Environmental Governance and Greening Fiscal Policy Government Accountability for Environmental Stewardship

This book addresses the increasingly urgent question: How can governments be made more accountable for the quality of their environmental stewardship?

It explores:

• Enhanced national State of the Environment reporting and integration of environmental outcomes in key national indicators.
• Mainstreaming environmental goals, targets, and risks by integrating them in fiscal policy and the annual budget—a government’s most important policy instrument.
• Promoting sustainability by progressively exposing and eliminating harmful tax and expenditure policies, putting a price on pollution, and providing environmental public goods.
• Civil society environmental monitoring.

The book combines in-depth assessment of the latest climate/green budgeting literature and country practices with discussion of how to implement green fiscal policies. The framework is deliberately ambitious given the severity, scale, and urgency of climate changeand biodiversity loss.

The book will be of interest to ministry of finance, budget, and planning officials, to environment sector agencies, oversight institutions, international organizations, civil society organizations, and to academics and students in the fields of environmental studies, development studies, economics, public finance, and public policy.  

1.Introduction.- 2. National State of Environment Reporting (SoER).- 3. Integrating environmental targets into government strategy and fiscal policy.- 4. The environmental impacts of fiscal policies.- 5. The fiscal impacts of environmental degradation.- 6. Green budgeting.- 7. Environmental stewardship and the private sector.- 8. Comprehensive environmental accountability framework.

Murray Petrie has wide experience as a public official, international civil servant, consultant, civil society activist, and academic researcher in public sector governance, financial management, and the interface between fiscal policy and the environment. He has published widely in these areas and is a member of the IMF’s Panel of Fiscal Experts and the OECD Expert Group on Green Budgeting.