Brief Authority

Abstract

Collectivities of various kinds are part of the problematic of individual agency discussed in the previous chapter. As the power of economic and political structures is seen to grow, the capacity of persons to induce microgenic change is diminished. For radical social change to occur, strategies of collective as opposed to individual action are accordingly required. By contrast, the focus in this chapter is on the actions and interactions of larger-scale collective actors — NGOs, states, corporations, governments and their bureaucratic component parts, and intergovernmental agencies. While the activities of these have implications for individuals, and may on the face of it be designed either to promote or manipulate their interests, these questions are not the concern here. These organizations have complex internal features. They interact in diverse sustained and temporary ways, and they do so increasingly in a global or transnational manner. Insights from sociology and social theory on the one side, and from political economy on the other, are thus particularly useful for studying the complex threads of governance. Different actors in global society have governance claims relevant to environmental problem-solving. After discussing these, the chapter examines in particular functionalist ideas of governance as guides for the environmental domain.