governance recommendations table
return to Governance For Sustainability


 Opening Up Access Enabling Civil Society
 Greening Corporate Environmental Performance
 Encouraging Decentralization that Supports
Sustainability
 Better Global Environmental Governance
 More Transparent Finance
Government agencies can:
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Industry trade groups can:
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Consumers and shareholders can:
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Media outlets can:
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Donor agencies can:
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International environmental treaties and trade agreements can:
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Multilateral Development Banks can:
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Export Credit Agencies can:
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Both Multilateral Development Banks and Export Credit Agencies can:
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The World Trade Organization can:
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Private International Financial Institutions can:
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Opening Up Access

Government agencies can:
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■ Support independent assessment and monitoring of government performance in applying the access principles.
■ Continue efforts to establish the legal framework for access, and to elaborate these laws in well-defined administrative procedures.
■ Specify which classes of information are in the public domain and which are confidential, in order to reduce administrative discretion in releasing information.
■ Introduce common reporting standards for industrial facilities and procedures for public access to facility-level reports.
■ Establish mechanisms for public notice and comment on projects and policies beyond the narrowly defined “environmental” arena.
■ Extend participation procedures into the earliest phases of the decision-making cycle, as well as into the implementation and review stages.
■ Broaden the interpretation of “the public” and “legal standing” to allow legal challenges by public interest groups and citizens who may not be able to prove direct harm.
■ Invest in training judges and other officials to ensure that they are familiar with rapidly changing laws related to environmental rights.
■ Create favorable conditions for the formation and activities of public interest groups and media outlets.
■ Implement their commitments to improved access under the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21, and the WSSD Plan of Implementation, as well as under related provisions in global environmental agreements and regional instruments such as the Aarhus Convention.

Civil society organizations
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■ Undertake independent assessments and regular monitoring using a framework of governance indicators such as The Access Initiative framework.
■ Collaborate with government and other stakeholders to identify gaps in national practices of access and to set priorities for action.
■ Stimulate and channel public demand for access to information, participation, and justice.
■ Build their own capacity, and the capacity of the communities they live in, to access the public participation system.

Media outlets can:
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■ Investigate and call attention to lapses in performance by governments in providing access.
■ Provide high-quality coverage of environmental issues and a forum for diverse views on environmental decisions.

Donor agencies can:
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■ Support continued improvement of an indicator framework for national assessments, and mechanisms for exchange of best practices.
■ Provide financial, institutional, and political support for development of national public participation systems.
■ Support capacity building on both the “demand” and “supply” sides.
■ Model best practices of information disclosure, participation, and accountability in their own operations.

International environmental treaties and trade agreements can:
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■ Incorporate provisions mandating best practices of information disclosure, participation, and accountability with regard to obligations carried out under the treaty or agreement, and in on-going deliberations on the treaty.

Enabling Civil Society

Government agencies can:
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■ Enact or strengthen freedoms of expression and association.
■ Eliminate or simplify laws governing NGOs and other civic groups, including removing barriers to registration, eliminating burdensome reporting requirements, and dropping limits on NGO longevity.
■ Remove restrictions on Internet and press freedoms.

Civil society organizations can:
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■ Embrace the same policies of accountability and transparency that they advocate for governments and corporations, including openness about their funding, operations, purposes, goals, and accomplishments.
■ Participate in NGO networks to increase communication among themselves and share successful practices.
■ Join in consensus-building coalitions of NGOs that maximize their voice and increase their influence in public decision-making and multi-stakeholder processes.
■ Foster greater contact with and accountability to the communities they serve through public consultations, newsletters, and formal progress reports.
■ Work with the media to encourage more and higher quality environmental reporting, including the presentation of issues in greater depth, and from more perspectives.

Donor agencies can:
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■ Increase NGO access to communications tools such as the Internet as a source of environmental empowerment.
■ Support capacity building for NGOs, with particular attention to developing the ability of smaller groups to fundraise, build coalitions, and develop relationships at the grassroots level.

Greening Corporate Environmental Performance

Corporations can:
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■ Embrace voluntary environmental disclosure practices, including environmental auditing and sustainability reporting. Using standardized formats such as the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines can increase the credibility of such reporting and its usefulness to shareholders, communities, and the companies themselves.
■ Work to quantify the financial benefits (as opposed to just the costs) of corporate environmental programs, thus advancing the business rationale for these programs to company managers and shareholders.
■ Establish company liaisons or ombudsmen to the communities in which they are located in order to respond to local concerns.
■ Encourage their chains of suppliers and distributors to adopt sustainable manufacturing or extraction practices, green disclosure practices, and sensitivity to community concerns.
■ Pursue corporate philanthropy that promotes employee awareness of the environment-business connection, builds employee capacity for better environmental choices, or mitigates environmental impacts caused by their business activities.

