Environmental Management Systems and Public Authority in Canada: Rethinking Environmental Governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the example of environmental management systems (EMS) and the ISO 14001 standard, I propose a typology of eight ways in which public authorities interact with voluntary environmental initiatives: 1. Steering (influencing the development, use or content of voluntary initiatives through official policy pronouncements, participation in standards development or creation of legal ground rules or backstops for voluntary initiatives), 2. Self-discipline (applying voluntary initiatives to government operations or agreeing to international trade rules that turn voluntary standards into constraints on regulatory authority), 3. Knowledge production (generating and disseminating ideas, information and expertise about the design, use or value of voluntary initiatives), 4. Reward (providing material incentives for adherence to voluntary initiatives through regulatory relief programs, financial incentives or green procurement policies), 5. Command (issuing legally binding requirements to adhere to voluntary initiatives through court orders or legislation), 6. Benchmarking (using voluntary initiatives as standards for "reasonableness" in civil actions or "due diligence" in regulatory prosecutions), 7. Challenge (challenging firms or other organizations to adhere to voluntary initiatives), and 8. Borrowing (incorporating voluntary initiatives into legal instruments such as statutes and regulations). I then employs Foucault's notion of governmentality to characterize EMSs and EMS standards as a mode of governance with their own normative rationales and mundane technologies of rule. I argue in this connection that the techniques of EMSs and standardization deactivate the substantial political stakes of corporate environmental management by treating them as technical matters to be resolved by neutral professional expertise and simultaneously as private matters of consumer or commercial preference to be resolved by the market. The political rationalities of EMSs and EMS standards consist of a particular set of justifications and story-lines that vest the development and implementation of important environmental standards in global standardization bodies, business firms, consultancies and private certification and accreditation bodies. This analysis of the governmental rationalities and techniques of EMSs and the interpenetration of public and private authority in the politics of environmental management casts new light on the debate over what role EMSs should play in public law and policy. I conclude the article with some tentative thoughts on what role law might play in this arena -- in particular, how it might be employed to resist the tendency of EMS-based initiatives to depoliticize environmental politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".