Earth System Governance Project

Aims

The Earth System Governance Project aims to contribute to science on the large, complex challenges of governance in an era of rapid and large-scale environmental change. The project seeks to create a better understanding of the role of institutions, organizations and governance mechanisms by which humans regulate their relationship with the natural environment. The Earth System Governance Project aims to integrate governance research at all levels. The project aims to examine problems of the ‘global commons’, but also local problems from air pollution to the preservation of waters, waste treatment or desertification and soil degradation. However, due to natural interdependencies local environmental pollution can be transformed into changes of the global system that affect other localities. Therefore, the Earth System Governance Project looks at institutions and governance processes both local and globally.

The Earth System Governance Project is a scientific effort, but also aims to assist policy responses to the pressing problems of earth system transformation Is very good.

Conceptual framework

The Earth System Governance Project organizes its research according to a conceptual framework guided by five analytical problems. These are the problems of the overall architecture of earth system governance, of agency beyond the state and of the state, of the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes, of their accountability and legitimacy and of modes of allocation and access in earth system governance.

The concept of Earth System Governance is defined as:

... the interrelated and increasingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change and, in particular, earth system transformation, within the normative context of sustainable development.

Origin and history

In 2001, the four then active global change research programmes (DIVERSITAS, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, World Climate Research Programme, and International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change) agreed to intensify co-operation through setting up an overarching Earth System Science Partnership. The research communities represented in this Partnership contend in the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change that the earth system now operates ‘well outside the normal state exhibited over the past 500,000 years’ and that ‘human activity is generating change that extends well beyond natural variability—in some cases, alarmingly so— and at rates that continue to accelerate.’ To cope with this challenge, the four global change research programmes have called ‘urgently’ for strategies for Earth System management’.

In March 2007, in response to the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration, the Scientific Committee of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), the overarching social science programme in the field, mandated the drafting of the Science Plan of the Earth System Governance Project by a newly appointed Scientific Planning Committee. The Earth System Governance Project builds on the results of an earlier long-term research programme, the IHDP core project Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC). In 2008, the Earth System Governance Project was officially launched.

In 2009, the Science and Implementation Plan of the Earth System Governance Project was published. In the science and implementation plan, the conceptual problems, cross-cutting themes, flagship projects, and its policy relevance are outlined in detail. The Science Plan was written by an international, interdisciplinary Scientific Planning Committee chaired by Prof. Frank Biermann, which drew on a consultative process that started in 2004. Several working drafts of this Science Plan have been presented and discussed at a series of international events and conferences, and numerous scholars in the field, as well as practitioners, have offered suggestions, advice, and critique.

Since then, the project has evolved into a broader research alliance that builds on an international network of research centers, lead faculty and research fellows. After the termination of the IHDP in 2014, the activities of the Earth System Governance research alliance are supported by an international steering group of representatives of the main Earth System Governance Research Centres and the global group of lead faculty and research fellows.

Global research network

For its activities and implementation, the Earth System Governance Project relies on a global network of experts from different academic and cultural backgrounds. The research network consists of different groups of scientific experts. The Earth System Governance Project operates under the direction of a Scientific Steering Group chaired by Frank Biermann. The role of the Scientific Steering Committee is to guide the implementation of the Earth System Governance Science Plan. The Lead Faculty of the Earth System Governance Project is a group of individual scientists who take over (shared) responsibility for the development of research on particular analytical problems. Earth System Governance Fellows are scientists who link their own research projects with the broader themes and questions raised by the Earth System Governance Science and Implementation Plan.

An important element in the project organisation is the global alliance of research centres that brings together the VU University Amsterdam; the Australian National University; Chiang Mai University; Colorado State University; Lund University; University of East Anglia; University of Oldenburg; the Stockholm Resilience Centre; the University of Toronto; the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Yale University. In addition, strong networks on earth system governance research exist in China, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia.

Conferences

Since 2007, the Project has organized major scientific conferences addressing the topics of governance and global environmental change, including:

Research output

The network of researchers affiliated with the Earth System Governance Project has brought out many reports and books, and has published in journals such as International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics; Ecological Economics; Global Environmental Change; Environmental Science & Policy Global Environmental Politics and Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability Recurring research topics of the Earth System Governance Project are water governance, climate governance and fragmentation of global environmental governance.

A related MIT Press Book series is designed to address the research challenge of earth system governance. Additionally, the Project publishes regular Working Papers, which are peer-reviewed online publications that broadly address questions raised by the Project’s Science and Implementation Plan.

Several special issues of topics related to earth system governance have been published in scientific journals over the last years.

Education programmes

Earth system governance as a research object is quickly emerging, and as a consequence, the number of education programmes on bachelor, master and doctoral level related to earth system governance steadily increases. A number of institutes and universities currently collaborate in a Global Alliance of Earth System Governance Research Centres, including:

A substantial number of the workshops and other events of the project are capacity-building activities. The project also organizes, endorses and provides teaching to summer schools and capacity building events and programs. In addition, members of the Scientific Steering Group and staff of the International Project Office give guest lectures around the world.

Task forces

The Earth System Governance Project organizes Task Forces, international networks of senior and early career scholars with a series of working groups focused on particular ideas or idea clusters. There are currently two active Task Forces:

This Task Force aims to explore key concepts with regard to Earth System Governance, such as planetary boundaries, green economy, resilience and the Anthropocene. It aims to critically examine and further refine these novel governance ideas.

This Task Force seeks aims to advance quantitative earth system governance research by promoting new international research collaborations, fostering interaction and dialogue among existing research projects, and developing architectures to promote the building and sharing of datasets.

Policy influence

In 2011, the Earth System Governance Project launched an initiative on International Environmental Governance. This initiative aims to provide a forum for discussion of current and ongoing research on international environmental governance and the institutional framework for sustainable development, in the period leading up to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, also known as ‘Rio + 20’. In addition, the initiative aims to target decision-makers and to contribute not just to a better understanding but also to actual improvements in international environmental governance towards an institutional framework that enables sustainable development.

context

There is widespread support for the Earth System Governance Project in the scientific community, which is reflected in the size of the research network and in various publications by experts. However, criticisms of the Earth System Governance Project have also been made.

In an internal report of the International Human Dimensions Programme it is stated that the steering group of the Earth System Governance Project is too much dominated by experts from OECD countries. Since then, the Earth System Governance Project has actively sought ways to involve experts from different regions of the world.

The idea of earth system governance has also been criticized for being too top-down, for placing too much emphasis on global governance structures. According to Mike Hulme, earth system governance represents an attempt to ‘geopolitically engineer’ our way out of the climate crisis. He questions whether the climate is governable and argues that it is way too optimistic and even hubristic to attempt to control the global climate by universal governance regimes. This interpretation of the novel concept, however, has been rejected by other scholars as being too narrow and misleading

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