Environmental Governance

The basic idea of governance concerns how goals are achieved by businesses, governments, private individuals and environmental NGOs. Governance appears in the news most often in relation to corporate governance (how companies work internally) or with criticism of how the governments have been failing to effectively govern.

This section explains governance in terms of how governments and the wider public protect and interact with the environment – environmental governance. Environmental governance affects each of us because weak governance practices limits how effective policies can be. Policies are less effective when there are weak links between the responsible parties (for example, the government, the Environmental Protection Agency, and individual citizens).

Environmental governance is important in Ireland because, as noted in the Who Does What?  Page of the ENFO website, responsibility for the environment is shared by many different organisations. In many cases, there is no one structure of policy that covers everything – this was also noted in a Review of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Applying an environmental governance perspective helps to identify how things work (or could be improved). This section examines the different actors’ roles and the concept of integration. Examples are also given of case studies and links to videos about governance.    

From an environmental governance perspective, we look at the role of government, businesses, private individuals, and NGOs (non-governmental organisations).

 

Different Actors in Governance

From an environmental governance perspective, we look at the role of government, businesses, private individuals, and NGOs. All of these actors are interconnected, and their responsibilities overlap as shown in this figure.