"Jon Marco Church offers breadth and depth in his critical analysis of regional environmental governance, which is timely given that the majority of international environmental agreements are in fact regional in nature. Building on case studies that appear diverse yet display many common features, Church skillfully combines an interdisciplinary theoretical framework with many years of research and professional involvement in the processes he describes. The design principles offered in his conclusion will provide food for thought to scholars and practitioners alike." — Jörg Balsiger, University of Geneva, Switzerland
"Jon Marco Church provides a rich, analytically informed study of the evolving understanding and governance of ecoregions. He conducts 6 comparative focused case studies, and applies Ostrom’s polyarchy framework to derive design principles for sustainable regional environmental governance." — Peter M. Haas, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States
"Church’s comparative analysis of the processes and outcomes associated with contemporary "ecoregionalism" yields myriad insights about the growing number of regional governance arrangements around the globe, through careful examination of 6 case studies, including those focused on seas, mountains, rivers and lakes." — Stacy D. VanDeveer, University of Massachusetts, Boston, United States
"This book makes original contributions to scholarly debates about how to define and analyse ecoregions and is essential reading for all those interested in how regional environmental cooperation is structured and functions. Due to the author’s thorough and artfully written engagement with core and adjacent literature, the book also serves as an up-to-date critical history on how different disciplines have understood regional politics." — Elana Wilson Rowe, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Norway
"Until recently, little progress has been made in theorizing or testing questions of scale and scope. Church is one of the few scholars who has been pursuing such work. This book establishes Church at the forefront of the field, extending his ecoregionalism work to encompass a wider array of cases, a richer theoretical framework and a practical bent toward general design principles that can be adapted to particular cases. This is turning into an enormously important focus of scholarship in environmental policy and politics, and Church is ahead of the curve in being there." — William C. Clark, Harvard University, United States
"This is a book to return to for many reasons. In marrying a clear and thoughtful conceptual framework with detailed case studies, Jon Marco Church not only makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how ecoregions are defined, governed and institutionalized, but offers us an approach that has real scale-ability potential for the way we understand both global and local environmental institutional contexts." — Lorraine Elliott, Australian National University, Australia
