Managing Leviathan: Environmental Politics and the Administrative State - Softcover

9780921149545: Managing Leviathan: Environmental Politics and the Administrative State

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0921149549 ISBN 13: 9780921149545

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education Division, 1990

Bureaucracies, including large corporations and governmental agencies, are based on hierarchy and prone to secrecy. They encourage highly specialized forms of knowledge and structure themselves in compartmentalized ways. In stark contrast, environmental problems cut across all artificial divisions and boundaries.

Managing Leviathan illustrates the nature of environmental problems from genetically modified crops to climate change, from urban sprawl to toxic chemicals to trace pharmaceuticals in our water supply. Understanding these problems, and how they might be resolved, requires that we transcend the divisions of government, economy, and knowledge. Solutions often also require the mobilization of citizen knowledge and values. Are governments and bureaucracies up to the complex task? How might they adapt to be better suited to meet the new environmental challenges that continuously arise?

This extensively revised edition of Managing Leviathan expands from a North American to a global perspective and includes new articles on both European and Australian experiences as well as on transnational environmental issues. The overall pattern is remarkably clear: environmental administration demands integrative thinking and new forms of direct public involvement in governance.

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About the Author:

Robert Paehlke is Professor of Environmental and Resource Studies at Trent University. He has previously authored Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics (Yale University Press, 1989 and 1991) and Democracy's Dilemma: Environment, Social Equity and the Global Economy (MIT Press, 2003 and 2004).

Review:

This collection of writing goes to the heart of the fundamental structural challenge in environmental policy and management in modern developed societies. Anyone wishing to explore the cutting edge of environmental policy and management will find this book an invaluable tool.

(The Honourable David Anderson, PC, Member of Parliament for Victoria, Minister of Environment, Government of Canada, 1999-2004)

My well-thumbed first edition of Managing Leviathan has been an invaluable teaching and research aide. Its pages contain several of the wisest of insights into the complex links between structures of government and environment regarding policy and regulatory outcomes. Now my reliable old friend has been superseded by an updated version, one that retains all the strengths of the parent, whilst adding new contributions that are as important as they are timely. The new edition will be welcomed by all those who share my belief that, in the vexed times in which we live, there is a pressing need to overcome government's structural bias against environmental imperatives. Managing Leviathan points to ways through this long-standing impasse. It deals—brilliantly—with subjects of surpassing importance. For those in search of planetary solutions, this book is essential reading.

(Peter Hay, University of Tasmania, Australia)

This classic of environmental social and political theory has been thoroughly reworked to take Leviathan out of North America and put it into the world. On this broad canvas the argument that greater public involvement and integrated governance are the foundations of more effective and more legitimate environmental policy seem utterly convincing. I hope that politicians as well as academics read this book.

(Andrew Dobson, author of Green Political Thought, The Open University, UK)

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