In this timely book, leading scholar Oran Young reflects on the future of the global order. Developing new lenses through which to consider needs for governance arising on a global scale, Young investigates the grand challenges of the 21st century requiring the most urgent and sustained planetary responses: protecting the Earth’s climate system; controlling the eruption of pandemics; suppressing disruptive uses of cyberspace; and guiding the biotechnology revolution.
The world today confronts unprecedented needs for governance having profound implications for human well-being that are difficult - perhaps impossible - to address effectively within the prevailing global political order. This makes it pertinent to ask whether we must assume that the global order will continue during the foreseeable future to take the form of a state-based society as we think about options for addressing these challenges. Treating political orders as complex systems and drawing on our understanding of the dynamics of such systems, the author explores the prospects for a critical transition in the prevailing global political order. Individual sections analyze constitutive pressures, systemic forces, tipping elements, the effects of scale, the defining characteristics of potential successors to the current order, and pathways to a new order. In the process, seeking to make a more general contribution to our understanding of critical transitions in large political orders.
Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.
This book is an introduction to complex systems thinking at the global governance level. It offers concepts, tools, and ways of thinking about how systems change that can be applied to the most wicked problems facing the world today. More than an abstract argument for complexity theory, the book offers a targeted critique of today’s highest-profile proposals for improving the governance of our environment, security, finance, health, and digital space. It suggests that we should spend less effort and resources on upgrading existing institutions, and more on understanding how they (and we) relate to each other. The volume will be essential reading for public policymakers, NGOs and think tanks, foreign policy experts, government officials, and global decision-makers.
Learning is critical for our capacity to govern the environment and adapt proactively to complex and emerging environmental issues. Yet, underlying barriers can challenge our capacity for learning in environmental governance. As a result, we often fail to adequately understand pressing environmental problems or produce innovative and effective solutions. This Element synthesizes insights from extensive academic and applied research on learning around the world to inform both research and practice. We distill the social and structural features of governance to help researchers and practitioners better understand, diagnose, and support learning and more adaptive responses to environmental problems.
Historical Dictionary and Environmentalism, Third Edition provides a balanced and wide-ranging overview of the most important events, issues, organizations, ideas, and people shaping the direction of environmentalism worldwide. This book is global in scope, covering a large range of perspectives and countries with a focus on the period since 1960. This book contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 400 cross-referenced entries on organizations, people, issues, events, and countries shaping environmentalism. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about environmentalism.
A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences. Deadly viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants cross the globe unimpeded by national borders. While the consequences of these flows range across scales, from the planetary to the local, the authority and resources to manage them are concentrated mainly at one level: the nation-state. This profound mismatch between the scale of planetary challenges and the institutions tasked with governing them is leading to cascading systemic failures. In the groundbreaking Children of a Modest Star, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman not only challenge dominant ways of thinking about humanity's relationship to the planet and the political forms that presently govern it, but also present a new, innovative framework that corresponds to our inherently planetary condition. Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the holistic findings of Earth system science, Blake and Gilman argue that it is essential to reimagine our governing institutions in light of the fact that we can only thrive if the multi-species ecosystems we inhabit are also flourishing. Aware of the interlocking challenges we face, it is no longer adequate merely to critique our existing systems or the modernist assumptions that helped create them. Blake and Gilman propose a bold, original architecture for global governance—what they call planetary subsidiarity—designed to enable the enduring habitability of the Earth for humans and non-humans alike. Children of a Modest Star offers a clear-eyed and urgent vision for constructing a system capable of stabilizing a planet in crisis.
Connections between resources and migration operate as a complex adaptive system rather than being premised in linear, causal mechanisms. The systems thinking advocated within this Element increases the inclusion of socio-psychological, financial, demographic, environmental and political dimensions that mediate resource-(im)mobility pathways. The Earth Systems Governance paradigm provides a way to manage global migration flows more effectively, allowing for consideration of networks and interdependencies in addition to its inherent adaptiveness. Resource rushes, hydropower displacement, and climate-induced retreat from coastal areas are all examples of circumstances linking resources and human mobility. Movement can also ameliorate environmental conditions and hence close monitoring of impacts and policies which harness benefits of migration is advocated. Green remittance bonds, and land tenure policies favoring better arable resource usage are key ingredients of a more systems-oriented approach to managing mobility. The Global Compact on Migration offers an opportunity to operationalize such adaptive governance approaches in the Anthropocene.
The mushrooming of trade agreements and their interlinkages with environmental governance calls for new research on the trade and environment interface. The more than 700 existing preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include ever more diverse and far-reaching environmental provisions. While missed opportunities remain and harmful provisions persist, numerous environmental provisions in PTAs entail promising potential. They promote the implementation of environmental treaties and cover numerous environmental issues. New concepts, data, and methods, including detailed content analysis across multiple institutions, are needed to explain these interlinkages and understand whether and how PTAs with environmental provisions can contribute to tackling global environmental challenges. Making use of the most extensive coding of environmental provisions in PTAs to date and combining quantitative data with qualitative analyses, this Element provides a comprehensive yet fine-grained picture of the drivers and effects of environmental provisions in PTAs. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
For many years, suggestions to 'geoengineer' the climate occupied a marginal role in climate change science and politics. Today, visions of massive carbon drawdown and sunlight reflection have become reasonable additions to conventional mitigation and adaptation. Why did researchers start engaging with ideas that were, for a long time, considered highly controversial? And how did some of these ideas come to be perceived worthy of research funding and in need of international governance? This Element provides an analysis of the recent history and evolution of geoengineering as a governance object. It explains how geoengineering evolved from a thought shared by a small network into a governance object that is likely to shape the future of climate politics. In the process, it generates a theory on the earliest phase of the policy cycle and sheds light on the question why we govern the things we govern in the first place.
