Governance and Sustainability

New Challenges for States, Companies and Civil Society

Ulrich Petschow, James Rosenau, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351280983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Sustainability cannot be achieved without good governance. The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 stated that governance and sustainable development are intimately tied together and the future role and architecture of institutions, from local to international levels, will be crucial determinants to whether future policies and programmes for sustainable development will succeed.

But these are changing times. With growing tensions over both globalization and regionalization, traditional systems of regulation are being subjected to growing pressure for reform. While states will continue to play a significant, if changed, role in the future, the importance of players from business and civil society is increasing. Sustainable development requires this change. Such an intra- and intergenerational concept cannot be achieved with a top-down approach, but rather needs the participation of all. In fact, the governance of sustainable development requires the exploration of new forms of both social co-operation and confrontation. By doing so, the different levels (global and local), players (state, company and civil society), control structures (hierarchy, market and public-private) and fields of action need to be taken into consideration.Governance and Sustainability examines the possibilities of integrating the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development within the framework of governance processes and how that might steer societies towards sustainability. It takes a close look at the key actors, their agendas and methods, forms of organization, problems and limits, as well as real-life examples for governance in different areas of society at the regional, national and international level. It is especially interested in exploring the nature of changes in the context of governance; the role of actors in such processes; and analysing how different forms of societal learning can improve governance processes. It concludes that this is a continuous process, characterized by conflicts and learning processes necessary to heighten both awareness of the complexity of the social and environmental problems faced and the prospects of implementing successful solutions.

Based on a major conference hosted to assess the issue of governance post-Johannesburg, the book includes innovative insights from some of the leading thinkers in both sustainable development and governance from academia, business, multilateral organizations and NGOs. It provides a unique perspective on two of the key societal problems facing the world today.

Part 1
Governance and global sustainability: setting the stage

1
Globalisation and governance

Sustainability Between Fragmentation and Integration*

James N. Rosenau
The George Washington University, USA

At first glance, the prospects for effective global governance in the realm of environmental sustainability would appear to be considerable—less because the world has advanced in its capacity for effective governance, but more because environmental issues affect everyone’s desire for a more harmonious link to nature and because recent decades have witnessed a profound and discernible shift to a worldwide consciousness of the vast scope of environmental challenges. We have collectively moved from a fragmented NIMBY (not in my back yard) syndrome to a keen awareness of an integrated future symbolised by the picture of the Earth from outer space (Jasanoff 2001: 309-37).

But appearances can be deceiving. Or at least the ensuing pages argue that the prospects for effective governance leading to sustainability are, on balance, quite bleak. To be sure, the Johannesburg conclave has again drawn the world’s attention to the myriad issues that constitute environmental sustainability, and doubtless that focus will continue for a long time; but there is no one-to-one correlation between extensive preoccupation and actual implementation. Enacting the commitments made at Johannesburg pose challenges to global governance that, for a variety of reasons suggested below, seem unlikely to be met in a thoroughgoing way. Accordingly, it is difficult to outline a basis for optimism.

A bleak conclusion also rests on the premise that we live in a very messy and complex world. There are far too many people who survive on or below the poverty line. There are far too many societies paralysed by division. There is too much violence within and between countries. In many places there is too little water and too many overly populated, pollution-ridden cities. And, most conspicuously, there is all too little effective governance capable of ameliorating, if not resolving, these and numerous other problems that crowd high on the global agenda.

Perhaps even more troubling, our generation lacks the orientations necessary for sound assessments of how the authority of governance can be brought to bear on the challenges posed by the prevailing disarray. As will be seen, we have not adjusted our conceptual equipment to facilitate the analysis of how authority gets exercised in a decentralised world. We are still deeply ensconced in a paradigm that locates authority exclusively in states and environmental challenges exclusively in their shared problems —the so-called tragedy of the commons. In effect, we have elevated the NIMBY syndrome to the national level. Our preoccupation with global problems posed by recognising the Earth as a lonely spheroid in a vast universe has led us to minimise the extent to which environmental challenges at local levels are marked by variability. Today societies can have as much difficulty exercising authority within their own jurisdictions as they do with respect to the commons. The world, in other words, is both fragmenting and integrating, which is another way of stressing why the challenges of sustainability and global governance are so daunting.