Industry trade groups can:
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■ Support laws and regulations that reward companies for superior environmental performance.
■ Formulate industry guidelines and codes of conduct—including enforcement mechanisms and training programs to increase compliance—to encourage good environmental practices among their members.
■ Actively participate in and endorse environmental labeling and certification schemes that increase consumer information and choice.
■ Promote industry-wide disclosure, transparency, and community-engagement practices.
■ Participate in civil society efforts to forge consensus around new corporate performance norms.

Governments can:
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■ Require companies to publicly report on emissions in key areas by establishing Pollutant Release and Transfer Registries (PRTRs), or publicly rate companies’ pollution mitigation efforts in order to highlight their environmental performance.
■ Require companies to disclose environmental liabilities such as hazardous material use, toxic waste disposal, or environmental restoration costs (for extractive industries) to make it easier for investors to assess a company’s potential environmental risks and thus increase incentives for improved performance.
■ Send the right economic signals to companies by removing or modifying government subsidies for water, fishing, energy exploitation, mining, pesticide use, and other environmentally harmful activities.

Consumers and shareholders can:
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■ Make use of environmental labels and certifications to purchase products whose harvesting, extraction, manufacture, or disposal is environmentally sound, thus rewarding good corporate environmental performance.
■ Introduce resolutions at shareholder meetings to raise the profile of environmental concerns among top company management and encourage environment-friendly policies and investments.

NGOs can:
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■ Act as industry watchdogs by compiling, analyzing, and publicizing corporate environmental performance data.
■ Initiate certification and labeling schemes to guide consumer purchase of sustainably manufactured, harvested, or extracted products.
■ In concert with industry, detail best practices necessary to achieve environmentally benign products or to receive green product certification.
■ Partner with corporations to identify targets for corporate environmental philanthropy and to design ecosystemfriendly land management practices on corporate manufacturing and office sites.

Encouraging Decentralization that Supports Sustainability


National decision-makers can:
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■ Create local elected bodies, and give them a mandate to define local natural resource priorities within the state’s overall framework for sustainable development.
■ Strengthen the local capacity for governance and natural resource management by providing training for local government staff in key skills such as budgeting, revenue collection, conducting town meetings and other local consultations, land use planning, and mapping and cataloging the local environmental resource base.
■ Reorient state extension agencies to provide services to local people in response to needs and concerns articulated directly by the people and their local representatives, or restructure them to be accountable to local elected authorities.
■ Create positive incentives for good local government performance and sound resource management, such as awards for innovative programs and targeted budget allocations for demonstrated delivery of services.
■ Require local elected and administrative authorities to practice transparency in their operations and budgeting procedures.
■ Educate citizens on their right to be represented, the services they should expect from local authorities, their responsibility to participate in local decisions, and how they can hold local officials accountable.
■ Develop and apply standardized measures of service delivery and community satisfaction to assess local governance statewide and help local governments identify gaps in their performance.
■ Increase the voice of traditionally marginalized groups, such as women and the poor. This may include reserving seats in local decision-making bodies or creating separate opportunities to solicit their input.
■ Ensure that the authority over resources exists at the appropriate ecosystem level (e.g., the watershed) so that the impacts of different land uses and development activities can be assessed and managed in an integrated manner. If this results in the formation of a new institution, such as a regional river basin authority, ensure that this institution is accountable to governments at different levels, including the local level.
■ Institute minimum environmental standards to guide local resource decisions and to make sure these decisions conform to statewide environmental laws.
■ Strengthen or accelerate the creation of a justice system that is independent and accessible to the general public.
■ Make sure contracts for privatizing environmental services such as water provision also contain clauses conferring the responsibility to meet minimum environmental standards, to work within an accepted framework of sustainable development, and to deliver services equitably. Contracts awarding logging, mining, or grazing concessions should contain similar commitments to environmental stewardship and equitable service.

Local officials can:
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■ Commit to transparency in operations and budgeting, and make sure that opportunities for public participation are well-advertised.
■ Identify which households or groups in the community find it difficult to participate in the consultative process and make special efforts to facilitate their participation.
■ Collaborate with adjacent jurisdictions to manage transboundary ecosystems.

Communities can:
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■ Demand accountability from their local government representatives.
■ Mobilize to articulate common goals for local development.
■ Enlist NGOs or community groups to carry out independent monitoring of nearby forest, mining, and other concessions to discourage corruption and increase the community’s voice in how these concessions are managed.
■ Promote positive exchange with other communities regarding natural resource issues of common concern.

