19-21 September 2007, Jesus College, Oxford
Please Note: This event has finished. For information on our current events please see our Events, Conferences and Workshops listing.
Workshop Overview
The workshop will bring together students from Eastern Europe and Oxford to explore and discuss environmental governance mechanisms.
An eclectic group of speakers, representing perspectives from academia, government, business, civil society environmental consulting, religious groups and the media will offer their insights on the strengths and weaknesses of existing mechanisms along with ideas for how Eastern Europe might develop improved environmental governance to further the goal of sustainable societies.
Eastern European accession and candidate countries face both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is how to embrace the heavy environmental regulatory burden of the European Union without this flattening national traditions, initiatives, and innovation in environmental governance. The opportunity lies in the growing recognition among scholars, policy makers and business leaders that regulatory, participatory and market-based governance mechanism have important limitations. This recognition is creating 'spaces' to develop 3rd generation mechanisms that apply the best from what we have and add new features that galvanise public support to deliver meaningful and lasting results. In short, Eastern Europe has the opportunity to leap-frog into state-of-the-art environmental governance but this will require reflection, entrepreneurship and the support of new environmental governance institutions.
During the 3-day workshop students will work together to think through what the key features and principles of environmental governance in Eastern Europe should be. For instance, is there a need for more fundamental reform in how we conceptualise the aims and principles of environmental governance and redefine administrative rationality, or is it simply a question of adjusting the existing system? One thing most commentators seem to agree on is the need to re-engage citizens in the everyday practices of environmental management. The output of the workshop will be a student communiqué with suggestions or principles for achieving the ideal of effective and equitable environmental governance in Eastern Europe.
To provide a focus and entry point to these broader questions, the workshop will start by addressing four related questions:
- Whose voices (perspectives) should shape environmental governance in Eastern Europe?
- What are the relative roles of trans-national vs. national governance institutions in formulating environmental policy and management?
- Do institutions exist through which different voices can be heard and, if so, are they functioning well? If not, then how might they be created or strengthened?
- How can we create a strong public/social acceptability of environmental law and policy?