Grassroots Global Governance: Local Watershed Management Experiments and the Evolution of Sustainable Development

ISBN-13: 9780190625733 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 272 str.

Craig M. Kauffman

Opis

When international agreements fail to solve global problems like climate change, transnational networks attempt to address them by implementing "global ideas" -- policies and best practices negotiated at the global level-locally around the world. Grassroots Global Governance not only explains why some efforts succeed and others fail, but also why the process of implementing global ideas locally causes these ideas to evolve. Drawing on nodal governance theory, the book shows how transnational actors' success in putting global ideas into practice depends on the framing and network capacity-building strategies they use to activate networks of grassroots actors influential in local social and policy arenas.

Grassroots actors neither accept nor reject global ideas as presented by outsiders. Instead, they negotiate whether and how to adapt them to fit local conditions. This contestation produces experimentation, and results in unique institutional applications of global ideas infused with local norms and practices. Grassroots actors ultimately guide this process due to their unique ability to provide the pressure needed to push the process forward. Experiments that endure are perceived as "successful," empowering those actors involved to activate transnational networks to scale up and diffuse innovative local governance models globally. These models carry local norms and practices to the international level where they challenge existing global approaches and stimulate new global governance institutions. By guiding the way global ideas evolve through local experimentation, grassroots actors reshape international actors' thinking, discourse, organizing, and the strategies they pursue globally. This makes them grassroots global governors. To demonstrate this, the book compares transnational efforts to implement local Integrated Watershed Management programs across Ecuador and shows how local experiments altered the global debate regarding sustainable development and stimulated a new global movement dedicated to changing the way sustainable development is practiced. In doing so, the book reveals the grassroots level as not merely the object of global governance, but rather a terrain where global governance is constructed.

Recenzje

Grassroots Global Governance will be of great interest to political scientists and other social scientists of environmental and natural resource policies and programs, who will find in grassroots global governance a provocative thesis, several new insights, and important methodological contributions. The book's novel framework and analysis opens numerous opportunities for the students of comparative and international environmental politics interested in theorizing how elements of national and subnational politics influence the ways in which specific actors engage with global ideas, policies, and programs.

O autorze

Craig M. Kauffman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon