Introduction: The Politics of Environmental. Accountability. Teresa Kramarz. University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Susan Park. The University of ...
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Introduction: The Politics of Environmental Accountability Teresa Kramarz University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Susan Park The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia KEY WORDS: accountability, environment, governance, politics
This special issue of Review of Policy Research centers on the question of accountability in environmental governance. The idea for this issue evolved from a series of workshops, panels, and roundtables we organized with scholars working on transparency and accountability during the 2014 and 2015 annual meetings of the International Studies Association and Earth System Governance Conference. We asked participants to consider a paradox: while there has been a significant increase in mechanisms of accountability in environmental governance, most global indicators show that the environment continues to deteriorate. As a group, this led us to question the definition and value of accountability for more effective governance. It soon became evident that academic and policy discussions on accountability have been conducted without much conceptual scrutiny or systematic analysis of its deployment in environmental governance. This special issue is a step toward filling that gap. Although our contributors focus on the environment as a specific issue area, the broad questions we raise in this introduction and in the empirical cases that follow are applicable beyond this policy arena. Accountability refers to the obligation that authoritative actors have to provide justification for their actions, and the right of those affected to evaluate and sanction those actions (Grant & Keohane, 2005). Actors in global governance are assessed in terms of accountability for the process of decision making, as well as the outcomes of those decisions (Scharpf, 1999; Schmidt, 2013). Input-oriented accountability can be a means to ensure inclusive governance and normally implies access to information, transparency of decision making, appropriate representation of all stakeholders, and adequate channels of participation. Alternatively output-oriented accountability refers to assessments over whether rule makers adequately use the resources at their disposal for addressing the end goal (Ebrahim, 2003). This is a more “common characterization of accountability as oversight of operations, or accounting for results or impacts” (Davenport & Low, 2013, pp. 88–89). Output-oriented accounting can be a means to effective problem solving. However, rule makers and takers need to agree on the particular nature of the problem, its cause-effect linkages, and who is affected, in order to design accountability means that will meet desired ends. Hence, at first sight and in its ideal form, accountability can enable due processes and tangible outputs that address specific problems. To the extent that these are both desirable features for global governance, accountability constitutes an important subject of research. However, to complement Grant and Keohane, we argue that accountability needs to be conceptualized more profoundly as a reflection of choices within relationships of obligation between decision makers and takers. Review of Policy Research, Volume 34, Number 1 (2017) 10.1111/ropr.12223 C 2017 Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved. V
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Accountability mechanisms reflect a way of achieving particular sets of goals. Sometimes, these goals are negotiated between stakeholders and other times, depending on the constellation of actors and authority in a given issue area, these goals are imposed. This is why this special issue focuses on the politics of choice inherent in any relationship of accountability. We highlight the following two propositions regarding the global politics of environmental accountability. First, we argue that an important, yet overlooked feature of accountability rests on a distinction between means and ends. Second, accountability is at its core a relational compact based on expectations of rights and responsibilities. On the means-ends distinction, the literature on accountability overwhelmingly emphasizes accountability as an end in itself often without raising questions about the normative underpinnings of accountability mechanisms. Calls for greater accountability in the system largely ignore discussing the various purposes of accountability for different stakeholders (Kramarz & Park, 2016). This gap in research and practice undermines the possibility of identifying and discussing the role of choice and purpose that accountability mechanisms are set up to serve (Stein, 2002). We argue that the form of accountability is always a means to reflect a choice of one or more goals over others. Accountability mechanisms are deployed as a means to specific ends, which need to be identified and continuously re-evaluated if accountability is to produce not just a lot of inputs but also tangible environmental outputs. To empirically assess the means and ends of accountability, Jerry Mashaw (2006) sets forth six questions that our contributors examine wholly or in part: Who is being held to account? To whom is accountability owed? For what are they accountable? What process demonstrates accountability? What standards does an agent use to demonstrate accountability? What happens when the agent fails to meet these standards? (p. 118). In tackling the connection between the means and the ends of accountability, Jonathan Rosenberg (2017) examines the effects of privatization on the long chains of accountability from bilateral aid agencies to recipient states. The article focuses on the gaps that emerge when public development assistance agencies (DAAs) outsource the execution of sustainable development projects to the private sector. The author analyzes a USAID case of private contracting in Grenada following Hurricane Ivan. For this author, the available means of accountability are contracts between principals and agents. However, the purpose of accountability for the DAA is to induce for-profit actors to further the long-term environmental outcomes of their interventions, while also delivering on immediate implementation of specific activities in fulfillment of their contractual obligations. This article highlights the gap between the available accountability means and the desired ends, particularly where the private contractor is able to fulfill its financial and economic accountability while environmental metrics remain beyond the contract reporting cycle. Sustainable development is omitted from this form of accountability that requires contractual obligations with measurable time-specific outputs. Teresa Kramarz, David Cosolo, and Alejandro Rossi (2017) examine the increasing trend of judicial activism in environmental policy making, and the impact this has on democratic accountability. They analyze the case of the Argentine Supreme Court and the managerial role it assumed in attempting to clean up one of the most polluted watersheds in the world. Domestic constituencies used the Court as a means to achieve environmental accountability when other branches of