Indeed, I contend that the world is messier today than was the case in earlier decades. Granted that every generation thinks it has more problems than its predecessors, but a case can readily be made that the present era is far messier than any other, that today’s insecurities are more pervasive, its uncertainties more elusive, its ambiguities more perplexing, and its complexities more extensive. Let me briefly make that case by stressing that the central differentiation between the present epoch and previous ones involves personal, community, national and international life today being marked by rapid acceleration, even by simultaneity. Due to innovative electronic technologies, to jet aircraft that annually move millions of people around the world, and to the resulting shrinkage of time and distance, people and societies today have become substantially more interdependent than was the case in earlier eras. What is remote today is also in our back yards; what was distant is now also proximate, and the prevalence of these distant proximities underlies the messiness that sets our time apart from previous generations.¹

One major consequence of the accelerated pace of life in our time is the breakdown of long-standing boundaries—those boundaries that differentiate the public from the private, the domestic from the foreign, the local from the global, the political from the economic, the living from the natural environment, the scientific from the experiential, to mention only a few of the distinctions that had been commonplace and that are today so obscure as to be a prime source of the widespread insecurities, uncertainties, ambiguities and complexities that prevail throughout the world. The 9/11 attacks did not initiate the insecurities, uncertainties, ambiguities and complexities; rather, the attacks simply aggravated dynamics that were already deeply rooted in the social, political and economic life of people, communities and societies.

While it goes without saying that analysts are subject to the same insecurities and uncertainties, it is also the case that some of us are, by temperament, optimistic and others are pessimistic in our approach to interpreting the prospects for sustainability. Some of us are inclined to stress the Montreal Protocol and numerous other mechanisms through which the global community has successfully addressed environmental challenges, while others emphasise the flouting of commitments made at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio and the failure of states and corporations to live up to their responsibilities. More specifically, some discern a long-term trend towards state compliance with environmental treaties (see e.g. Brown Weiss and Jacobson 1998: ch. 15) and others contend that:

steps in the 1990s toward a more just and ecologically resilient world were too small, too slow, or too poorly rooted . . . Not surprisingly, then, global governmental problems, from climate change to species extinctions, deforestation, and water scarcity, have generally worsened since delegates met in Rio (Gardner 2002: 4).

Likewise, some regard the Global Compact framed by Kofi Annan and the UN as a huge step forward (www.unglobalcompact.org), while still others insist the Compact is ‘deeply flawed’ and should be ‘scrapped or re-designed completely’ (Bruno 2002:4). I myself am optimistic by nature, but the empiricist in me has a hard time ignoring the obstacles to progress towards effective governance that will promote environmental sustainability.

It matters, in short, how one achieves a balance between what one observes and what one wishes was the case. Wishes can prove to be self-fulfilling prophecies if they are grounded within the realm of what is realistically attainable, but all too often they ignore the empirical processes that hinder the realisation of what are seen as moral imperatives.

1.1 Between integration and fragmentation

It is in the context of the complexities that have rendered our world messier than ever that I want to examine the links between governance, sustainability and globalisation in a world that is simultaneously undergoing fragmentation and integration. First, of course, some conceptual specifications are in order. Three concepts require clarification: governance, sustainability and globalisation (which I conceive to embrace both integration and fragmentation).

1.1.1 Governance

Elsewhere I have suggested that the core of governance involves rule systems in which steering mechanisms are employed to frame and implement goals that move communities in the directions they wish to go or that enable them to maintain the institutions and policies they wish to maintain (Rosenau 1995: 13-43). Governance is not the same as government in that the rule systems of the latter are rooted in formal and legal procedures, while those of the former are also marked by informal rule systems (Rosenau 1992: ch. 1). It follows that the achievement of a modicum of governance that promotes environmental sustainability on a global scale requires the development of steering mechanisms that evoke compliant actions, not just words, on the part of the innumerable actors whose work impacts upon the myriad aspects of the natural environment that need to be sustained across generations.

Two key challenges here are especially acute. One concerns the local variability that defies an overall global solution. Some problems are global in scope, but the environmental circumstances of different communities can vary considerably, with the result that global governance must address sustainability in a host of diverse conditions. To aspire to transnational institutions that are relevant to situations everywhere is to drastically misread the governance problem and to fall back on the tragedy-of-the-commons perspective. Needs at the local level must be met without encouraging or reinforcing the NIMBY syndrome. The second involves the nature of compliance, of getting relevant actors to put aside habitual responses and, instead, to yield to authorities that act on behalf of standards that allow for the utilisation of nature’s bounties without depriving future generations of the resources they will need. I shall return later to the ways in which effective governance rests on the capacity to evoke compliance with authority. For the moment it suffices to note that the sum of the world’s formal and informal rule systems at all levels of community amount to what can properly be called global governance and that, for reasons elaborated below, it is a highly disaggregated and only a minimally co-ordinated system of governance.

