Integration of environmental assessment with planning and policy-making on a regional scale: Towards an environmental governance agenda
Date
2016-07-20
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0000-0002-2150-019X
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Doctoral
Abstract
Regional environmental assessment sits delicately at the intersection of assessment, land use planning, and policy-making processes. The need for improved integration among these three domains has grown especially keen recently, given the shift in the past decade toward more landscape-wide and strategic forms of environmental assessment. Paradoxically, existing works have failed to engage its complex, multi-institutional dimensions and their implications for sustainable regional environmental governance. This thesis advances work in this area by assessing the state-of-research, evaluating the state of practice, and exploring key environmental governance concepts that could better facilitate cross-domain integration in regional environmental assessment. The research draws on a mixed-method approach that includes three key methods: an in-depth literature review; a web-based survey; and semi-structured interviews.
The results are presented in three manuscripts. The first manuscript details the dimensions, conceptual approaches, and a research agenda towards facilitating cross-domain integration in regional environmental assessment. The second manuscript develops a set of evaluative criteria to characterize and gauge the challenges related to cross-domain integration in regional environmental assessment as well as emergent opportunities for learning and multiple domain expertise in practice. The third manuscript reviews lessons learned from a mature regional environmental assessment case study in North America from an environmental governance perspective. Significant findings include that cross-domain integration is a phenomenon limited by institutional, transactional, and disciplinary factors, and that actors in regional environmental assessment need to explicitly recognize these divides in its design.
Further, the research indicates that cross-domain integration in regional environmental assessment processes can be better facilitated by adopting an environmental governance perspective that includes strong leadership; alignment of the decision-making scales with the analytical scales; operationalizing the principle of subsidiarity; bridging, bonding, and linking via social capital; and connecting assessments to high-level decision-making contexts within a region. Moving forward, there is a pressing need for explanatory theories to support cross-domain integration in regional environmental assessment, mainstreaming an adaptive context that anticipates uncertainty and failure into the process, and expanding the discourse to a holistic context that takes into consideration the distributional effects of regional environmental impacts on wide-ranging stakeholders, including non-institutional actors such as the local communities and civil society.
Description
Keywords
Regional environmental assessment, environmental governance, planning, policy-making, integration, institutional coordination, silo effects, evaluative framework
Citation
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
School of Environment and Sustainability
Program
Environment and Sustainability