Governance Approaches that Can be Used to Implement Sustainability Criteria

Evgenia Pavlovskaia
Page no. 54-71

Implementation of sustainability criteria, both in legal frameworks and voluntary sustainability
standards, is an urgent and important issue. In the article, three less state-centric governance
approaches and their capacity to be used to implement sustainability criteria have been
investigated. The chosen approaches are good governance, multi-level governance and selfgovernance.
Their potential strengths and weaknesses have been pointed out.
The research indicates that sustainability criteria can be implemented in different ways, which have
the potential to highlight, strengthen or weaken different aspects of their function. The use of
different governance approaches, or their combinations, can lead to different implementation
results for the same sustainability criterion. The choice of an appropriate governance approach
depends on the circumstances in each case, on the purpose of using sustainability criteria and on
the results that are strived at. Possibilities to establish a profitable international regime with
homogeneous requirements and sustainability criteria for a certain production branch or a product
should be explored .The article suggests that the most promising solution is to combine the use of
legal regulations (juridical steering) with less hierarchical and less state-centric governance
approaches, involving the participation of different groups of interested actors. Elements of good
governance, multi-level governance and self-governance can be efficiently incorporated in legal
frameworks and voluntary sustainability standards with sustainability criteria .Further research
and case study analysis in this area are recommended.
Keywords: governance, good governance, multi-level governance, self-governance,
implementation of sustainability criteria.