Sustainability Governance and Hierarchy provides a solid, theoretically and empirically grounded reflection on the concept of "sustainability governance". This idea has been growing in popularity in social science literature, as well as among decision-makers and governance actors, as it brings together two vast fields of study that have sometimes been dismissed as vague or ideologically loaded. In order to link the concepts of "sustainability" and "governance", the book is organized around the exploration of hierarchy issues, which often lie in the background of the existing literature but are not the focus of analysis. The chapters reflect ongoing controversies and dialogue between scientists with different theoretical and thematic backgrounds, who are all willing to participate in and contribute to a constructive effort to reach a more inclusive and more theoretically relevant stage for sustainability studies, being content with merely global analyses. The book is an innovative contribution to the hierarchy/non-hierarchy debate regarding governance arrangements in the field of sustainability and sustainability studies. This book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars focusing on governance issues, sustainability studies, environmental studies, as well as on the methodological aspects of the social sciences (economy, geography, law, philosophy, political science, sociology, urbanism and planning). This book is published with the support of the European Union, the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Upper Rhine Interreg V programme, as part of the "Upper Rhine Cluster for Sustainability Research" project.
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which were adopted by the United Nations in September 2015 are universally applicable in all 193 UN Member States and connect the big challenges of our time, such as hunger and poverty, climate change, health in an urbanised environment, sustainable energy, mobility, economic development and environmental degradation. Sustainability has the characteristics of a ‘wicked problem’, for which there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. This book tests the hypothesis that the implementation of sustainable development, and in particular the 2015 SDGs, requires tailor-made metagovernance or ‘governance of governance’. This is necessary to develop effective governance and high quality and inclusive public administration and to foster policy and institutional coherence to support implementing the SDGs. Based on the growing literature on governance and metagovernance, and taking into account the specificities of societal factors such as different values and traditions in different countries, the book presents a framework for the design and management of SDG implementation. It shows how hierarchical, network and market governance styles can be combined and how governance failure can be prevented or dealt with. The book presents an overview of fifty ‘shades of governance’ which differ for each governance style, and a sketch of a concrete method to apply sustainability metagovernance. Metagovernance for Sustainability is relevant to academic and practitioner fields across many disciplines and problem areas. It will be of particular interest to scholars, students and policy-makers studying Sustainable Development, Governance and Metagovernance, Public Management and Capacity Building.
Sustaining our agricultural landscapes is no longer just a technical, scientific or even political problem, but it has evolved into a socially complex, so-called wicked problem of conflicting social governance and economics. This creates an extreme economic obstacle where the value of ecosystem services remains low and diffuse and the transactions costs remain high and multiple.Using Uber-like business platform technology and a shared governance model, a symbiotic demand for environmental benefits is created. Enabling multi-sector transactions for environmental benefits, this platform innovation would remedy the "tragedy of the commons"; the economic nemesis to achieving landscape sustainability. In a nutshell, to sustain our agricultural landscapes a transdisciplinary approach supported by a shared governance model housed within a multi-sided platform in needed. This book introduces an assessment framework identifying governance actors, styles and ratios for socio-ecological systems. The assessment uses a new governance compass to identify the types of actors completing which tasks and identifies the styles of governance used to complete the tasks. It is aimed to anyone involved in sustainability science, agricultural policy planning, or integrated landscape design.
The contributors to this book critically examine the performance of new modes of governance in areas of limited statehood, drawing on a range of in-depth case studies on issues of climate change, biodiversity, and health. The Paris Agreement for Climate Change or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) rely on new modes of governance for implementation. New modes of governance such as market-based instruments, public-private partnerships or stakeholder participation initiatives have been praised for playing a pivotal role in effective and legitimate sustainability governance. Yet, do they also deliver in areas of limited statehood? States such as Malaysia or the Dominican Republic partly lack the ability to implement and enforce rules; their domestic sovereignty is limited. Exploring this perspective on governance, the authors demonstrate that areas of limited statehood are not ungoverned or ungovernable spaces. The book elaborates how and under what conditions new modes of governance emerge in areas of limited statehood, and examines their relative effectiveness.
‘Transgovernance: Advancing Sustainability Governance’ analyses the question what recent and ongoing changes in the relations between politics, science and media – together characterized as the emergence of a knowledge democracy – may imply for governance for sustainable development, on global and other levels of societal decision making, and the other way around: How can the discussion on sustainable development contribute to a knowledge democracy? How can concepts such as second modernity, reflexivity, configuration theory, (meta)governance theory and cultural theory contribute to a ‘transgovernance’ approach which goes beyond mainstream sustainability governance? This volume presents contributions from various angles: international relations, governance and metagovernance theory, (environmental) economics and innovation science. It offers challenging insights regarding institutions and transformation processes, and on the paradigms behind contemporary sustainability governance.This book gives the sustainability governance debate a new context. It transforms classical questions into new options for societal decision making and identifies starting points and strategies towards effective governance of transitions to sustainability.
