The rational allocation of authority across government levels is crucial for the effective provision of environmental public goods. Based on China’s environmental policy texts (1973–2023) and case studies, this paper analyzes the division and adjustment of environmental governance powers. The findings reveal selective decentralization under the trend of centralization over the past fifty years in China’s environmental governance: (1) Legislative power has been conditionally devolved, to encourage distinctive local environmental legislation that is non-contradictory to central legislation; (2) Administrative power has transitioned from an ambiguous two-tier system to a three-category framework with attempts to quantify shared authorities. This recentralization aligns with the principle that national public goods are provided by the central government, while regional ones are supplied jointly; (3) Supervisory power has transitioned from local to vertical management, and its oversight has been elevated to a national initiative, receiving strong political endorsement.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 36 policymakers, experts and scholars, this paper employs a principal-agent framework to analyse China’s carbon market governance. The findings reveal that institutional misalignment between central and local priorities undermines market efficacy. While mechanisms like the Target Responsibility System (TRS) and environmental inspections aim to enforce compliance, fragmented incentives and passive central supervision exacerbate policy incoherence. Owing to competing mandates, local governments prioritize short-term GDP growth over the development of the carbon market, thereby relegating emissions trading to a peripheral status. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) dominate market participation, fulfilling compliance through political alignment but distorting price signals and marginalizing private actors. China’s hybrid governance model, which combines top-down controls with decentralized experimentation, generates systemic contradictions where weak enforcement, ritualistic compliance and data opacity persist as the dominance of SOEs colludes with local developmentalism to weaken carbon pricing. Overall, carbon market governance mechanisms have paradoxically incentivized regulated entities to prioritize developmental goals over improving carbon market infrastructure.

Mediation is characterised as a voluntary, consensual process, with self-determination a core value. The literature does, however, indicate a significant evolution in its role within society. Scholars contend that government-backed mediation exhibits capacity to ‘govern’ where the process has disputants reconfigure their selves and orientation to the conflict and align their behaviour with a guiding norm (or ideal). In this way, ‘mentalities’ can be moulded by the state to secure wider political aims. This paper provides empirically grounded insights into the efficacy of mediation-based governance in the context of environmental disputes. It analyses complaints submitted to National Contact Points (NCPs) by interested parties (eg individuals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) against multinational enterprises. NCPs are state-based non-judicial grievance mechanisms which seek to assist the resolution of alleged breaches of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. I argue that the empirical reality exposes tensions within mediation-based governance which present challenges and opportunities for it: (in)consistency in the state’s influence over negotiations, background levels of (dis)trust between disputants and (future-orientated) temporal focus. Until these are remedied, it will remain incapable of realising wider political aims, such as sustainable development. Private interests are too deeply ingrained and prevailing power structures too dominant.

Carbon credits have become increasingly important for supporting sustainable forest management and mitigating climate change. However, carbon projects can be challenging for local communities and smallholders to implement due to high expenses and complicated protocols. Forest projects often suffer from inefficiency, lack of transparency, and uneven benefit distribution. This study suggests a blockchain-based framework for aggregating forest carbon projects. This framework is the first in the forest sector to provide a reward mechanism for local communities or smallholders with a direct integration into an accredited registry protocol of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification. The system combines digital identities, smart contracts, and automated incentives to improve transparency, responsibility, and trust among stakeholders. Two types of tokens are introduced: (i) Carbon Coin represents verified carbon credits within the system; and (ii) Forest Coin functions as a security token used to proportionally distribute project revenue among stakeholders. The revenue distribution was demonstrated in scenarios of afforestation, reforestation, and conservation. In addition, a web application was developed so that users can monitor project details. Unlike most blockchain carbon platforms that focus on investment and trading, this framework addresses upstream challenges, prioritising equitable benefit-sharing. The framework supports project aggregation and prioritises community ownership, advancing inclusive access to the carbon market. This study demonstrates how technological advantages can be transferred to community-driven ecological conservation.

