lder groups and teams, in particular those which improve motivation, information flows, and collaborative learning. The report covers four main areas: i) a review of contemporary approaches to environmental policy making; ii) a review of frameworks for supporting behaviour change; iii) providing an outline of the key concepts for managing participation in practice; and iv) a description of techniques for building group capacity for environmental change.
Editorial: Governance for sustainability This editorial by Derk Loorbach in “Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy” talks about the Dutch experiences with “transition management” as a novel governance paradigm dealing with long-term social change. Transition management is a coordinated effort to influence the speed and direction of large-scale social change based on the concepts of social transitions and sustainable development. In this sense he argues, transition management as governance for sustainability is a collective process of learning-by-doing and doing-by-learning based on a shared way of thinking. The approach is not to achieve fixed goals, but to gradually work towards common ambitions through innovation, integration, and transition. And the beauty is that everyone can contribute in his or her own way and in doing so the search itself becomes the process of governance for sustainable development.
Conceptualizing climate change governance beyond the international regime: a review of four theoretical approaches This paper by Chukwumerije Okereke and Harriet Bulkeley reviews four theoretical approaches for considering the governance of climate change at the international level â€“ regime theory, global governance, neo-Gramscian and governmentality perspectives â€“ to assess their respective strengths and weaknesses. Based on the review, the authors draw out some concepts around which future research on the involvement of non-nation state actors (NNSAs) in global climate governance might be framed. These include: (i) the nature of the state; (ii) the character of power and authority in the international arena; (iii) the underlying dynamics of governance; and (iv) governance as a process. This 2007 working paper from the Tyndall Centre concludes that although eclecticism is hardly celebrated in the IR scholarship, one ultimately would have to draw from the four theoretical traditions in order to generate a robust framework for conceptualizing climate governance beyond the international regime.
Governance for sustainable development: a framework This paper by Annemarie van Zeijl-Rozema, Ron Cörvers and René Kemp deals with the linking of two complex concepts, governance and sustainable development. Sustainable development is a normative concept, dealing with different temporal and spatial scales and with multiple stakeholders. It indicates a process of human progress. Sometimes sustainable development is objectified in terms of goals and principles, but the exact meaning of sustainable development is usually left open. Governance is seen as a means to steer the process of sustainable development. However, governance is not a straightforward concept either. It can be seen as a collection of rules, stakeholder involvement and processes to realise a common goal. The central assumption in this paper is that sustainable development cannot be achieved without governance because of the nature of the sustainable development concept. Sustainable development incorporates wicked issues, social complexity and weak institutionalisation. In this paper we argue that the many perspectives on sustainable development can be described meaningfully between the extremes of the rational, objective perspective and the normative perspective of sustainable development. Furthermore, the variety of modes of governance can be captured between hierarchical governance and co-governance. From this we derive four typologies of state-society relations (governance) for sustainable development: the rational state, the rational society, the normative state and the normative society. The main conc