“The Largest NGO in the World is in DC”
posted by Frank Pasquale
So claims Paul Hawken, referring to the current administration’s laissez-faire approach to environmental regulation. His new book suggests that thousands of smaller groups are going to have to take the government’s place, offering small-scale solutions for sustainability. Hawken’s remedy reminds me of the “new governance” theory that’s been hot in admin circles for the past two decades. NG emphasizes flexible and fluid relationships between public and private bodies to develop pragmatic policy responses to intractable problems.
I find a lot to admire in this work, but a recent interview with corporate environmental evangelist Ray Anderson highlights some limits to the approach:
Mr. Anderson is . . . proud to say that as a member of an advisory council at Georgia Tech, he persuaded the institution to modify its mission statement to proclaim the goal of “working for a sustainable society.” But there is a lot that even business cannot accomplish on its own, he said. For example, he said, the tax code is “perverse,” in that it puts heavy taxes on good things, like income and capital, and leaves a lot of bad things, like energy use, relatively unscathed. And economists typically underestimate the true cost of doing business because they exclude “externalities,” like environmental damage from pollution.
Anderson’s story of building a sustainable carpet manufacturer was a major highlight of the film The Corporation, and he makes a lot of sense here. As Carol Rose pointed out in The Several Futures of Property, some authoritative institution has to set some initial allocation of “rights to pollute,” etc. And someone has to come up with an agreed way of measuring externalities, a notoriously difficult process. If, as Ed Glaeser proposes, “American and European carbon taxes [should] provide funding that could be used to reward poorer countries for cutting emissions,” some government has to impose the tax.
Of course, the NG theorists realize these things. I just bring them up to chasten any optimism about “small-scale” solutions making the crucial contribution to solving environmental dilemmas. It’s no wonder why the “average building in the U.S. uses roughly a third more energy than its German counterpart;” our “federal government has yet to establish universal efficiency standards for buildings.”
May 22, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Environmental Law, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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Responses (5)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - May 22, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Just a couple of observations that may be germane to the topic: the “new governance” literature includes a lot of stuff that goes by different names: “responsive regulation,” “soft law,” “democratic experimentalism,” “collaborative governance,” and so on, and its ambition is far broader than environmental regulation (where its shortcomings are, indeed, conspicuous). In addition to the implied critique you raise here, there’s another provided by in Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Cesar A. Rodriguez-Garavito, eds., Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), as well as some relevant material in Richard P. Appelbaum and William I. Robinson, eds., Critical Globalization Studies (New York: Routledge, 2005). Globally speaking, the new governance approach is flaccid in light of such multilateral economic institutions as the IMF, World Bank and the WTO, as well as the growing power of transnational corporations.
C.Burg - May 23, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I don’t believe that the Paul Hawken suggests in Blessed Unrest that the 1000s of small not-for-profit organizations around the world take the place of government, but that they are the result of a universal disillusionment with the traditional forms of government. Indeed, they are the driving force of a new form of democracy around the world.
Shamim Ahmed - July 14, 2008 at 7:53 pm
The largest NGO is the world is BRAC
http://www.brac.net
Shamim Ahmed - July 14, 2008 at 7:54 pm
The largest NGO is the world is BRAC
http://www.brac.net
Shamim Ahmed - July 14, 2008 at 7:54 pm
The largest NGO is the world is BRAC
http://www.brac.net
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