In Sustainable Governance in Hybrid Organizations the author Linne Marie Lauesen explores how businesses that have succeeded in conducting sustainable governance, manage and govern their sustainable performance: in other words, how they manage to be economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable. In this respect, hybrid organizations that are formed as businesses with a mission to be sustainable and to provide services for society - such as water companies - are a good point of departure. Water companies are highly regulated whilst working primarily for the betterment of society and on behalf of generations to come, for whom clean and plentiful water and the preservation of nature is a must. Linne Marie has dug deep into these types of hybrid organizations in order to reveal which mechanisms of organizational governance for sustainability are at play, and how these organizations manage to balance their triple bottom lines in order to survive financially, socially, and environmentally and make a business out of their conduct. Balancing these three bottom lines in a sustainable way is explained in a clear and accessible way and the juxtaposition between non-profit and for-profit water companies will show how this model can be transferred to other business spheres.
This book explores the intrinsically multiscale issue of renewable energy transition from a local, national and transnational perspective, and provides insights into current developments in the Upper Rhine Region that can serve as an international model. Organised around the exploration of stakeholder issues, the volume first describes a framework for public action and modelling and then articulates a triple complementary focus from the viewpoint of law, economics and sociology. This multidisciplinary approach is anchored in the social sciences, but also explores the ways in which technological issues are increasingly debated in the implementation of the ecological transition. With a focus on the Upper Rhine Region of France, Germany and Switzerland, the contributions throughout analyse how concrete regional projects emerge, and whether they are carried out by local authorities, private energy groups, network associations or committed citizens. From this, it appears that real-world energy transition modes can be best understood as permanent transactional processes involving institutional regulations, economic levers and barriers and social interactions. This book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars focusing on renewable energy transition, stakeholder issues, environment and sustainability studies, as well as those who are interested in the methodological aspects of the social sciences, especially within the fields of sociology, law, economy, geography, political science, urbanism and planning.
This PhD thesis approaches the phenomenon of supply chain governance for social sustainability in the ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh. This research is based on a study of eight large multinational corporations (e.g. clothing brands and retailers) and their ready-made garment suppliers. The purpose of this research is to understand how supply chain governance mechanisms and governance structures improve social sustainability performance when stakeholders are engaged. The study identifies four main governance systems, namely, market-based, hierarchical controlbased, collaborative multi-stakeholder-based and relational cross-sectoral-based. These governance systems are employed in the supply chain by the multinational corporations in combination with different stakeholders, such as suppliers, multi-stakeholder-initiatives, and non-government organisations. The study focuses on the challenges faced by the multinational corporations to ensure social sustainability, whilst at the same time, incorporating suppliers’ viewpoints on the consequences of different governance systems for social sustainability. This research shows the choice of governance structures from market-based, hierarchy-based, collaboration-based and relational-based depend on the cost of managing relationships with the stakeholders and potential risks of governance in a given situation. An effective governance structure for a multinational corporation in a particular context is determined by how well the structure supports governance mechanisms to reduce associated transaction risks that results from potential opportunistic behaviour of the suppliers. In this research, it is argued that governance structure provides the platform for practicing a set of governance mechanisms. The study claims that social sustainability governance incorporates three mechanisms with separate outcomes: one consists of buyer-driven control-based mechanisms which include codes of conduct, supplier assessment and monitoring, and supplier training for regular social compliance; the second consists of multi-stakeholder-based governance mechanisms for structural compliance when unexpected problems occur, for example, building collapse, electrical and fire safety risks emerge; and the third comprises cross-sectoral governance mechanisms when the multinational corporations involve with non-government organisations for social development of the garment workers and community by facilitating drinking water, health-hygiene, education, and so on. This thesis contributes to the Sustainable Supply Chain Management literature by expanding knowledge of supply chain governance through bringing an understanding of governance mechanisms, governance structures and stakeholder engagements