Environmental Integration and Policy Implementation: Competing Governance Modes in Waste Management Decision Making

MÃ¥ns Nilsson, Mats Eklund and Sara Tyskeng
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Måns Nilsson: Stockholm Environment Institute, Kräftriket 2B, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden
Mats Eklund: Environmental Technology and Management, Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, SE-58183 Linköping, Sweden
Sara Tyskeng: Division of Environmental Strategies Research—fms, Department of Urban Studies, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

Environment and Planning C, 2009, vol. 27, issue 1, 1-18

Abstract: Research into environmental policy integration (EPI) has focused very much on coordination issues associated with the preparation of policies at national and international levels. We instead examine some challenges in implementing EPI at the local level. We look at legal and policy frameworks relating to environmental governance and actual waste management decision making in five Swedish cities. We observe an implementation gap between the high-level policy ambitions relating to environmental governance of the waste sector, as expressed in national policy frameworks, and the local-level decision-making procedures and outcomes. Several discrepancies are identified: between national waste policy and the local decision premises, between local waste planning and project decision making, between knowledge gathering and project decision making, and between the legal mechanism in the development consent process and the national environmental quality objectives framework. Our study indicates that the governance frameworks at different levels are quite different, and at least partly incompatible, which causes important coordination problems across levels. Sectoral developments towards an industrial marketisation of waste have rendered frameworks such as local waste plans obsolete. We also find that the more traditional and coercive forms of governing the sector, such as consent, bans, and taxes, are the ones that have steering power, whereas new procedures, such as management by objectives, lack sufficient institutional and cognitive support structures to be effective.

Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:27:y:2009:i:1:p:1-18

DOI: 10.1068/c0794j

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