Governance is a multidimensional phenomenon. It is sensitive to context by being applicable in various guises to different political systems in the developed and developing world alike. There are institutional components in the form of structures, rules, operational modes, and performance expectations. The significance of responsibility, responsiveness and legitimacy is appreciated, with a keen eye on control and accountability. The arrangements are containable within state boundaries, while also transcending such boundaries by embracing relationships both between states and across state-market-civil society divides nationally and internationally.

Fundamentally, governance as a political, social and economic construct is all about the existence, use and consequences of power. Power is distributed, exercised, and has effects in numerous ways, on which theories, models and ideas about governance serve to focus attention, both analytically and practically. The analytical comprises frameworks to guide and inform detailed empirical inquiries, while the practical includes measures that are influenced by, and ideally enhance, the everyday experience of designing, taking and reviewing policy initiatives. An underlying aim is to develop a well-honed capacity to understand and manage collective action as a matter of public interest and significance.

This book appropriately adopts a governance perspective in seeking to assess and make sense of environmental politics and policy in Singapore as a city-state with an interesting governmental system. The intriguing notion of “disciplined governance” underpins the analysis, with its origins in an appreciation of how illiberal democracies are usually structured and run by a tightly knit political-administrative elite. The elite has an ongoing interest in maintaining direct and strict control, but can often over time expand its deliberative processes to involve sections of the wider society. It does this as a strategy of confined and contained inclusiveness either by itself recognizing the merits of such action, by force of political and social circumstances, or by a combination thereof.

The issues of discipline and strategy are explored through selected case studies which highlight different, but related, aspects of how state-society relations in Singapore have been forged and managed in response to matters of considerable environmental importance. The studies are detailed and clear in their depiction of key actors in terms of their motivations, involvement and interaction.