Framework Convention on Climate Change

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

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Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment

The theory of environmental policy

Most research on global governance has focused either on theoretical accounts of the overall phenomenon or on empirical studies of distinct institutions that serve to solve particular governance challenges. In this article we analyze instead “governance architectures,” defined as the overarching system of public and private institutions, principles, norms, regulations, decision-making procedures and organizations that are valid or active in a given issue area of world politics. We focus on one aspect that is turning into a major source of concern for scholars and policy-makers alike: the “fragmentation” of governance architectures in important policy domains. The article offers a typology of different degrees of fragmentation, which we describe as synergistic, cooperative, and conflictive fragmentation. We then systematically assess alternative hypotheses over the relative advantages and disadvantages of different degrees of fragmentation. We argue that moderate degrees of fragmentation may entail both significant costs and benefits, while higher degrees of fragmentation are likely to decrease the overall performance of a governance architecture. The article concludes with policy options on how high degrees of fragmentation could be reduced. Fragmentation is prevalent in particular in the current governance of climate change, which we have hence chosen as illustration for our discussion.

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The Fragmentation of Global Governance Architectures: A Framework for Analysis

. New Environmental Policy Instruments (NEPIs) are becoming increasingly attractive. From a global perspective, there has been a rapid diffusion of these market-based, voluntary or informational instruments. This article examines the spread of four different NEPIs – eco-labels, energy or carbon taxes, national environmental policy plans or strategies for sustainable development, and free-access-of-information (FAI) provisions. The adoption of NEPIs by national policy makers is not simply a reaction to newly emerging environmental problems or to real or perceived deficits of traditional command and control regulation, rather the use of NEPIs can also be ascribed to the inner dynamics of international processes of policy transfer or policy diffusion. These processes make it increasingly difficult for national policy makers to ignore new approaches in environmental policy that have already been put into practice in ‘forerunner’ countries.

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The diffusion of new environmental policy instruments

How do international processes, actors and institutions contribute to domestic policy change and cross-national policy convergence? Scholars in the fields of international relations and comparative politics have identified a wide array of convergence mechanisms operating at the international or transnational level. In order to categorize this wide array of possible causes of policy convergence, we propose a typology of three broad classes of mechanisms: (1) the co-operative harmonization of domestic practices by means of international legal agreements or supranational law; (2) the coercive imposition of political practices by means of economic, political or even military threat, intervention or conditionality; and (3) the interdependent but uncoordinated diffusion of practices by means of cross-national imitation, emulation or learning. We illustrate and substantiate this claim through the empirical analysis of the international spread of three different kinds of policy innovation: national envir...

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The international sources of policy convergence: explaining the spread of environmental policy innovations

National Environmental Policies

During the 1990s, a new regulatory pattern in domestic environmental policy making emerged. This pattern is largely a result of policy diffusion. In the absence of formal obligations, regulatory instruments that have been communicated internationally and were already being practiced elsewhere were voluntarily emulated and adopted by policy makers. While the international promotion of regulatory instruments often facilitated their diffusion, the instruments’ characteristics determined the extent and speed by which regulatory instruments spread across countries. The voluntary adoption of regulatory instruments cannot be exclusively explained by the rational motivation of policy makers to improve effectiveness. In addition, they were motivated by concerns of legitimacy and perceived pressure to conform with international norms.

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The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Instruments: The Making of a New International Environmental Regime:

The article gives an empirical overview of the international spread of 22 environmental policy innovations. The policy innovations examined in the article include administrative institutions (e.g. environmental ministries, scientific advisory bodies), laws (e.g. soil protection laws, packaging waste laws), instruments of environmental policy integration (e.g. national environmental policy plans, environmental impact assessment), energy taxes and eco-labels. On this empirical basis, recurring patterns in the global spread of environmental policy innovations are identified and linked to specific causal mechanisms through which this change occurs. In particular, the paper demonstrates how and to what extent non-obligatory diffusion, legal harmonization and coercive imposition matter as mechanisms of global environmental policy convergence. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Helge Jörgens

Papers

The diffusion of new environmental policy instruments

The international sources of policy convergence: explaining the spread of environmental policy innovations

National Environmental Policies

The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Instruments: The Making of a New International Environmental Regime:

International patterns of environmental policy change and convergence