The Environmental State is not a formal category, but a substantive one. It came up in the late 1960s/1970s, changed in character since then and we will have to see how long it will last and in what outlook. This paper argues that since the new Millennium a new period has emerged: the growing irrelevance of the environmental state as the political authority to cope with environmental agendas.
This growing irrelevance is has a number of frontiers. First, international collaboration of environmental states is showing its limitations, as the architecture of the international state-system needs new models of global environmental collaboration between states, but states fail to collectively agree and decide on that. Second, this becomes even more relevant now that environmentally relevant practices are increasingly determined by networks and flows that cross national borders and jurisdictions. Within these global networks states are one of the many participating categories. Third, environmental states are still held accountable by equivalent (state) entities as well as their domestic constituencies for environmental performance on their territories, but states loose relevance in ruling, regulating, detailing and prescribing these environmentally-relevant activities as these are determined beyond the state. Hence, the legitimacy of the environmental state is severely undermined by unfulfilled accountabilities.
Two questions will conclude the paper. First, where to look for complementing environmental authorities to the environmental state in fulfilling some of its main environmental tasks: environmental security, collective welfare by collective environmental goods provisioning), and fair distribution of environmental goods and bads (environmental justice)? Second, how to evaluate this analysis of losing environmental state authority in normative and strategic dimensions?
