Environmental governance on the street: Towards an expanded research agenda on street-level bureaucrats

Research on environmental governance would benefit from greater attention to the practices, agency and subjectivities of the public frontline staff who implement and shape environmental policies and interventions on the ground. These local state actors conduct the everyday work of bringing global agreements and state policies into being and influence how citizens experience the state and environmental governance. We provide a brief overview of existing literature on ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs). We then suggest three key research areas through which insights into the role of SLBs in environmental governance could be further developed, including (i) the nature of SLBs agency and practice as they enact global and national environmental agendas, (ii) the subjectivities of SLBs and how they affect environmental governance and (iii) the outcomes of the activities of SLB on state-citizen relations. We argue that this research agenda has explanatory power in understanding existing and desired environmental governance.