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government failed to deliver results. Yet their finding is that when the Supreme Court becomes involved in policy making, it distorts the horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms that were designed to avoid monopolies of power and protest through elections. The result is that attempts to work around traditional but ineffectual means of providing environmental outputs have not succeeded in holding actors to account for environmental devastation. Here, then, is an example of an innovative means to establish accountability for environmental harm in a domestic setting, but one that theoretically and empirically fails to deliver on its promise. Craig Johnson’s (2017) article examines how criteria for governing climate change adaptation have been constructed by unpacking the politics behind different choices and preferences. Specifically, he identifies whether there are accountability “means” for upholding climate regime norms of responsibility, liability, and fairness. As climate adaptation increasingly turns toward evaluating acceptable levels of environmental risk, the gaps between effective international institutional structures and the provision of accountability are exposed. Accountability for upholding important norms of the climate regime is thus revealed as fundamentally lacking. Whereas the United Nations Framework Convention’s Mechanism on Loss and Damage could provide an important means for setting out the norms that govern the allocation of responsibility, he argues that it has become a technocratic tool to collect and disseminate data. All of the articles discussed thus far highlight how attempts to address complex environmental problems remain beyond the means used to grapple with them. Better tying the tools of accountability to their professed ends would go some way to adequately address the environmental devastation evidenced at the local, national, and global levels. As each contributor shows, however, there are specific reasons as to why actors use these tools of accountability as their preferred means of action. Higher order preferences regarding commitments to fairness in the case of the UNFCCC’s Loss and Damage mechanism lose out to multilateral and bureaucratic procedures over how to implement acceptable levels of loss and recompense for damage. Enacting accountability for executive branch functions through the judiciary in Argentina also demonstrates a failure to recognize the latter’s own lack of capacity. In the case of USAID a commitment to private sector outsourcing diminishes any chance of capturing the impact on the environment. The means-ends problematic is also evident in Oscar Widerberg and Philipp Pattberg’s (2017) article on tracing accountability for the climate change regime. Focusing on how private actors attempt to demonstrate their commitments to reducing their carbon use reveals the multiplicity of metrics private actors invoke as evidence of accountability. This begins to underscore the complexity of developing accountability mechanisms in the climate regime that transcend public/private, hierarchical/horizontal, and traditional roles of answerability; such as the government to the public, corporate actors to the government, and NGOs to their supporters. This contribution also speaks to the second proposition of this special issue, which is the relational dimension of accountability. Accountability provides a means for those to whom accountability is owed to seek answers from authoritative agents, and for these agents to provide justification for their actions (Mulgan, 2000).
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Environmental governance often lacks a regulatory entity that requires actors be held to account for environmental harm; there can also exist resistance from corporate, NGOs, and multilateral and even state actors to acknowledge the legitimacy of the need to be held environmentally accountable (Mason, 2005). Focusing on accountability relationships opens the door for questioning who constitutes a legitimate agent who can demand accounting, and if the environment or unborn generations can be deemed such agents (Gray, Owen, & Adams, 1996). In the context of an emerging polycentric climate governance regime, Widerberg and Pattberg (2017) identify three main challenges for accountability: the overlap between institutions, questions around which actors participate, and the blurred lines of responsibility among principals and agents. Accountability relationships increasingly begin to operate in multiple multilevel contexts, creating overlapping institutions. These complex institutional relationships emerge from experimentation between actors who are making rules inside and outside the state. This is raising questions as to who is participating at what level and with what impact. Finally, many types of new governance arrangements are hybrid in nature, such as multistakeholder initiatives, and these are difficult to assess using traditional principal-agent models of accountability. For these authors, accountability is a means––not yet attained in global environmental governance––to monitor the representation of important groups and to devise ways to make actors more clearly answerable for reducing carbon emissions. The remaining contributors all identify relationships between the accountability of decision makers and takers. Our authors distinguish from whom and to whom accountability is given and taken, for what and how? Accountability relationships can be horizontally, downwardly, or upwardly directed between agents (Ebrahim, 2003). These constitute important dimensions of obligation that must be investigated rather than taken for granted based on pronouncements or a priori assumptions. Jonathan Kuyper, Karin B€ackstrand, and Heike Schroeder (2017) analyze the dynamics of representation among nonstate actor constituencies in the UNFCCC. The authors question how representatives of the constituencies hold each other to account, advancing the literature on how nonstate actors feed into the formal multilateral structure of the climate regime. They argue that nonstate actors engage in a process of exit, voice, and loyalty within each