Democracy in Global Environmental Governance: Issues, Interests, and Actors in the Mekong and the Rhine

This paper presents a study of the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the International Commission for Protection of the Rhine (ICPR). The primary focus of this study is to analyze and explain how the issues, interests, and participation of local communities and non-state actors, such as industries and non-governmental organizations, are incorporated or not incorporated into transnational environmental governance in the MRC and ICPR regimes. Analyzing issues, interests and actors across three layers—local, national, and transnational—of the MRC and ICPR, this paper argues that the spirit of democracy can be enhanced in global environmental governance. Although states remain central players in the governance of global environmental resources, non-state actors have made striking advances both in the creation of environmental regimes and in efforts to make these regimes function effectively once they are in place. This phenomenon of increased participation of non-state actors and local communities is evident in the governance of the Mekong and Rhine River Basin.

The international system, in which nation-states are the key players, is going through a period of transformation. The phenomena of democratization, economic globalization, environmental degradation, and regional integration are creating a global transformation that is shaping the future of the nation-state, as well as the future of the international system. Describing the challenges of global transformation, Robert O. Keohane argues that the “key problem of world order now is to seek to devise institutional arrangements that are consistent both with key features of international relations and the new shape of domestic politics.” In his presidential address to the 2000 American Political Science Association Meeting, Keohane further asserted that “the effective governance of global issues will be dependent upon interstate cooperation and transnational networks.” Global transformation means that the traditional international regimes that were built by the power of states and interstate relations have become ineffective institutions, especially in regard to global environmental issues. In dealing with global environmental issues, global solutions “require local approaches when global environmental crisis results from both the aggregation of local resource decisions and from the impact of the global political economy on local communities.” This raises the question of whether transnational environmental regimes that are designed to foster interstate cooperation and transnational networks, such as the MRC and ICPR, are desirable or effective forms of governance for global environmental issues that are simultaneously linked to the local context.

Within these transnational regimes, there are three layers of governing institutions: local institutions composed of individuals and industries, national institutions in each member state composed of ministerial and municipal governments, and transnational institutions made up of national delegations at the transnational level and other non-state actors such as donors and non-governmental environmental organizations. These layers are institutionally interconnected in the governance process. Within each layer, issues, interests, and actors shape political processes. The presence of these issues, interests, and actors in each layer, as well as the strength of networks among them, creates a dynamic political process. I will define this whole process as the “governance process.” Though governance by governments of states has traditionally been the study of international affairs, governance nowadays is a phenomenon of managing and networking issues, interests, and actors to produce transparent actions in process and to achieve the stated goals of regimes. This paper, in an attempt to develop a model that explains how democracy can function in transnational environmental governance, examines issues, interests, and actors in MRC and ICPR regimes.

Part I lays out the theoretical puzzles that form the essence of this paper. Part II discusses the Issues, Interests, and Actors Network (IAN), employing insights from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University—Bloomington. Part III discusses the current states of the Mekong and the Rhine in brief. Part IV applies the IAN framework tool to break down and analyze governance processes mainly of the Rhine regimes. Finally, I conclude with remarks on democracy and transnational environmental governance in three layers of transnational regimes in the Rhine and in the Mekong River Basins.