Environmental Governance and Sustainable Development

Standard dictionary definition of governance is mostly concerned with governance in its orthodox state-centered manifestation. For example, the oxford dictionary of English defines the noun governance as ‘the action or manner of governing a state, organization, etc.’ As a verb, governance manifests as ‘to govern’ which is defined as an activity to conduct the policy actions, and affairs of (a state, organization, or people) with authority to control, influence, or regulate (a person, action, or course of events)’.

 In short, and as a minimum in its traditional guise as per this definition, governance means the regulation of a state’s affairs and its people through political authority; a decidedly hierarchical orthodox Westphalia concept of governance.

These dictionary definitions, suggest that governance, at least from a politics perspective, means the collection of polity (institution), politics (processes), and policy (the content and result of polity and politics). In terms of these definitions, governance seems to focus on steering, a concept which some argue includes both governance and governing. 

Governance facilitates regulatory intervention and cooperation to protect and promote common interest and is mostly concerned with adjusting human behavior in an interactive setting where the achievement of common goals and solving of collective problems are primary concerns. 

The various factor involved are coerced and encouraged to change their behavior according to what is perceived to be legitimate, acceptable, and in their common interests. Because of its emphasis on adjusting human behavior, governance is therefore focused on human agency in the institutional context, which means that it has to do with people’s ability to choose and to make decision and to impose these decision on themselves and on other people, mostly by means of rule setting, rule intervention, rule application and rule enforcement.  

People could act individually to achieve a certain outcome or they could act collectively if it were in their common interest to do so. In fact in some instance the nature of governance problem or issue is such that people are forced to act together to address their problem. Environmental degradation is an example of a governance problem which forces people to take collective action, since a degraded environment, whether it is within the border of a particular country or spans a specific region and thus includes many countries affects everyone.

We and our Environment are at risk. Air, water and soil pollution; hazardous waste disposal; global warming; acid rain; and reduction of the ozone layer threaten the natural environment and endanger people’s health. The concerns about rising pollution in the environment are universal as well as national. 

The people and policies play crucial role in safeguarding the global environment but actions taken are not adequate. It is true that, international conferences and programmes since the 1970s have helped in developing environmental thinking and planning but results were not proportionate. 

In India the generous resources are not always put to optimum use as there is wide gap between precept and practice. One of the reasons for the absence of clear attributed to the multidisciplinary nature of Environment management, for which the individual and institution had not been equipped with. In the meanwhile, forests are vanishing, soils eroding, wildlife retreating, rain diminishing, and rivers thinning and silting. The environment daily becomes less and less habitable. 

It seems that we are in a slow-motion death. To top it all, there is population explosion both of humans and livestock. Suitable actions are urgently needed and Sustainable development is the need of the hour. Environment is the sum of all biotic and abiotic elements at a place. Directly or indirectly all human beings are influenced by these factors of the Environment.