Better Global Environmental Governance

Governments can:
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■ Remember the poverty-environment link. Prioritize environmental activities that restore or mitigate the loss of resources that the poor most depend on, such as in rural areas, on marginal lands, or in informal periurban settlements. Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals will represent a key milestone in realizing sustainable and equitable development.
■ Commit to comprehensive monitoring. Enhance the capacity for global environmental monitoring and scientific assessment of environmental trends, including their
interlinkages and probable impacts on ecosystems as well as on national food supplies, economies, and settlements.
■ Implement the “Precautionary Principle.” Reaffirm the “Precautionary Principle” of applying caution to environmental decisions where environmental risks are uncertain, but carry potentially large costs. Commit to applying this approach when configuring national development plans and crafting international environmental treaties.
■ Adopt an “Ecosystem Approach.” Use ecosystems as the fundamental unit of natural resource management and governance at the local, regional, national, and international levels. Incorporate ecosystem thinking—framing threats and responses in terms of how they affect the delivery of ecosystem goods and services—into negotiations on current and future environmental treaties.
■ Strengthen and harmonize environmental agreements. Strengthen international environmental agreements (treaties and protocols) with deadlines for significant progress, robust enforcement mechanisms to encourage compliance, competent monitoring protocols to assess progress, and binding mechanisms for dispute resolution. Harmonize and coordinate the action plans of these treaties and streamline their administration. Ensure that trade and environmental agreements are mutually supportive.
■ Enable institutional leadership. Provide the United Nations Environment Programme with a clearer and stronger framework for its current coordinating role and adequate funding to pursue this role. Reorient the CSD to serve as a monitoring and accountability mechanism for government commitments.
■ Build and support regional mechanisms. Support existing regional institutions or design and implement new regional mechanisms such as river basin authorities, and, where appropriate, devolve monitoring and implementation functions to such regional bodies.
■ Make decision-making inclusive. Strengthen multi-stakeholder processes—where stakeholders of all stripes are included in decision processes—so that civil society groups can effectively participate at the international level in setting environmental priorities, specifying the terms and timelines for international action, and crafting environmental treaties.
■ Hold business and industry accountable. Promote corporate responsibility and accountability by developing andimplementing intergovernmental agreements, international initiatives, public-private partnerships, and appropriate national regulations.
■ Pursue new partnerships. Join in partnerships with civil society groups and businesses to achieve well-defined environmental objectives. Such partnerships should magnify the efforts of governments, rather than substitute for a lack of government commitment.

NGOs can:
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■ Provide objective information. Advise governments on environmental issues by identifying, assessing, and disseminating scientific and other relevant information.
■ Build coalitions. Pursue coalitions with each other and with like-minded stakeholders to increase their leverage on governments. Priority attention should be given to expanding alliances with NGOs from developing countries and with social movements engaged in global justice work worldwide. In appropriate cases, as in the case of climate change, working with business and industry on a common objective can yield enormous political and practical benefits.

More Transparent Finance

Multilateral Development Banks can:
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■ Articulate information disclosure rules for project planning documents and environmental assessment reports, permitting external parties such as NGOs and public interest groups to track project decisions.
■ Open to the public the process of developing “country assistance strategies” or other national development plans that determine how development aid is allocated, as well as institutional policies and strategies that determine how assistance is conditioned.
■ Establish mechanisms such as ombudsmen or formal dispute procedures to address and resolve complaints by civil society groups and communities that are affected by project loans and investments.
■ Relax the application of blanket confidentiality rules on loan negotiations and dispute settlements to create a more transparent decision-making process.
■ Finance structural adjustment and sectoral adjustment loans in ways that encourage a broad agenda of good governance reforms and transparency practices in client nations.

Export Credit Agencies can:
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■ Adopt a set of common environmental guidelines for Export Credit Agency (ECA) investments that include robust transparency, disclosure, and public participation standards. These could include:
■ Annual disclosure of project details (including company, location, financing amount and vehicle) at the level of individual transactions;
■ Publicly disclosing environmental assessments and screening exercises;
■ Allowing periods for public comment on pending financing decisions;
■ Requiring project environmental assessments to include consultation with governments and potentially affected populations;
■ Communicating mitigation measures adopted;
■ Reporting basic environmental indicators for projects receiving ECA support.

Both Multilateral Development Banks and Export Credit Agencies can:
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■ Commit not only to “do no harm” to the environment through their policies and lending, but to prioritize investments that will positively benefit the environment.
For example, Export Credit Agencies can expand their support for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects rather than funding investments that put countries on paths toward fossil fuel dependency.
■ Consider the implications of financing decisions on global systems, such as biodiversity and climate, in addition to local environmental impacts at project sites. For example, international financial institutions should collaborate with other stakeholders to agree on mechanisms for assigning responsibility for the carbon emissions resulting from individual transactions.

The World Trade Organization can:
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■ Reconcile environment and trade. Recognize environmental protection as a shaping factor in global trade policies. In the short term, this means acting with dispatch and openness on the environmental agenda set forth in the current round of WTO trade negotiations (the Doha round). Specific measures include:
■ Adopt transparent and inclusive processes. Commit to transparent and open processes in the manner of the multilateral development banks, including better public disclosure practices, a more transparent dispute resolution process, and consultation with civil society groups.

Private International Financial Institutions can:
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■ Adopt information disclosure and environmental assessment procedures consistent with international norms.
■ Adopt investment policies with strong environmental criteria to ensure that their investments support sustainable development.