Environmental Governance and Policy: Water

The related terms, "sustainable" and "sustainability" are popularly used to describe a wide variety of activities in the environment which are generally ecologically laudable but which may not be sustainable. The sustainable development agenda has introduced a number of principles to guide policy-making – for example, long-term planning horizons should be employed, equity implications should be considered, and opportunities for international cooperation should be sought. One of the principles that has been relatively easy to agree upon is environmental governance and policy (EGP).It refers to the “the sum of organizations, policy instruments, financing mechanisms, rules, procedures and norms that regulate the processes of global environmental protection. The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review of the EGP concept and how it has been studied and evaluated in practice, in order to identify the key reasons due to which we are not able to sustain our environment properly. Following a brief overview of EGP initiatives at the national and domestic level in India, three questions have guided the literature review. First, what is meant by EGP? The examination of a range of conceptions suggests that the two most important differences at the conceptual level are whether a weighting criterion giving ‘principled priority’ to environmental objectives or not, and whether it is seen as process or an output. . Second, how make EGP work to obtain sustainable environment? The review of both theoretical and practitioner-oriented literature suggests that variables and measures for EPG can be roughly divided into three broad and inter-related categories: normative. Leadership, overall policy framework, change of policy-making culture), organizational (e.g. integrating non-governmental organization, change of the budgeting process), and procedural factors (e.g. EGP strategies and action plans, regularly monitoring on plans, systematic impact assessment procedures). ). Thirdly, what criteria can be used to evaluate the degree of EGP? While there are a few different sets of procedural criteria for evaluating specific EGP measures, there is a lack of criteria for evaluating the degree of EGP in substantive policy outputs resulting from ‘normal’ sector policy-making. The paper is concluded by highlighting key conceptual choices and making recommendations for further EGP study, including more theory-driven and explorative approaches.