ABSTRACT
The challenges ahead The analysis presented in the 12 chapters of this edited volume shows an interesting evolution in the environmental governance scenario across the East, South and Southeast Asian countries. The economic growth cycle witnessed by the Asian countries enables one to understand the environmental policymaking in a larger perspective. For instance, Japan embarked on a growth path early during the fi fties and played a key role by providing foreign direct investment (FDI) to other East and Southeast Asian economies giving rise to the ‘Flying Geese’ phenomenon. The investments in core manufacturing sectors, namely, textiles, chemicals, iron and steel, automobiles in the initial phase and in the more sophisticated sectors (e.g. electronics) with the advent of time enabled the investment-recipient economies to grow, but at the same time the need for following a cautious environmental management system emerged. The growth in South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, SAR China and Taiwan, ROC, the newly industrialized economies (NIEs), had initially been fueled by the foreign investments but soon a strong domestic entrepreneur class emerged there as well, which propelled their growth engine further (Kwan 2002). Meanwhile FDI-led manufacturing growth progressed to other Asian economies, increasingly amenable to the idea of export-oriented growth, as limitations of the importsubstituting growth model were gradually being acknowledged. On the part of the investors, the FDI outfl ow was driven by low labor cost and resource availability in relatively less developed countries vis-à-vis the home country. The countries to grow in the next phase, i.e. Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines received investment from not only Japan but sometimes also from the four NIEs as well. This growth path, in turn, led to both the scale effect and the composition effects , with the manufacturing sector growing in all these countries. The growth of Asian economies with reliance on the manufacturing sector resulted in environmental concerns that eventually started affecting the local population, and the raised concerns found their ways into the policy forums. As a result efforts to strengthen environmental governance were visibly noticed, albeit in varying degrees, infl uenced by multiple country-specifi c factors (Howe and Wyrwoll 2012).
