Environmental Governance Submitted to Annual Review of Environment and Resources

This article reviews the literature relevant to environmental governance in four domains of scholarship: globalization, decentralization, market and individual incentivesbased governance and cross-scale governance. It argues that in view of the complexity and multi-scalar character of many of the most pressing environmental problems, conventional debates focused on “pure” modes of governance, where state or market actors play the leading role, fall short of the capacity needed to address them. The paper highlights emerging hybrid modes of governance across the state-market-community divisions: Co-Governance, PublicPrivate Partnerships and Social-Private Partnerships. It examines the significant promise they hold for coupled social and natural systems to recover from environmental degradation and change. We conclude with some of the critical problems to which hybrid forms of environmental governance are also subject.