Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology

In global environmental governance, accountability tends to be narrowly perceived in terms of correct behavior within the confines of already-given institutional choices. What if that’s a trap? What if the environment keeps deteriorating and we waste our time arguing about how to improve the accountability of actors embedded in deeply unsustainable institutions? Are the organizations governing the global environment accountable to the environment itself? Certainly not, as “the environment” is commonly not perceived to have agency (Gaia theory/beliefs notwithstanding). Instead, they are accountable to a whole array of different organizations and individuals. The perceptions of who ought to be accountable to whom, in what way, and in accordance with what procedures vary across different issue areas and actor constellations. Susan Park and Teresa Kramarz, the editors of Global Environmental Governance and the Accountability Trap, argue that the preoccupation with accountability focuses too often on only the narrow aspects of the implementation and performance of agreed procedures (“second-tier” accountability) rather than on the goal orientation and design of institutions (“first-tier” accountability). Given the ongoing worsening of the environmental crisis, for Kramarz and Park the preoccupation with second-tier accountability is insufficient at best and even runs the danger of distracting from the necessary deeper institutional reform. They lament the lack of feedback loops from second-tier accountability mechanisms and processes back to goal orientation and institutional design. Ideally, they contend, accountability norms and practices should be engaged to open up conversations and contestation about how to reorient governance institutions toward greater environmental effectiveness. The authors advance acute reflections on the challenges and opportunities that governance in polycentric systems poses for accountability. Cristina Balboa shows how environmental nongovernmental organizations’ mission to fight environmental degradation first gets derailed by having to compete with a multitude of peers for limited resources and then becomes further complicated by the pressure to be accountable to an amorphous, ambiguous, and potentially open-ended set of stakeholders with no clear hierarchy for whose concerns should be prioritized. Lars Gulbrandsen and Graeme Auld locate the contestation around the accountability of the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSCs)