In the past, natural resource conservation came down to the capacity of an authoritative, centralized body in a geographic territory to monitor and control the exploitation of a given resource, whether forests, minerals or fisheries. Said regulators would issue permits for exploitation, often acting from a distance and on the basis of very sparse and intermittent data about the sustainability of those resource stocks (see study on Canada’s failure to regulate cod stocks on the East Coast and chart below).

Today, at least three forces are opening up the regulatory process to a much broader global audience.

1. Satellite imagery coupled with a plethora of intelligent micro-sensors allows us to cull staggering quantities from our natural and built environments (see the California Institute for Technology and Carnegie Mellon experiments where low-power intelligent wireless sensors measure everything from temperature to movement to chemical composition and report that information back in real-time). And thanks to tools like Google Earth, much of this information is now freely available on the Internet, which gives considerable ammunition to conservationists (see here and here, for example).

2. There is growing recognition that at least some resource stocks should be considered global public goods, due to the ecological services they provide to the broader global biosphere (the Amazon being one example). Citizens around the globe have taken an increasing interest in the protection of those public goods and in doing so they call into question traditional notions of national sovereignty when it comes to planetary stewardship.

3. As a result, there are well organized and increasingly agile networks of conservations and environmental groups that reach across national borders and wield considerable influence in key policy debates. They have also become increasingly adept at exposing instances of abuse and pressuring either the culprits directly or the regulatory authorities, or both.

My favourite example in this space, Global Forest Watch improves transparency and accountability in forest management decisions by increasing the public’s access to information on forestry developments around the world. They have a cool Data Warehouse where users can download a vast array of geographical data and manipulate it for their own analyses using their interactive map server

Other examples include the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council, both of which were set up as joint efforts of industry and conservation groups to impose new eco-labelling regimes that help consumers recognize and reward sustainable practices in forestry and fishing.

For other posts in this series see:
Time for participatory regulation
Participatory regulation for workplace health and safety
Participatory regulation and anti-corruption efforts