This special issue is concerned with the transboundary dimensions of governing common pool resources and formulating collective responses to cross-border environmental threats and crises. Our theoretical and conceptual focus is on transboundary environmental governance, understood to mean the full range of actors and institutions involved in shaping and implementing decisions about the environment across jurisdictions and property boundaries within, as well as between, nation-states (Miller et al., 2020). From a governance perspective, this definition is useful in directing attention toward the cross-border networks and power relations that determine how resources are differentially valued over time, what ecological knowledge becomes integrated into formal policy choices and who is included or excluded from environmental collaborations among spatially dispersed actors and institutions. In taking this multi-sectoral, multi-scalar and cross-border approach, we build upon the contributions of two earlier Environmental Policy and Governance special issues on polycentric governance (Heikkila et al., 2018) and water management across borders, scales and sectors (Ingold et al., 2016). Like these thematically allied collections, we explore the varied forms that transboundary environmental governance takes in (re)distributing environmental benefits and costs while mediating risks across scales and borders of overlapping resource interests.
From ARI organised workshop “Transboundary Environmental Governance in Southeast Asia”, 4 December 2020.