There are several examples of collective action/social movements for the environmental cause in India. The literature on environmental governance and environmental economics, identifies a significant role of the nature of environmental goods with respect to the twin classifying criteria of rivalry in consumption and excludability. The common pool resource and public good nature of environmental property require varied governance approaches. These economic theory-based classifications can be associated with diverse types of property rights regimes in the legal realm. By developing an analytic narrative, this article attempts to identify how common individuals related with environmental movements, identify some of these nuances with respect to nature of environmental goods and associated property rights regimes and develop strategies for improvements. This article utilises secondary qualitative data to examine the perspective of common individuals, groups, and leaders of environmental movements to infer theoretical learnings from a few cases in India.

Departing from simplistic portrayals of Chinese environmental governance as authoritarian, this study identifies a hybrid policy style that combines authoritarian environmentalism with policy experimentation, as evidenced in national park policy. A detailed examination of the North-East China Tiger and Leopard National Park shows that this hybrid increasingly tilts towards authoritarianism during implementation. To explain this dynamic, the study moves beyond the prevailing central–local lens and employs the tiao–kuai model, which captures the power relations among top leaders, central departments (tiao), and local governments (kuai). The analysis reveals that organizational interests centred on conservation have led central departments to expand their authority, marginalize local governments and narrow the space for experimentation, thereby suppressing community development demands. Even when top leaders intervene from above, the entrenched power structure of tiao and kuai still limits the effectiveness of corrective measures. The study contends that a hybrid policy style, supported by balanced power relations between tiao and kuai, is essential for reconciling conservation with development through environmental policy experimentation.

This article examines the idea of introducing a comprehensive reward program for whistleblowing on violations of environmental laws. The common criticism that rewards for external reporting considerably discourage employees from internal reporting is unjustified. This argument overlooks both legal practices of whistleblowing and prior research on social preferences. We argue that prosocial motivations are a crucial determinant of both internal and external reporting. Prosocial individuals are predominant in society. They respond to monetary incentives for external reporting while maintaining their commitment to internal reporting driven by prosocial motives. By combining a vignette-based survey and a measurement of social value orientation, we find that the effect size of prosociality on the likelihood of whistleblowing is comparable to, or greater than, the effect sizes of established predictors like demographic and contextual variables. We also find that the discouragement effect is less pronounced for prosocial individuals than for proself individuals. Based on these findings, we discuss how to design legal frameworks that balance the discouragement effect and the incentive effect of whistleblower rewards.

In response to its severe environmental problems, China's government is pursuing a national goal to “build an ecological civilization.” One approach used to theorize about China's environmental governance is environmental authoritarianism (EA). Drawing on work in political steering theory and the governmentality tradition, this paper addresses the “soft” side of EA by analysing the eco-civilization discourse on food and eating in policy documents and consumer guidebooks. It argues that China's EA works not only through coercion but also through citizen responsibilization. The emerging discourse of eco-civilization outlines a cultural nationalist programme focused on virtue and vice, in which consumer behaviour is morally charged. Consumers are expected to cultivate themselves into models of ecological morality to fulfil their civic duty and support the state's goal of building an ecological civilization.

Co-management regimes are institutional innovations that hold the promise of achieving sustainable common-pool resource governance. However, the transition to such institutional regimes in coastal resource systems has faced challenges in many countries. This article examines the processes and outcomes of such institutional changes in coastal fisheries in Ghana, where the transition to co-management was unsuccessful. Combining theoretical perspectives from legal pluralism in legal anthropology and ideational theories of institutional change within institutional economics, the paper uses process tracing to examine the role of ideology and historical institutional dynamics of the resource context in the institutionalization and failure of co-management arrangements for governing coastal fisheries. The study finds that ideological conflicts and historical legacies of legal pluralism hindered the practice and outcomes of coastal fisheries co-management in Ghana. The article argues for particular attention to the historical institutional dimensions and underlying worldviews of the resource context in institutional interventions for sustainability in coastal resource systems.

