It has traditionally examined local and international levels of governance and there is, as of yet, relatively little research on national environmental governance solutions. Moreover, interactions between the levels of governance have only recently been recognised as an important area for research and governance practice (see Young, 2002). For example, international agreements on desertification, deforestation, or climate change do not directly translate to national policy strategies. Ostrom et al. (1999) have in turn argued that local governance solutions are tied to and influenced by other levels and areas of governance and cannot be simply scaled or sealed up. We argue that ecological economics and institutional economics can together achieve important intellectual developments by combining their insights on issues such as interdependence, complexity, resilience, scale, governance, and institutional design. The next section discusses the concept of interdependence as the foundation of new institutional approach to environmental issues. The third section investigates the implications of transaction costs for environmental governance and the fourth section shows how and with what implications plural behavioural goals and limited cognitive capacity can be crafted to the new institutional approach. We then compare evolutionary and volitional approaches to the change and choice of governance institutions and outline the role of social capital in environmental governance. Each of these areas, we argue, can contribute to “institutional ecological economics” as a synthesis of institutional economics and ecological economics.

We conclude that new institutional economics contributes to emerging institutional ecological economics by shedding new light on urgent areas of environmental policy and governance in several ways. The institutional approach helps us to examine how the attributes of environmental resources and their users create interdependence and conflicts. Environmental conflicts can be resolved by making collective choices that are implemented by establishing, changing, or reaffirming governance institutions. The approach can be sensitive to motivations that actually inform collective environmental decisions and to the limitations that cognitive capacity imposes upon such choices. Theories of institutional change and social capital further highlight the importance of macro-level and social factors and balance individualistic and volitional explanations of change of environmental governance institutions. These general features of a broadly conceived institutional ecological economics point to an expanding and innovative agenda for research. First, the concept of interdependence can be used to characterise environmental problems and to design institutional responses to them in the increasingly complex and globalising world. Interdependence often spans geographical levels and requires governance responses at each level simultaneously. Environmental problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss are often functionally linked to each other. This justifies and requires multiple and overlapping governance solutions and suggests that “magic bullets” do not exist. For example, mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to climate change are intimately related. The level of greenhouse gas emissions determines the impacts of climate change and ultimately the pressures for adapt. The capacity to adapt and the capacity to mitigate emissions are co-determined because both involve institutions, learning, technological diffusion, and cognition of risk. Yet simple trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation are not meaningful (Azar and Schneider, 2002). Both require their own, albeit overlapping governance solutions. Second, the institutional approach sheds new light on policy implementation and factors that influence governance outcomes. The conventional economic approach has been silent on implementation because it conflates all policy concerns to the choice of the policy instrument. By contrast, the institutional approach sheds light on the compatibility of governance solutions and patterns of interdependence as well as on the transaction cost implications of the institutional design of governance solutions. It also highlights that social capital influences transaction costs and the effectiveness of governance solutions. These kinds of institutional factors largely explain the weak performance of early water pollution control policies in the United States, for example. The institutional design of state and federal policies did not create clear and enforceable rules of water use before the 1970s. State agencies implementing the state policies often involved key stakeholders but their decision-making was not transparent or accountable for the public at large. Changes in the standing of civic groups in court proceedings in the 1960s and the 1970s created pressure for greater transparency and accountability and also resulted in changes in federal water pollution control legislation in the early 1970s. While the new federal policy framework was much more comprehensive than earlier, it still omitted important sources of pollution. Third, the institutional approach has important implications for environmental decisions and analytical frameworks for studying them. Environmental economists often attribute the absence of environmental policy interventions to lack of information, especially lack of information on the monetary values of environmental benefits. The institutional approach draws attention to how interdependence creates environmental conflicts and problems in the absence of clear entitlements. It reminds us that the definition of environmental entitlements is not an exercise of optimisation and that for this reason the valuation of environmental benefits is not going to be a panacea for environmental protection. For example, the conversion of wetlands in Asia is largely driven by the insecurity of entitlements and the future of these wetlands depends on who will have what kind of entitlements in them—rather than on knowledge of the value of the functions of these environmental resources (see Adger and Luttrell, 2000). The institutional approach suggests that more attention ought to be given to processes and procedures in environmental decision making in order to guarantee adequate learning and fair representation of affected parties and legitimacy of environmental decisions. Fourth, instead of limiting policy analysis to the welfare implications of governance alternatives, the traditional approach in cost–benefit analyses, institutional ecological economics helps us to assess governance solutions and outcomes in the light of governance goals that are actually held by diverse decision makers and stakeholders. The analytical understanding of institutional ecological economics on the relationships between resource attributes, interdependence, environmental conflicts and institutions highlights the importance of intra-generational social justice in environmental decision making and governance, both for its own sake and for the sake of effective governance. For example, the European Union's habitat's protection program has had the valuable goal of preserving biodiversity and endangered species. However, it failed to inform the public of its goals and implications and to respect other viewpoints and interests. Implementation of the program was compromised by civic protests in several member states because of its perceived distributive and procedural injustice (see Paavola, 2004a). Thus we argue for “institutional ecological economics” as a promising cross-over between a new institutional economics and ecological economics. The learning process involved in making the cross-over real would assist ecological economics to take us further towards sustainable solutions for persistent ecological problems.