International Collaboration

to encourage the cooperation of business people is by providing incentives to develop sustainable products and services. In this way, environmental sustainability can be pursued as a non-zero-sum game to enlist the cooperation of the liberals and the conservatives.

The ideological debate may be less prominent in poor developing countries because of the lack of the salience of environmental sustainability. Moreover, the lack of education, political rights, and economic development prevents any substantial public debate on the environment. In many poor developing countries, business interests can influence governments to ignore environmental policies. Nevertheless, civil society organizations are instrumental in pressuring the government to undertake environmentally sustainable policies.

InternatIonal collaboratIon Sustainability requires concerted action involving the participation of local, national, and international actors. Global environmental politics includes new actors in addition to traditional players and institutions. What Beck (1992, p. 221) “refers to as “sub-political” developmentsinvolving actors and mechanisms outside traditional political domains “occupied” by (the system of) nation-states, parliaments, and political parties-are interpreted by some as a new response to environmental deterioration, following some of the features of globalization.” The international environmental groups played an important role in the reform movement in many advanced industrial nations. Sonenfeld and Mol (2002 examine three important innovations: the development of supranational environmental institutions, increased use of market-based regulatory instruments, and the rise of global civil society involvement. “The basic idea seems to be that because environmental problems have spread from local to national and national to supranational levels, political institutions and arrangements to deal with them should be upscaled to be effective” (Beck 1992, p. 221).

Meek (2008) mentioned that many of the problems had become complex and cross-jurisdictional requiring collaboration among many disciplines (Meek 2001; Meek and Newell 2005). This implies that the traditional forms of leadership or administration will be insufficient to solve the problems. Beck (1992) suggests cooperation between the traditional bureaucracy and the newly evolved networks of participants. Several authors have advocated the theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS) as