In its nearly 80-year history, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has shifted from a “whalers club” to an international governance body chiefly focused on the protection and conservation of global cetacean populations. Drawing on recent scholarship on extinction and its entanglements, this article compares two addresses given by whalers at IWC meetings 40 years apart to problematise the way whaling and its relation to extinction is conceptualised in international environmental governance. Guided by practice-oriented document analysis and recent theorisation of extinction as an entangled process, this article analyses the personal stakeholder testimonies from two different representatives of the North Slope whalers of Northern Alaska to the IWC – one in relation to the 1977 Alaska bowhead whaling controversy and the other in the context of the 2018 negotiations over streamlining Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling management and supporting greater flexibility and Indigenous autonomy. By comparing these two statements from very different points of history for the IWC and the governance of Indigenous whaling, this article illustrates some of the ongoing struggles for environmental governance to recognise extinction as a complex, multifaceted process that reverberates throughout human and more-than-human communities.

Decentralization is believed to ensure better environmental governance. However, recent studies have shown that some governments recentralize local enforcement to increase the effectiveness of policy implementation. Under what conditions is recentralization the better option for environmental enforcement? This study attempts to differentiate two possible mechanisms through which recentralization can deliver better environmental outcomes: curbing elite capture and enhancing local resources. In the context of recentralization reform and with a unique dataset of local investigations into China's environmental enforcement, we demonstrate that although decentralization has been successful from many perspectives, recentralizing local environmental enforcement can produce better outcomes for pollution reduction in China, by curbing local protectionism rather than enhancing local resources. Further qualitative analysis reveals why recentralization cannot necessarily enhance local resources and capacity, even though it is designed to do so.

This article systematically evaluates whether, how, and to what extent twelve prominent forestry and fisheries certification schemes address human rights in their standards. In line with the broader cross-fertilization of the fields of international human rights and environmental law and policy, our results demonstrate that human rights norms and considerations – primarily Indigenous, labour, and procedural rights – are increasingly reflected in the rulemaking of these schemes. At the same time, our analysis also demonstrates the mixed and underwhelming performance of certification standards in protecting human rights norms, including those relating to women, children, racialized and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, workers, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, and peasants and rural peoples. Through descriptive statistics, we also show that levels of human rights adherence vary significantly across schemes and that standards developed in the forestry sector tend to outperform those for fisheries. Our methodology and results add a new dimension to efforts to assess the stringency, equity, and legitimacy of private authority in the environmental field.

Herbicide resistance is often viewed as a complex problem in need of innovative management solutions. Because of the transboundary mobility of many weeds, resistance to herbicides is also viewed as a community-scale issue. Consequently, the idea of greater coordination among resource users—especially growers—is often promoted as a management approach. Recently, scholars have framed herbicide resistance as a commons problem in need of collective action. Specifically, social scientists have explored the utility of adopting bottom-up, community-based approaches to help solve the growing problem of herbicide resistance through a framework for interpreting the commons known as common pool resource theory. This article analyzes how herbicide resistance fits—and fails to fit—within common pool resource theory and offers an updated conceptual framework from which to build future work. We argue that the application of common pool resource theory to herbicide-resistance management is underdeveloped, and approaches based on this theory have shown little success. The relevance of common pool resource theory for informing herbicide-resistance management is less settled than existing scholarship has suggested, and other frameworks for approaching transboundary resource problems—such as co-production of knowledge and participatory action research—warrant consideration.

Over the course of 2021, several local councils across the island of Ireland introduced motions recognizing the ‘Rights of Nature’. To date, little research has been conducted into these nascent Rights of Nature movements, even though they raise important questions about the philosophical, cultural, political, and legal drivers in pursuing such rights. Similarly, much remains unclear as to the implications of such initiatives, both in their domestic context and for Rights of Nature movements around the world. This article contributes to addressing this gap by exploring these themes through an analysis of interviews with key stakeholders conducted across the island of Ireland in June 2022. In particular, it explores the impact of international movements, colonial legacies, cultural heritage, and years of inadequate environmental governance, in motivating local councils to pursue a Rights of Nature strategy.