constituency. The purpose of accountability for these actors is to discipline each other and their focal point to represent and advance the diverse institutional interests of constituency members before the Secretariat. This provides crucial insight into the operation of inputoriented accountability for the key negotiating body of the climate regime. Cristina Balboa’s (2017) article highlights the competing priorities inherent in this relational dimension of accountability by focusing on the importance of environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) for addressing environmental problems. The rise of ENGOs as major players in global climate governance is not unproblematic. She examines the impossible choice that ENGOs face in having to account to myriad stakeholders (creating Multiple Accountability Disorder, MAD) or its own mission and survival (creating Single Accountability Disorder, SAD). By attempting to be fully accountable to multiple stakeholders, ENGOs may compromise their own survival and their ability to achieve environmental protection (air, land, water, species). This is because being accountable to multiple actors takes the
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organization away from its overarching priority to prevent or mitigate environmental degradation. This is heightened by the fact that different actors that demand the ENGO be accountable have different means for achieving environmental ends themselves. Accounting for its own mission or survival might achieve environmental gains, but at the risk of defying or denying the demands of other actors. ENGOs, unlike many other nonstate actors, are in this accountability dilemma. They have to articulate and hold themselves to account for their vision of sustainability compared with their stakeholders and competitors, as the environment is a nonhuman stakeholder that cannot demand accountability in its own right. Conclusion We argue that accountability should be conceived as a means, rather than as an end in itself in environmental governance. The collection of articles in this issue demonstrates how accountability implicitly or explicitly serves as a tool to promote particular choices in governance regarding who is an authority, to whom they are answerable, and for what outputs. Since accountability is a reflective surface of the underlying politics of choice that shape governance, we caution that the presence or absence of accountability is neither a necessary or sufficient means to guarantee due process or effective problem solving. Instead, accountability is a fruitful object of study as the platform where governance choices are enacted and institutionalized through relationships of obligation. In this collection, we highlight how accountability mechanisms produce or reproduce particular purposes that become authoritative over other, perhaps equally compelling purposes. Accountability is also a relational concept. Conceptually differentiating the perspectives of accountability among those who demand answers versus those who are responsible for providing them allows us to further parse the locus of action and purpose building.
About the Authors Teresa Kramarz is Assistant Professor and Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs in the University of Toronto. She co-directs with Susan Park, University of Sydney, the Accountability in Global Environmental Governance Task Force. Dr. Kramarz has extensive professional experience in environmental monitoring, evaluation, and accountability of United Nations Development Programme and World Bank projects in Latin America. Her most recent publications appear in Global Environmental Politics, Environmental Policy and Governance, and Review of Policy Research. Susan Park is an Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Sydney and co-director with Teresa Kramarz of the Accountability in Global Environmental Governance Task Force. She has published in numerous journals, most recently in Global Environmental Politics. Her book The World Bank Group and Environmentalists: Changing International Organisation Identities was published by Manchester University Press in 2010.
References Balboa, C. (2017). Mission interference: How competition confounds accountability for environmental nongovernmental organizations. Review of Policy Research, 34, 110–131.
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Davenport, E., & Low, W. (2013). From trust to compliance: Accountability in the fair trade movement. Social Enterprise Journal, 9(1), 88–101. Ebrahim, A. (2003). Accountability in practice: Mechanisms for NGOs. World Development, 31(5), 813–829. Grant, R. W., & Keohane, R. O. (2005). Accountability and abuses of power in world politics. American Political Science Review, 99(1), 29–43. Gray, R., Owen, D., & Adams, C. (1996). Accounting & accountability: Changes and challenges in corporate social and environmental reporting. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Prentice Hall. Johnson, C. A. (2017). Holding Polluting countries to account for climate change: Is “loss and damage” up to the task? Review of Policy Research, 34, 50–67. Kramarz, T., & Park, S. (2016). Accountability in global environmental governance: A meaningful tool for action? Global Environmental Politics, 16(2), 1–21. Kramarz, K., Cosolo, D., & Rossi, A. (2017). Judicialization of environmental policy and the crisis of democratic accountability. Review of Policy Research, 34, 31–49. Kuyper, J., B€ackstrand, K., & Schroeder, H. (2016). Institutional accountability of nonstate actors in the UNFCCC: Exit, voice, and loyalty. Review of Policy Research, 34, 88–109. Mashaw, J. (2006). Accountability in institutional design: Some thoughts on the grammar of governance. In M. D. Dowdle (Ed.), Public accountability: Designs, dilemmas and experiences (pp. 115–156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mason, M. (2005). The new accountability: Environmental responsibility across borders. London: Earthscan. Mulgan, R. (2000). “Accountability”: An ever-expanding concept? Public Administration, 78(3), 555–573. Rosenberg, J. (2017). More than a question of agency: Privatized project implementation, accountabilities, and global environmental governance. Review of Policy Research, 34, 10–30. Scharpf, F. W. (1999). Governing in Europe: Effective and democratic? New York: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, V. A. (2013). Democracy and legitimacy in the European Union revisited: Input, output and “throughput.” Political Studies, 61(1), 2–22. Stein, J. G. (2002). The cult of efficiency. Toronto, Ontario: House of Anansi Press. Widerberg, O., & Pattberg, P. (2017). Accountability challenges in the transnational regime complex for climate change. Review of Policy Research, 34, 68–87.