1.1.2 Sustainability

As it has developed among activists and observers alike, environmental sustainability has both empirical and moral dimensions. On the one hand, it refers to those empirical processes whereby humankind preserves or exploits the resources of nature in such a way that present and subsequent generations do or do not have available access to comparable standards of living. Viewed in this way, sustainability is thus about meeting the needs of the future as well as the present, about the long run as well as the short term, about the capacity of people to ponder the well-being of their unborn great-grandchildren as well as the circumstances of their own generation. But efforts to promote a desirable future for both the unborn and the born are loaded with values and it is here where sustainability is pervaded with moral dimensions, with questions of right and wrong, with loaded interpretations of scientific enquiries. Empirical data—the findings of science—on whether a particular practice promotes or deters sustainable development in the future can be interpreted in diverse ways, depending on the perspectives from which they are approached.

Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that the ongoing discourse about sustainable development is marked by florid affirmations and vivid denunciations. Whatever the solidity of the empirical findings that may be uncovered about species survival, pollution, resource utilisation, and all the other foci that comprise the environmental issue-area, inevitably policies designed to achieve sustainability will be deeply ensconced in unending controversies and conflicts that make widespread compliance with the policies improbable. A major source of the controversies stems from governmental structures at local, national and international levels in which responsibility for the ecological, social and economic dimensions of sustainability is assigned to competitive agencies that must be co-ordinated for meaningful policies to be adopted. The chances of consensuses and new institutional steering mechanisms forming to overcome these bureaucratic obstacles and the environmental threats they sustain are thus dim and central to a bleak view of the prospects for the future. It is not difficult to imagine the great-grandchildren of future generations living under even more dire conditions than prevail at present.

1.1.3 Globalisation

I have found it helpful to conceive of globalisation as rooted in two basic and contrary processes. One involves all those forces that press for centralisation, integration and globalisation, and the other consists of those forces that press for decentralisation, fragmentation and localisation. In turn, these polarities can be viewed as either philosophical premises or as empirical processes. As philosophical premises, they amount to forms of either localism or globalism, both of which consist of mind-sets, of orientations, of world-views. Localism pertains to those mental sets that focus on and value the familiar and close-at-hand arrangements located within conventional community and national boundaries, while globalism involves orientations towards the distant circumstances that lie beyond national boundaries. But localism and globalism can usefully be distinguished from localisation and globalisation, which I conceive to be empirical processes rather than mind-sets, processes that are boundary-spanning in the case of globalisation and that either contract within conventional boundaries or do not span them in the case of localisation.

Whether globalism and localism are viewed as orientations towards or as processes of integration and fragmentation, they are best conceived as a singular phenomenon wherein the foregoing polarities converge. Indeed, it is the dominant phenomenon of the epoch that has emerged subsequent to the Cold War, so much so that I have coined a word designed to capture the inextricable links between the individual and societal tendencies to integrate across boundaries that are the hallmark of globalisation and the counter-tendencies towards fragmentation that are fomented by localising resistances to boundary-spanning activities. My label is that of fragmegration, an ungainly and contrived word that has the virtue of capturing in a single word—and thus of drawing our attention to—the extraordinarily complex phenomena that sustain the endless interactions between the forces of fragmentation and integration. I dare to suggest that, by viewing the world through fragmegrative lenses, one can discern the underlying dynamics of our epoch with a clarity that is not otherwise available.²

In other words, globalisation and localisation feed off each other, stimulate responses to each other, in endless interactions at every level of community. At times the interactions are co-operative, but often they are conflictual and underlie many of the issues on the global agenda. Hence, it is not far-fetched to assert that virtually every increment of globalisation gives rise to an increment of localisation, and vice versa, so thoroughly are the two contrary orientations and processes interconnected.

While fragmegrative dynamics tend to be conflictual, it is useful to reiterate that many environmental issues originate in local communities and the resolution of more than a few of them involve a measure of decentralisation founded on the perspectives of localism. In the energy field, for example, sustainable enterprises are estimated to be most efficient when they are decentralised in the private and non-profit sector (Sachs et al. 2002: 29), an estimate that runs counter to practices in many countries but that is quite con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1. Governance and global sustainability: setting the stage
• Part 2. Cross-cutting issues
• Part 3. Actors in global governance and their changing roles
• About the contributors
• Abbreviations
• Index