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To say that corporations have their plates full is an understatement. In addition to running their core business, a constant stream of new global regulations, from evolving tax law to regulatory reporting requirements, are regularly testing the limits of how quickly companies can adapt. The events of the last few years have also proven that even the strongest supply chains can be disrupted by anything from geopolitical unrest to a global healthcare emergency.…..Story continues…
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Critics:
Earth system governance is a paradigm that builds on earlier notions of environmental policy and nature conservation, but puts these into the broader context of human-induced transformations of the entire earth system. The integrative paradigm of earth system governance has evolved into an active research area that brings together a variety of disciplines including political science, sociology, economics, ecology, policy studies, geography, sustainability science, and law.
The concept of earth system governance is defined as: “the interrelated and increasingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change and, in particular, earth system transformation, within the normative context of sustainable development.”
The new paradigm of earth system governance was originally developed in the Netherlands by Professor Frank Biermann in his inaugural lecture at the VU University Amsterdam, which was published later in 2007Based on this pioneering contribution, Biermann was invited by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change to develop a long-term comprehensive international programme in this field, which became in 2009 the global Earth System Governance Project.
Key researchers who have applied the earth system governance framework in their work include Michele Betsill (co-founder of the Earth System Governance Project), John Dryzek, Peter M. Haas, Norichika Kanie, Lennart Olsson, and Oran Young. In 2012, 33 leading scholars from the Project wrote a blueprint for reform of strengthening earth system governance, which was published in Science.
The idea of earth system governance has also been criticized for being too top-down, for placing too much emphasis on global governance structures. According to Mike Hulme, earth system governance represents an attempt to “geopolitically engineer” our way out of the climate crisis. He questions whether the climate is governable and argues that it is way too optimistic and even hubristic to attempt to control the global climate by universal governance regimes. This interpretation of the novel concept, however, has been rejected by other scholars as being too narrow and misleading.
The Earth System Governance Project currently consists of a network of about 300 active and about 2,300 indirectly involved scholars from all continents. The global research alliance has evolved into the largest social science research network in the area of governance and global environmental change. Since 2015 it is part of the overarching international research platform Future Earth.
The new paradigm of earth system governance was originally developed in the Netherlands by Professor Frank Biermann in his inaugural lecture at the VU University Amsterdam, which was published later in 2007. Based on this pioneering contribution, Biermann was invited by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change to develop a long-term comprehensive international program in this field, which became in 2009 the global Earth System Governance Project (ESG Project).
The ESG Project is a network of researchers. It produced the first science and implementation plan for ESG research in 2009. This provided a framework for research activities of ESG scholars during 2009 to 2018. It was followed by a second Science and Implementation Plan in 2018 which is meant to guide the research activities from 2018 onwards. ESG research can be carried out under a conceptual framework of five analytical problems which are all highly interlinked.
These analytical problems are “problems of the overall architecture of ESG, of agency beyond the state and of the state, of the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes, of their accountability and legitimacy and of modes of allocation and access in ESG”. The table below shows these five research activities and the main research questions for each of the analytical problems. At the center of the ESG framework are particular problem domains (i.e. energy, food, water, climate, and economic systems), which are likely to be the focus of efforts to bring about transformations towards sustainability.
The first Science and Implementation Plan from 2009 emphasized four cross-cutting themes that were deemed crucial for understanding these problems: power, knowledge, norms, and scale. It also promoted focused case studies on the global water, food, climate, and economic systems, integrating here analyses of governance architecture, agents, adaptiveness, accountability, and allocation.
The second Science and Implementation Plan from 2018 has expanded the original framework of the “5 A’s” to pair them with novel concepts that have become more prominent in the community. This resulted in the following five sets of research lenses:
- Architecture and agency
- Democracy and power
- Justice and allocation
- Anticipation and imagination
- Adaptiveness and reflexivity
Those research lenses are embedded in four contextual conditions: Transformations, inequality, anthropocene, and diversity. The ESG research community focuses on the study of formal rules and institutions, which include laws, public regulations and policies set by national or local governments and international organizations to address global and local sustainability problems.
The network also examines informal rules and practices, such as unwritten norms and societal behaviors. Additionally, the community explores actor networks, such as relationships and interactions among various stakeholders such as governments, NGOs, and civil society.
When scholars conduct research in ESG they theorize about it as analytical practice (explaining current politics), as normative critique (a critique of current systems of governance), and as transformative visioning.
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