Public-Private Partnerships for the Earth: Politics and Patterns of Hybrid Authority in the Multilateral System

Liliana B. Andonova
Additional contact information
Liliana B. Andonova: Liliana B. Andonova is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. She is author of Transnational Politics of the Environment: EU Integration and Environmental Policy in Eastern Europe (2004). Her current research focuses on international organizations and public-private partnerships, transnational governance, climate cooperation, and regional environmental politics in Europe. She has published in journals such Global Governance, Global Environmental Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Perspective, Comparative Political Studies. Andonova is co-founder of the section on Development and Environment of the Swiss Political Science Association; current collaborative activities include the Leverhulme Foundation Project on Transnational Climate Governance; the SNIS Project Negotiating Climate Change; and the Graduate Institute project with the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment on Climate Information for Decision Making.

Global Environmental Politics, 2010, vol. 10, issue 2, 25-53

Abstract: The article examines the politics and patterns of public-private partnerships for the environment in the multilateral system. It argues that two kinds of dynamics have contributed to the hybridization of environmental authority at the global level. On one hand, the fragmentation of environmental regimes and the parallel growth of non-state actors have resulted in structural pressures and opportunities for public-private collaboration. More significantly, however, international organizations have responded to the pluralization of global environmental politics selectively and acted as entrepreneurs of collaborative governance. The analysis uses a principal-agent perspective of international organizations to specify the conditions for organizational entrepreneurship of public-private partnerships. The theoretical propositions inform the comparative analysis of three "meta" partnership programs in the multilateral system: the Small Grants Program, the Prototype Carbon Fund, and the environmental portfolio of the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships. The study demonstrates that public-private partnerships represent neither a radical "powershift" from established institutions, nor are partnerships a marginal governance fad. The three partnership programs examined here emerged out of the mandates and expertise of their lead organizations and partners, but established and diffused new niches of environmental governance, particularly around community-based biodiversity management and climate-change related technology diffusion. (c) 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/glep.2010.10.2.25 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:10:y:2010:i:2:p:25-53

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().