Is Hierarchy Against Collaboration? The Effect of Bureaucratic Politics on Environmental Governance Outcomes

Contemporary environmental governance emphasises decentralised, collaborative approaches over traditional hierarchical strategies. Despite this emphasis, critical processes and resources that enable the benefits of more horizontal environmental governance strategies heavily depend upon the public bureaucrats executing the day-to-day activities of coordinating and implementing environmental policies. However, the role of public bureaucracies in shaping environmental governance outcomes requires further investigation. In this paper, I integrate the complex systems and bureaucratic politics literatures to investigate how bureaucratic politics and structure determine the effectiveness of collaborative environmental governance. The paper’s argument is that a professional and stable public sector plays a crucial role in realising and sustaining the benefits of environmental governance strategies over time. I propose that in countries with high politicisation and low bureaucratic professionalisation—as is the case of a large share of developing democracies—more horizontal and decentralised governance practices can lead to adverse environmental outcomes. As the bureaucracy provides an increasingly solid and impartial platform for policy design and implementation, governance renders better results. Nonetheless, at high levels of bureaucratic development, strengthening public sector professionalisation and stability might raise administrative burden and rigidity, diminishing the ability of the governance system to experiment and innovate. To test my claims, I employ dynamic panel methods to analyse a sample of up to 90 countries from 2002 to 2020. I create indices to measure a country’s approach to environmental governance and bureaucratic politicisation, professionalisation, and stability. I cluster countries in groups of low-, middle-, and high-level bureaucratic development to elicit the heterogenous short- and long-term effects of governance strategies on environmental outcomes. This research sheds light on the relationship between bureaucratic politics and environmental governance and offers insights into reimagining the public sector reforms required to capture the potential benefits of collaborative environmental governance.