A taxonomy of green governance: A qualitative and quantitative analysis towards sustainable development

Abnormal climate change due to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and other energy-related consumption, has been an ongoing concern in the world since the beginning of industrialization, while everyone agrees that human activity has contributed to the causes of climate change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established an international environmental treaty in 1994 to address the dangers of human interference with the climate system by stabilizing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere for sustainable development. The UNFCCC was expanded to include the Kyoto Protocol, which went into effect in 2005 and was later superseded by the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement is an international treaty with members of 196 countries that addresses climate change mitigation, adaptation, and financing, which went into effect in 2016. The Agreement intends to strengthen parties' ability to adapt to the effects of climate change and raise sufficient finance. Through the Paris Agreement, many nations have viewed climate change as a global issue, prompting countries to reconsider and better understand mankind's place in nature, as well as the relationship between economic development and the environment. However, the international treaty is falling short of its own global climate change targets. Some environmentalists and analysts, for example, have criticized current pledges under the Paris Agreement as being insufficiently binding to meet the agreed-upon temperature targets. New approaches and governance instruments are therefore needed to address the challenges.

Green governance is a direct response to mounting calls to address the challenges posed by earth's climate problems in the way humans relate to them for global sustainability. Green governance provides an understanding of the integration of actors in a group's decisions and actions. For example, from the local to the international level, actors within the concept of green governance are not limited to states and governments, but include a plethora of public, private, and non-state actors, encompassing a larger and more diverse number of actors (Gupta and Sanchez, 2012). As a result, green governance is critical to achieving the globally agreed-upon goals of governments and other stakeholders for global sustainability. Li et al. (2018) created a green governance framework for cooperation based on sustainable development among enterprises, governments, social organizations, the public, and nature by investigating the synergy between humans and nature. While, Lin et al. (2019) proposed a framework of the green governance context along two dimensions (foreign direct investment (FDI) policy and environmental regulation) and contributed to the green governance literature by extending the green governance context typology, with a specific focus on EMNEs' IB strategies in different green governance contexts. However, the study focuses solely on the governmental pressure exerted on firms' IB strategies, but green governance systems involve a wide range of stakeholders, including governments, firms, social organizations, and the general public, etc. (Li et al., 2018). On the other hand, there has been little research on how different forms of governance are defined within the framework of green governance as well as how actors are classified within each governance form in order to carry out their activities for sustainable development. Furthermore, there has been little research into whether each separate forms of green governance are closely related or not to accomplishing global shared goals. For example, some researchers have argued that these issues deserve further investigation (Lin et al., 2019, Capatina et al., 2019, Mahmood and Orazalin, 2017).

Based on the above discussion and in the context of sustainable development, the research questions are being addressed in this study, concerning the extent to which governance can be form in the various interdependent groups under the green governance framework. Can we categorize the different forms of governance under a green governance framework? Are the different forms of governance interrelated? Is the green governance policy required to achieve sustainable development? In this context, the main objectives of this study are threefold: firstly, we need a single and simplified taxonomy of green governance to classify different forms of governance and learn their interrelationships with their key actors in terms of their key roles and objectives for sustainable development. To fill the research gap, a taxonomy of green governance is proposed to achieve the common goals of all stakeholders, as each stage of human development is closely linked to nature. Through the decentralization of partnership and collaboration of multiple actors, a taxonomy of green governance is needed to promote global sustainability. This will help researchers and policy-makers to understand and identify different forms of governance related to different fields of study more broadly. Secondly, we need to identify the critical factors of green governance to make appropriate decisions for current and future sustainable growth. Therefore, this study proposed the critical influencing factors to achieve green governance for sustainable development based on the existing literature. Thirdly, we need to determine if green governance is required to tackle the climate change and its related issues in achieving sustainable development. To do that, this study will conduct a case study to track the progress of the Indian green growth indicators for sustainable development. Finally, this study will provide some implications based on the findings of the analysis.

The main contributions for this study are summarized as follows:

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  First, this study proposed a taxonomy of green governance for sustainable development by classifying the different forms of governance and identifying their relationships with their key actors and their roles for achieving certain objectives to tackle the climate change and its related issues. To build the taxonomy, this study first conducted a literature review on the related topic to bridge the research gap and adopted an exploratory analysis. This study then builds the criteria for the analysis of green governance taxonomy by defining the key roles and activities that actors undertake in order to achieve their goals for sustainable development under each governance form. A statistical method (factor analysis) is used to identify different governance groups and analyze whether different forms of governance are interrelated or not under the green governance taxonomy.
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  Second, through exploratory analysis, this study proposed the influencing factors of green governance to achieve sustainable development based on the existing literature. The table matrix is built to support the proposed critical influencing factors.
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  Third, a case study was conducted to evaluate whether a country needs to adopt a green governance policy to achieve sustainable growth in the Indian green growth indicators provided by the OECD.stats (OECD 2021). A machine learning technique-linear digression, SVM, and Gaussian process is used to track the progress of the Indian green growth indicators for better accuracy results.
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  Finally, this study provides some practical implications based on the findings of the paper. The systematic overview which we represent in this paper is the first of its kind in the literature.

The remainder of the study's structure is classified as follows: Section 2 discusses a review of the literature and related works; Section 3 presents a proposed taxonomy of green governance for sustainable development; Section 4 suggests a critical influencing factor of green governance; and Section 5 conducts an empirical analysis of green governance. Finally, Section 6 discusses the study's conclusion and future research.