for social sustainability. As the demand for supply chain governance for social sustainability are growing, this thesis can help responsible corporate sourcing managers to develop a deeper understanding of how supply chain governance can affect social sustainability. Denna doktorsavhandling tar sig an fenomenet leverantörsstyrning för social hållbarhet i klädindustrin i Bangladesh. Forskningen baseras på en studie av åtta stora multinationella företag, tillika återförsäljare av kläder och välkända klädmärken. Syftet med studien är att förstå hur leverantörsstyrningsmekanismer och styrstrukturer kan förbättra socialt hållbarhetsarbete när flera aktörer är engagerade och samverkar. Resultatet av studien indikerar att multinationella företag de facto engagerar sig med andra aktörer för att förbättra sin förmåga att bedriva socialt hållbarhetsarbete. Studien identifierar fyra olika typer av leverantörsstyrsystem: ett marknadsbaserat, ett hierarkiskt kontrollbaserat, ett kollaborativt multi-intressentbaserat samt ett relationellt sektorsövergripande system. Dessa styrningssystem tillämpas i leverantörskedjan av de multinationella företagen i samarbete med andra aktörer såsom leverantörer, ‘multi-intressentinitiativ’ och icke-statliga organisationer. Studien fokuserar dels på de utmaningar som föreligger för de multinationella företagen när det gäller att säkerställa social hållbarhet, dels på hur leverantörer uppfattar konsekvenserna av de olika styrningssystemen för social hållbarhet. Denna forskning visar att valet av styrstruktur, från marknadsbaserad, hierarkibaserad, kollaborativ och relationell är beroende dels av kostnaden för att hantera och upprätthålla relationer med de olika aktörerna, dels av de potentiella riskerna som föreligger i en viss situation. Vad som utgör en effektiv styrstruktur för ett multinationellt företag i en viss given kontext avgörs av hur väl strukturen stödjer styrningsmekanismer för att reducera transaktionsrisker som bottnar i ett potentiellt opportunistiskt beteende hos leverantörerna. I denna forskning argumenteras det för att struktur ger en plattform för att tillämpa ett antal styrningsmekanismer. Studien visar att styrning av social hållbarhet omfattar tre typer av mekanismer med olika utgång. En består av köparstyrda styrningsmekanismer som omfattar uppförandekoder, leverantörskontroll och leverantörsutbildning. Den andra består av multi-initiativbaserade styrningsmekanismer av hur det strukturella arbetet för att hantera oväntade problem (t.ex. bygg-, el- och brandsäkerhetsrisker) efterföljs. Det tredje omfattar sektorsövergripande styrningsmekanismer där de multinationella företagen samverkar med lokala icke-statliga organisationer i projekt som syftar till social utveckling (tillgång till rent vatten, hälso- & utbildningsinsatser, etc.) för fabriksarbetarna och det omgivande samhället. Denna avhandling bidrar till Sustainable Supply Chain Management-litteraturen då den utvidgar kunskapen om leverantörsstyrning för social hållbarhet genom en den ger en ökad förståelse för styrningsmekanismer, styrstrukturer och olika aktörers engagemang för social hållbarhet. I takt med att behovet av leverantörsstyrning för social hållbarhet ökar kan denna avhandling hjälpa ansvariga ‘corporate sourcing managers’ att utveckla en fördjupad förståelse för hur leverantörsstyrning kan påverka social hållbarhet.
This textbook introduces advanced students of International Relations (and beyond) to the ways in which the advent of, and reflections on, the Anthropocene impact on the study of global politics and the disciplinary foundations of IR. The book contains 24 chapters, authored by senior academics as well as early career scholars, and is divided into four parts, detailing, respectively, why the Anthropocene is of importance to IR, challenges to traditional approaches to security, the question of governance and agency in the Anthropocene, and new methods and approaches, going beyond the human/nature divide. Chapter 9, “Security in the Anthropocene” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
This book analyses the evolution of the sustainability discourse in the European Union, exploring the conditions necessary for sustainable development to move from a conceptual model into a model for action for strategic decision makers at all levels of governance. This book questions the extent to which the discourse on sustainability has become embedded into governance structures in Europe. It focuses on the importance of the nature of the language of the political discourse on sustainability and how ideas are communicated amongst the actors and stakeholders in the policy making process, as well as assessing the conceptual, political, institutional and operational barriers apparent across the European geographic region. Drawing case studies from numerous policy areas including climate change, EU emissions trading scheme, renewable energy, nuclear energy, the European integrated energy market, transport mobility, and environmental protection, expert contributors unveil a narrowing of the discourse on sustainability that has taken place in Europe. However, a considerable discontinuity remains between the economic and environmental objectives of sustainable development, and the authors argue that it is essential that conditions for a dynamic discourse, open to multiple participants, are developed. Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe will be of strong interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, governance, sustainable development and environmental politics and studies.
