Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
Environ Manage. 2010 Jul;46(1):7-16. doi: 10.1007/s00267-009-9354-0. Epub 2009 Sep 1.
Conflicts over how to "scale" policy-making tasks have characterized environmental governance since time immemorial. They are particularly evident in the area of water policy and raise important questions over the democratic legitimacy, economic efficiency and effectiveness of allocating (or "scaling") tasks to some administrative levels as opposed to others. This article adopts a comparative federalism perspective to assess the "optimality" of scaling-either upward or downward-in one issue area, namely coastal recreational water quality. It does so by comparing the scaling of recreational water quality tasks in the European Union (EU) and Australia. It reveals that the two systems have adopted rather different approaches to scaling and that this difference can partly be accounted for in federal theoretical terms. However, a much greater awareness of the inescapably political nature of scaling processes is nonetheless required. Finally, some words of caution are offered with regard to transferring policy lessons between these two jurisdictions.
自古以来，关于如何“划分”政策制定任务的冲突一直是环境治理的特征。这些冲突在水政策领域尤为明显，并提出了一些重要问题，例如将（或“划分”）任务分配给某些行政级别而非其他级别在民主合法性、经济效率和效果方面的问题。本文采用比较联邦主义的视角，通过比较欧盟（EU）和澳大利亚在一个问题领域（即沿海休闲水质）中的划分任务，评估“划分”（无论是向上还是向下）的“最优性”。结果表明，这两个系统采取了截然不同的划分方法，这种差异可以在联邦理论层面上部分解释。然而，人们仍然需要更加意识到划分过程不可避免的政治性。最后，对于在这两个司法管辖区之间转移政策经验，提出了一些警示。
