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This paper aims to understand and illustrate how and to what extent the increasing role and importance of information, informational processes, and information technologies have changed the environmental policies and politics of state institutions. More specifically, how have states tried to find answers to the dilemmas resulting from a growing centrality of informational processes in environmental governance? As such, the paper sets out the contours of what can be labeled informational governance on the environment.

Although the traditional approach in water resources management is to address water-related scarcity problems at the local or regional scale, some see water as a global resource with global drivers and impacts, supporting the argument for a global governance of water. If water is not appropriately priced, or if “poor water governance“ creates adverse incentives for resource use in countries that export “virtual water,“ then increased demand from the world market may lead to the overexploitation of water or increasing pollution. Is this reason enough for a global governance of regional water-scarcity problems? On which scale should water-management problems actually be addressed, and can global action compensate for local and regional governance failure? The paper argues that compensating globally for regional governance failure could cause “problems of fit“ and present severe downside risks.

Th is article discusses the politics of “transition” in Tunisia and locates Tunisia’s post-uprising justice initiatives within existing critical literature on global liberal governance and transitional justice. Methodologically, it treats transitional justice as a site of contestation, involving the exercise of domestic and transnational strategies of power as well as the oft en subversive agency of former and ongoing victims of state crime. By examining noninstitutionalized forms of contestation, this article seeks to understand and contextualize the fears expressed by some victims that the formal transitional justice process may be a diversion from, rather than bridge to, revolutionary aims.

This article presents the reframing of flood management practices in the light of social-ecological systems governance. It presents an exploratory theoretical analysis of social-ecological systems (SES) governance complemented by insights from case study analysis. It identifies a mismatch between the goals of the underlying ecosystem paradigms and their manifestation in management practice. The Polder Altenheim case study is an illustration of the consequences of flood management practices that do not match their underlying paradigm. The article recommends two institutional arrangements that will allow institutions to increase their capacity to co-evolve with SES dynamics: (a) institutional arrangements to ensure and enable openness in actor participation, and (b) institutional arrangements to enable updating of the management practices in response to SES dynamics.

Global governance, central to international rule-making, is rapidly evolving; thus, there is a need for a way to evaluate whether institutions have the capacity to address the problems of the contemporary era. Current methods of evaluating the democratic quality of contemporary governance are closely linked to legitimacy, about which there are competing definitional theories. This article uses a theoretical approach based around “new“ governance and the environmental policy arena to argue that contemporary governance is best understood as social-political interaction built on “participation as structure“ and “deliberation as process“, with the level of interaction ultimately determining legitimacy. It presents a new arrangement of the accepted attributes of “good“ governance using a set of principles, criteria and indicators, and relates these to the structures and processes of governance. The implications and application of the analytical framework are also discussed.

This article examines the concept and metaphor of fragmentation and its underlying assumptions in international law and global governance. After engaging with fragmentation historically, we analyze current debates through five conceptual perspectives. Fragmentation is oft en perceived as a process, a gradation, a process with a single direction, a prognosis, and normatively as either loss or liberation. These interlinked tendencies carry conceptual implications, such as making fragmentation apparently inevitable or provoking positive revaluations of fragmentation in terms of differentiation. Furthermore, the conceptual coupling of fragmentation with modernity enhances these effects with an historical thesis. Consequently, fragmentation appears as a ubiquitous and necessary, rather than contingent, feature of modern law—a conceptual implication that may hinder empirical work, and that merits critical analysis.

This article discusses how the Gawad Kalinga movement in the Philippines has operationalized good governance among its communities. This movement has not only provided opportunities for collaboration and cooperation between and among the three major governance actors, governments, business, and civil society, but more important, provided a framework for active citizen engagement in the process of improving their quality of life. Citizen participation is central not only in the theory of social quality but also in good governance. The paper argues argues that in order for reforms to be successful and sustainable, institutional reforms and active citizen engagement are necessary. These reforms are key to addressing some basic problems facing nations today, an alarming decline in trust in institutions and corruption. This paper is divided into three parts. The first part discusses good governance approaches and reform of public administration in relation to social quality theory. The second part discusses the tenets of citizenship and civil organization leadership within the context of good governance. The third part focuses on an emerging citizens’ movement in the Philippines—the Gawad Kalinga movement, which highlights the aspects of citizen engagement. The last part contains some concluding remarks drawn from the Gawad Kalinga experience as applied governance reform, and its implications for enhancing social quality.

English abstract: This article examines how the EU regulates the rights of migrants as a matter of regional-level governance, and with what implications. To expose the differential logics behind the governance of migrant statuses by the EU, we compare the regulation of 12 legal categories of migrants, across three dimensions of rights: civil, economic, and social. We find that while asylum seekers are unequivocally subject to the most conditional regulation of rights, at the other end of the hierarchy, EU citizens' rights are subject to caveats and ambiguity. The allocation of diverse statuses to migrants privileges different kinds of rights for different categories of migrants, and does not construct clear hierarchies of rights or statuses. This complex stratification of migrant rights highlights the important role of EU-level regulation in generating a migrant rights regime, with substantive implications for migrants entering and living in the European Union.

Spanish abstract: Este artículo examina cómo la Unión Europea (EU) regula los derechos de los migrantes como una cuestión de gobernanza a nivel regional, y sus consecuencias. Para exponer las lógicas diferenciales detrás de la gobernabilidad de los estatus migratorios de la UE, los autores comparan la regulación de doce categorías legales de migrantes, a través de tres dimensiones de derechos: civiles, económicos y sociales. Un notable hallazgo es que mientras los solicitantes de asilo son inequívocamente sujetos a la regulación más condicional de sus derechos, en el otro extremo de la jerarquía, el estatus de los derechos de los ciudadanos de la UE está supeditado a advertencias y ambigüedad. Para otras categorías de migrantes reguladas por la UE no se observaron jerarquías claras en ninguna de las dimensiones de los derechos, y la asignación de diversos estatutos a los inmigrantes es tal que instituye una compleja estratificación que privilegia diferentes tipos de derechos para las diferentes categorías de migrantes. La emergente estratificación compleja de los derechos de los migrantes en la gobernanza europea, tiene implicaciones más amplias para los derechos de los migrantes dada su articulación con la normatividad coexistente de los Estados miembros.

French abstract: Cet article examine comment l'UE réglemente les droits des migrants à l'échelle régionale et ce que cela implique. Afin d'exposer les logiques différentielles qui se situent derrière la gouvernance des statuts des migrants par l'UE, nous souhaitons ici comparer la réglementation de douze catégories légales de migrants, à travers trois dimensions des droits de l'homme: civils, économiques et sociaux. Nous constatons que les demandeurs d'asile sont sans conteste soumis à la réglementation la plus conditionnelle des droits l'homme tandis que, de l'autre côté de l'échelle, les droits de l'homme des citoyens de l'UE font l'objet de circonspection et d'ambiguïté. Pour ce qui est des autres catégories de migrants réglementées par l'UE, on n'observe de hiérarchies précises dans aucune des dimensions des droits de l'homme et la répartition des divers statuts de migrants représente une stratification complexe dans laquelle sont privilégiés les différents types de droits pour les différentes catégories de migrants. Cette stratification complexe des droits des migrants souligne le rôle important que joue la gouvernance de l'Union européenne dans la conception d'un régime des droits des migrants et les implications significatives qu'elle a sur les migrants qui entrent et vivent dans l'Union Européenne.