Stacy D. VanDeveer

Grassroots Global Governance: Local Watershed Management Experiments and the Evolution of Sustainable Development. Kauffman, Craig M. 2017. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Craig M. Kauffman’s Grassroots Global Governance is an exceptionally good book, and an excellent example of the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical value to be gained in “global” environmental politics research by taking local and national contexts and dynamics – indeed comparative politics – seriously. The book emerges from a coherent, complex, and nuanced comparative and international research agenda, grounded equally in detailed local fieldwork and multiple streams of global environmental politics scholarship. In equal measure, it contributes to and benefits from a growing body of environmental politics work on Ecuador, in Latin America, and across the developing world, as well as much research on global governance. The book’s goals, structure, methods, and theoretical and conceptual content are quite ambitious, earning it a place among the best books in the growing subfield of comparative environmental politics (e.g., by Pamela Martin, Paul Steinberg, Tammy L. Lewis, and Kathryn Hochtstetler). Kauffman did extensive fieldwork over many years, and the book demonstrates the value of doing so. It is exactly this pairing of place-based, national, and regional expertise common in comparative politics and regional studies with the theories and concepts from international relations and research on transboundary politics that yields some of the richest research. As a result, Grassroots Global Governance combines several streams of theoretical and conceptual international relations and comparative politics research, including research on networks and network-based organizations, mobilization, public sector and civil society capacity building, stakeholder participation, knowledge construction and framing, and policy and organizational experimentation. These streams are well integrated in Kauffman’s theory of grassroots global governance. Likewise, they are well demonstrated in his empirical research, which finds contestation between the local and global, and institutional and agent-centered outcomes around water management, public and civil society institutions, and various groups of actors. Likewise, Kauffman’s book seamlessly accounts for interacting global governance structures that accumulate in environmental cases. To achieve this

Conclusions – Looking Beyond Transnational Climate Change Governance

Our intention at the outset of this project was to move beyond the focus on individual cases or particular segments of the world of TCCG in order to examine what we might be able to discover collectively about this phenomenon. In this final chapter, we return to this overarching theme and identify the ways in which our analysis of TCCG contributes to ongoing debates in the field. Underpinning this contribution, we suggest, are two novel aspects of our work. First, the book provides the first analysis of transnational governance that includes both an extensive database of a large number and a diverse array of particular case-studies. Existing research in the field of transnational governance has been mostly based on either individual examples or a small number of cases; whereas these can provide rich and nuanced analyses, there is nevertheless a significant value added in attempting to say something about this phenomenon as a whole. While we have not been able to survey the entire universe of cases in the transnational climate governance arena, a task that would be difficult to undertake given that much of this activity is relatively unknown, we have devised a strategy to maximise the diversity of cases we explore. In the sense that the approach we have developed includes the full variety of forms of TCCG, we thus suggest that it can be regarded as representative of the phenomenon as a whole. The database approach has enabled us to see patterns in the types of initiatives that predominate in TCCG, in terms of the types of actors, the issues upon which they focus, the forms of institutionalisation, the practices of governance, the claims to legitimacy and the geographical reach of TCCG initiatives.