Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article challenges the prevailing discourse on regional environmental governance in East Asia, emphasizing the risk of co‐optation among scholars and other experts through state authority in the transboundary co‐production of knowledge and action. By collecting first‐hand materials through the participatory observation of related events, organizing workshops, and conducting interviews, the research identified 15 transboundary cooperative networks in various fields of environmental sustainability issues and the involvement of 25 nonstate actors, including academics and practitioners. Using a comparative ethnographic approach for interpreting a nuanced sense of their experiences at the backstage of transboundary co‐production, the study found several strategies for boundary management to maintain credibility and legitimacy and to remain involved in transboundary co‐production with broad partners, including public and private actors. The nonstate actors have to be careful to engage in transboundary co‐production without eliminating any existing legitimacy of regional governance. In this sense, nonstate actors employ an ad‐hoc strategy of boundary management in determining a contingent situation surrounding the legitimacy of their initiatives and themselves and maintain their credibility to avoid co‐optation.

This article provides empirical evidence of the emergence of new private governance forms through three case studies: transboundary air pollution, green supply chain, and energy transition in Northeast Asia. This article also refers to private governance theories discussed in the context of global environmental governance. Consistent with the private authority theory, entrepreneurs with vast expertise and capacity to provide useful information and practices have emerged. They allow stakeholders to cooperate in regional environmental sustainability under the conditions of weak or no focal institutions and heterogeneous state preferences. This observation is consistent with the global trend of environmental governance, which is shifting from regulatory-based to goal-setting governance. As global partnership theory suggests, hybrid forms of private governance, including various local- to global-level public–private partnerships, emerge across the cases. However, these forms of governance are still in the embryonic stage, where their functions of private authority are not fully developed. These insights challenge the predominant view on the limited roles of nonstate actors in building regional environmental governance in Northeast Asia as discussed in the existing literature. (Pac Rev/GIGA)