The governance of sustainability and environmental policy is highly influenced by global interdependencies. The political science literature, however, too often over-simplifies the problem, suggesting that addressing global issues merely entails the up-scaling of governance, from the local or national to the global level. However, ‘globalization’ often involves interconnections of spatially distant localities and regions, implying very specific inter-regional sustainability challenges.
This notion of ‘interconnectedness’ implies a dual challenge for the state. As Meadowcroft (2002: 171) observes, “territorially rooted institutions are constantly being stretched to engage with issues which escape their jurisdiction or infiltrate their frontiers”. The governance of interconnectedness involves ‘coordinating’ semi-autonomous administrative ‘centers’ at various spatial levels. Yet often these centers ignore the impact of local action elsewhere. Hence, governance in interconnected systems is not merely about improving intra- and inter-governmental relations, it is about steering with limited control over causal chains. We attempt to sketch the impact of global patterns of interconnectedness on public authorities and their ability to govern towards sustainability – highlighting ‘infiltrations’ as well as jurisdictional gaps, using the empirical case of soy cultivation and trade between Brazil and Germany.
In this context, we address the linkages across the domains of sustainable policy and problematise governance of the ecological state across functional and spatial boundaries. Furthermore, we address the issue of legitimacy. To the extent that ‘the state’ become embedded in fluid multi-level governance systems addressing interconnected global phenomena, it may disconnect from defined constituencies in a democratic sense. Hence one could call for ‘the state’ to be brought back in in order to generate legitimate decisions even on such fluid phenomena as interconnectedness. We will thus address the old trade-off between effectiveness and democratic legitimacy from a structurally and historically novel perspective of the globally interconnected and ecological state searching its place.
