This book analyses the significance of socialāecological knowledge for the purposes of critical review and renewal of global environmental governance and the sustainability process. The book is the third and final part in a series on the development of social ecology as a new interdisciplinary science of natureāsociety relations The first two books, also from this publisher, were the preparatory study of āNatural Resource Use and Global Changeā from 2013, describing the development of a new interdisciplinary social ecology , and the theoretical reconstruction of an emerging socialāecological theory of natureāsociety interaction in āSocialāEcological Transformation : Reconnecting Society and Natureā from 2016. The new publication builds on the earlier ones, taking up further themes and problems to be analysed in social ecology , thus completing the project of reconstructing social ecology in historical, theoretical, and practical perspectives. In difference to the first two books, this one focusses on the practical problems of knowledge synthesis , transfer and application for the solution of global environmental and resource use problems in global environmental governance . It does so by showing, how the practical governance processes depend from scientific input, not only of empirical knowledge, furthermore of interdisciplinary and theoretical knowledge from system analyses of socialāecological systems .
The perspective of analysis in the following chapters is interdisciplinary, showing, that the discussion of governance cannot be limited to empirically investigated problems and deficits of negotiation and implementation of environmental policies, to questions of compliance and coercion. Environmental policy and governance are analysed here in the context of knowledge about global social and environmental change as it is created in social ecology . The overarching aim of the analysis is to identify possible pathways of socialāecological transformation of modern society to a more environmentally sustainable future society that encompasses the national societies in a gradually emerging global society. The transformation processes include political and further processes that can only to a limited degree be managed, controlled and regulated: processes of global social change , especially economic globalisation and the emergence of global societal and economic systems; and global environmental change , especially climate change, biodiversity reduction, and land use change, including urbanisation. Only when these broader processes are analysed and understood, so the guiding assumption of the following analyses, can global policy- and governance processes be developed and deal successfully with the regulation of such complex processes of change that result from the interaction of modern society with nature.
Recent theoretical approaches for analysing global change include the emerging socialāecological theory of natureāsociety interaction, the emerging theory and approach of earth system governance , and similar interdisciplinary approaches in environmental research, especially sustainability science, political ecology and world system analysis. All of these approaches create knowledge for the reformulation and renewal of sustainable development that became the guiding idea in national and international environmental policies in the last three decades, without resulting so far in significant progress towards sustainability. The progress achieved is limited to national and regional levels of policy and natural resource management, but hardly advancing at international and global levels, as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and later global assessments have shown. The global transformation to sustainability is, after reviewing the interdisciplinary knowledge about global change, reconceptualised. New approaches of global environmental governance that can support the transformation to sustainability better than the limited knowledge from empirical policy analyses, require inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge integration as it is discussed in social ecology (Hummel et al. 2017; Gƶrg et al. 2017). According to these and further critical discussions of environmental governance (Peterson 2018), it is especially social-scientific knowledge and non-scientific, practical and local knowledge that is insufficiently used in governance processes which remain, also in global governance, multi-scale approaches of integrated local, national and global governance. The knowledge used needs to be continually reviewed, synthesised, and translated for policies which include other knowledge use practices than environmental policies so far: knowledge integration and synthesis, cooperation of governmental and non-governmental actors, policies as experiments, collective learning, multi-scale and adaptive governance. Whereas so far power relations were a dominant theme in discussing and reviewing environmental governance, in future more attention needs to be given to knowledge processes and practices.
Environmental politics and governance deal with problems which never before have been subject of political action or regulation; these problems are in their complexity beyond the limits of specialised knowledge, or even beyond the limits of presently available scientific knowledge at all. What needs to be learned for environmental governance needs to be learned on the way of transformation, in new logics and with new methods of scientific research that have for the first time be described in social ecology and approaches like sustainability science. Environmental policy and governance become paradigmatic examples of dealing with limits of knowledge and ignorance. Governance is seen in social ecology from another, interdisciplinary perspective, and with other aims, that of supporting the socialāecological transformation of modern society to a more environmentally sustainable future society. In this interdisciplinary perspective, global environmental governance appears as a field of deficits where new forms of knowledge use and knowledge practices are required to deal with deficits of scientific and practical knowledge (reflected in the debates of āpost-normal scienceā or sustainability science), deficits of methodological and theoretical reflection, of discussion of theoryāpractice relations, and of scienceāpolicy relations. For its renewal and improvement, global environmental governance needs to apply theoretical and interdisciplinary knowledge that is usually not used in the policy-centred debates; the difficulties are that of how to deal this new knowledge in the policy and governance discourses and practices, that are neither prepared for nor open for such broadening of the knowledge use.
