Building Environmental States: Legitimacy and Rationalization in Sustainability Governance.

This paper explores the potential for sustainability governance by nation-states. Sustainability governance is achieved when nation-states make environmental protection a basic goal, in part by committing institutional resources toward the formation and implementation of substantive actions perceived necessary for long-term environmental sustainability. Existing research suggests that nation states undertake environmental action in order to maintain legitimacy in the face of political pressure. While the maintenance of legitimacy is necessary, we argue that substantive sustainability governance is also dependent upon the rationalization of state environmental roles. Further, environmental state-building can be fostered through the enrichment of embedded state-societal networks with two key actors in civil society: environmental justice movements and environmental knowledge professionals. We develop a conceptual framework that grounds sustainability efforts in rationalization processes, and examines the strengths, weaknesses, and synergistic potential of these two social actors to create the conditions necessary for building environmentally sustainable states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]