Complexity and challenges of long-term environmental governance

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Abstract

Some important processes of environmental change – including those of climate change and loss of biodiversity – share three characteristics that make them extremely demanding challenges of governance. First, time-lags between human action and environmental effect are very long, often extending beyond one human generation. Second, problems are embedded in highly complex systems that are not well understood. Third, these problems involve global collective goods of a type that links them to a wide range of human activities and leaves them beyond the scope of unilateral solutions. Social science research offers two essentially different models of collective response to severe challenges. One portrays effective response as collective action through central leadership and contraction of power. The other conceives of societal response as involving a variety of local activities undertaken by subunits of a complex and decentralised system. I argue that both models have considerable merit, but also that they respond to different types of challenges. Therefore, useful insights can be gained by specifying more precisely the circumstances under which each model applies.

Introduction

Some of the most important processes of social-ecological change – including those known as climate change and loss of biodiversity – share three characteristics that interact to make them extremely demanding challenges of governance. First, these challenges are long-term policy problems in which time-lags between policy measures (or ‘non-action’) and effects often extend beyond one human generation. Second, they are embedded in very complex systems of which our understanding is still incomplete and in part clouded by profound uncertainties. Third, they involve global collective goods of a nature that links them to a wide range of human activities and at the same time leaves them beyond the scope of ‘single best effort’ solutions.1

Social science research offers two essentially different models of collective response to severe challenges. One – prevalent in, inter alia, the study of international crisis management – portrays effective response as involving contraction of power, and centrally directed action guided by some synoptic master plan. The other – found in, inter alia, the study of adaptive management – conceives of collective response as involving a variety of ‘local’ activities undertaken by (sub)units of a diverse and complex system. The main argument of this paper is that both models have considerable merit, but also that they respond to different types of challenges. Therefore, useful insights can be gained by specifying the circumstances under which each of these strategies can be expected to work.

The next section explores how each of the three problem characteristics introduced above can render governance more difficult, and how they can interact to produce an extremely demanding challenge. Section 3 presents the two collective response models and begins to specify their respective domains of validity. The fourth and final section offers some suggestions as to how problem characteristics and governance approaches may be ‘matched’ to enhance the ability of governance systems to cope constructively with challenges such as global climate change and loss of biodiversity. My suggestions, I hope, will contribute to answering the first two questions formulated by the editors for this special issue.

Section snippets

The challenge

As indicated above, this paper deals with environmental change problems that share three main characteristics: very long time-lags between human action and environmental effect, embeddedness in highly complex systems that are not well understood, and provision of global collective goods. Each of these characteristics has important implications for governance.

Models of collective response

One of these models is concerned with the capacity for collective action. This capacity is seen as relying heavily on centralised leadership, guided by some synoptic master plan premised on the best knowledge and understanding available. The other model is concerned with adaptive and pluralistic modes of governance, highlighting the ability to monitor developments, learn from experience, and adjust flexibly to unforeseen change. This latter line of reasoning leads scholars to study, inter alia,

Concluding remarks

The analysis in this paper may now be summarized in two main propositions. First, to be effective, a response strategy must match the challenge. We need to think about challenge–response relationships in terms of fit (Young, 2002, Galaz et al., 2008). Arguably, the collective action model responds better to the challenge of climate change than to that of biodiversity loss. Moreover, for global climate change, policies of adaptation will by and large have higher aggregate scores on conditions

Acknowledgements

Discussions with Jon Hovi and Detlef Sprinz have helped clarify my own thinking about this topic. Comments and suggestions from two anonymous reviewers and from participants in the workshop organised by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in February 2009 are gratefully knowledged. Thanks also to Frank Azevedo for language editing.

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