Global environmental governance is understood here in a broader sense than in the political debates of global governance (Meadowcroft 2007; Moomaw et al. 2017). The broadening includes two new elements of a critical analysis of complex systems: (a) an analysis of global political and economic power relations and structures institutionalised in the modern economic world system that influences in manifold ways the policy processes; and (b) an analysis of the complex interactions between social and ecological systems at various scale levels, from social to global. The latter interactions are the key for understanding the relations between environmental governance and the broader systemic processes of global social and environmental change and transformation towards sustainability (Krausmann et al. 2009).
With the first step of broadening the perspective, the analysis goes beyond analyses of the formal institutions and international regimes for environmental policy that make the bulk of global environmental policies, with climate and sustainability regimes as overarching processes. The aim is to identify the multiple forms of dependence of global politics and governance from social and ecological processes, from international power relations, and from the knowledge practices in political processes and institutions that support, select and limit simultaneously the success of transformation to sustainability at regional, national and global levels. The selective knowledge use, the distortions, the controversies, the limits, the supporting and the blocking factors in global agency should be understood better (International Social Science Council 2010). The first step connects with the second step of critical analyses, the use of interdisciplinary socialāecological knowledge to understand the non-social, the ecological processes that influence, determine or limit the processes of global environmental governance . This knowledge is generated and structured in theoretical and empirical interdisciplinary research in the environmental sciences, as knowledge about modern society and its interaction with nature, about the modification of nature through humans in the epoch now called āthe anthropocene ā. The knowledge includes that about complex global ecological processes, biophysical interaction and feedback in material cycles, processes of global environmental change , the socially structured interaction between nature and society at large. In this second step of knowledge generation and integration, environmental governance is reconnected with the socialāecological transformation to sustainability as the overarching process.
As shorthand formulation for this broad perspective the inexact term of āintegrated global governanceā is used; it describes interdisciplinary socialāecological forms of analysis in which multi-scale processes, inter-systemic relations, interdependencies and entanglements between social (political, economic) systems and ecological systems are included. This perspective has some similarities with the term of earth systems governance used in the global governance project (Biermann 2007). The differences to this perspective, important for the reasoning in this book, include a more critical system analysis of interacting social and ecological systems: less policy-centred than earth system governance and more critical with regard to the underlying normative ideas and the idealism that influence earth governance thinking and large parts of environmental thinking of environmental movements. To make visible, how governance is dependent on complex social and ecological systems and their transformation is a precondition to develop and renew environmental governance that has lost dynamics after decades of struggling with insufficiently understood or ignored processes at the interfaces of nature and society that materialise in global environmental change . The resulting knowledge problems discussed in the following chapters can be summarised as follows.
- 1.Inter- and transdisciplinary disciplinary knowledge integration connecting environmental research and political practice are required for the further development of global environmental governance , where the knowledge needs to be applied for implementing global action programmes in climate policy, biodiversity management, land use policy, water management. In research, in science communication, and in the application of available knowledge in global policy and governance the practical difficulty met is that of manifold, competing and contradicting forms of knowledge in environmental research and contradicting interpretations of global changeāmore than a lack of knowledge that is often diagnosed and highlighted as difficulty of knowledge integration and application, for example, in the hypothesis of āpost-normal scienceā (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). That environmental regulation shows, so far, little success, is discussed as a consequence of the complexity of interacting global systems and processes, as policy failure resulting from power asymmetries between and within countries and from the bureaucratic organisation of policy processes, as deficits of coordination of policies resulting from vested interests of powerful actors, and as contradictions between the processes of sustainable development and economic globalisation or deregulation of markets (Martens and Raza 2010). To discuss the environmental problems in terms of management and governance, cooperation and coordination of policies, as action and implementation deficits, implies, however, simplifications, selective knowledge use, reductions of the complexity of processes in interacting social and ecological systems, and as consequence misunderstandings of environmental problems as such that can be solved in policy processes, through policy reforms, clean-up, repair of damages and restoration of ecosystems. Such attempts of problem-solving through reforms and legislation have inher...