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Last updated:
August 18, 2011



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Wisconsin Style: New Approaches to Regulatory Innovation

Pushing the paradigm limits: metagovernance and the environmental movement

By John Morgan
For Multi-State Working Group

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Many would assume that most environmental science goes on outside, in the forests, in the prairies and wetlands, and in lakes and rivers.

But sometimes there’s a lot be said for sitting down at the drawing board and hatching an experiment in the laboratory. This is precisely what occurred after David Laws, director of the Environmental Technology and Public Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jurgen van der Heijden, professor in the Center for Environmental Law at the University of Amsterdam, met at the January 2005 Environmental Law in a Connected World conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs.

Laws and van de Heijden hatched the crazy and curiously underused idea of encouraging collaboration within the environmental movement —sparking a bottom-up embrace of practice first and theory second and of asynchronous and ongoing communication via web sites and discussion groups. They call their idea metagovernance and introduced it the MSWG Annual Workshop in June 2005 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“We want to suggest a way to try to understand the ability of people to find open spaces or fashion niches in which new forms of action are possible and into which we are able to breath new life into old relationships in ways that further goals of environmental regulation, “ said Laws. “And ‘metagovernance’ is the beginning of our way to sort of try to get an understanding on that. And when we say ‘meta’ we say it in the sense of more than, not in the sense of having an all-encompassing vision.”

The idea, the two explained, seemed to be the theme of the day: to work together and to put action above theory.

“What we suggest is the need to start a dialogue with all of the people, all of the organizations involved,” added van der Heijden. “Forget about government; start with society, and ask yourself how as society do we steer things?”

Indeed, in his own research of the Tamales Bay watershed in California, Laws has observed what it means to have a group of people and of interests converge into a productive and active entity in order to solve problems. Simply stated, they want to understand what a public group is and how it forms and how it puts its desired goals into action.

Laws conceded that the two scholars are turning the traditional ways of doing research on its head.

“In other words, we can imagine a triad, where there’s a conversation between research and practice in particular. We’re talking about starting on that leg of the triangle that could really inform the development of law and of policy and regulation,” he explained.

“What we don’t want is an explanation that relies on saints or saviors.”

 

Reportage from MSWG's annual workshop

Building bridges across ocean's: China's role in a sustainable world

Bringing power to the people: a journalist's view

Environmentalism: death or rebirth? The debate rages on