1. Introduction

The Gulf governments have very publicly expressed their concerns about the environmental dimension of national development and seen environmental challenges as something that had to be addressed by national development. In contrast to the aspirations of governments, the record of the Gulf countries, with one clear exception, was very poor in terms of environmental performance over the period 2000 to 2010.

The aimof this chapter is to better understand the link between the design and capabilities of public sector institutions in the Gulf countries and their environmental development. In 1997 the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank produced a report, the World Development Report 1997, in which it was claimed that there was a widespread need, in many countries, to close the gap between what was expected of the state and the capabilities of the state to act. For more than 20 years there have been attempts to rethink and reinvent governments (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) to increase their effectiveness.

One of the implicit issues for this chapter is to see if a country’sperformance on the environment was linked to economic development and growth. Government effectiveness might be expected to show up both as better economic growth and better performance on the environment. This issue will be addressed by looking at economic growth in recent years and seeing if its determinants were different to, or the same as, those for environmental performance. The case of the United Arab Emirates will be especially interesting on this point, since it was the main exception to a poor record on environmental performance.

The intended outcomes of this chapter are the clarification of how public governance has developed in the Gulf States, before and after the international financial crisis of 2007-2009, and to see if the poor environmental performance can be understood in relation to public governance. But, first, the chapter considers the evidence on environmental performance.

2. The Environmental Performance of the Gulf States

As was noted in the introduction, the governments of the Gulf States were concerned about the natural environment. But how well were they doing? One authoritative source of comparative data on environmental performance is the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) report (see Emerson et al. 2012). The EPI and the Pilot Trend Environmental Performance Index (Trend EPI) use a range of performance indicators to assess the environmental public health and ecosystem vitality of countries. In the 2012 report, the Trend EPI focuses on changes in performance between 2000 and 2010.