Page 43 - Governing Congo Basin Forests in a Changing Climate • Olufunso Somorin

General Introduction and Research Setting
Congo Basin forests. The first definition given by Lemos and Agrawal (2006. p 298)
refers environmental governance as ‘the set of regulatory processes, mechanisms 1 and organizations through which political actors influence environmental actions
and outcomes’. The second definition given by Biermann and others (2010. p
279) considers earth system governance (which can be considered a synonym
for environmental governance) as ‘interrelated and increasingly integrated
system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks
at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to steer
societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change’. These definitions share two elements that are useful
for understanding the policy process of adaptation and mitigation strategies in
the Congo Basin forests. One, governance does not exist or operate in a political
vacuum – it is a subject of political actors, agents or actor-networks who operate
from local to global levels. How different agents conceive the idea of different
governance instruments and approaches to ‘steer’ the societies towards a
particular objective is a central analytical question of interest to many scholars
of environmental governance. Two, governance is underpinned by a system of
structures - a constellation of regulatory processes, formal and informal rules,
norms and rule-making systems - called institutions. Similar to policy agents,
institutions within the context of governance, also operate across scales: global
to local.
Closely related to the study of environmental governance is the concept of regime. Regimes refer to‘implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision- making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area’ (Krasner, 1982, p. 185). Most of the major issue areas within the environmental sector: climate change, biodiversity, desertification, and pollution, currently have international regimes formed in response to the need to coordinate behaviour among countries around these issue areas (Miles et al., 2001; Young, 2002). Many scholars in the field of regime theory have made important contribution to the research of regime effectiveness and regime interaction (Keohane, 1982; Haggard and Simmons, 1987; Rittberger, 1993; Haas et al., 1995; Raustalia, 1997). International environmental regimes have increasingly become an important empirical focus of regime literature (Visseren-Hamakers, 2009). Within the regime interaction or institutional interaction debate, scholars presume that (the effectiveness of) one regime or institution is affected by its
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