Global Environmental Governance Reconsidered

Preface

Preface This book brings together the core findings of a ten-year research program involving more than forty researchers at thirteen leading European research institutions: the Global Governance Project. The program was formally launched in 2001; this book brings together its major theoretical insights and key empirical findings. When the Global Governance Project was started, the notion of global governance was still rather new. Today, dozens of leading universities have set up research centers on global governance, specialized university chairs have been created, and the notion of global governance is widely in use in academic research and political practice. Yet despite a growing body of literature, even the very meaning of the term remains disputed, and many of its elements are yet insufficiently understood. To contribute to academic and policy debates on global governance has thus been the aim of the Global Governance Project. Although we address the phenomenon of global governance in general, most of our research has focused on global environmental change and governance for sustainable development . Consequently, throughout its duration the Global Governance Project operated with the endorsement of the core project “Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change” of the UN-affiliated International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). The science agenda of the Global Governance Project was built on an understanding of global governance that juxtaposed it with traditional notions of intergovernmental relations.The project conceptualized global governance as a new phenomenon of world politics characterized by three major trends. These trends were chosen to shape the research agenda of the project and to organize scholarly analysis in three research clusters. First, the project conceptualized global governance as characterized by increasing participation of actors other than states, ranging from x Preface multinational corporations and (networks of) scientists to intergovernmental bureaucracies. These new actors of global governance have been the focus of the research group MANUS (Managers of Global Change). Second, the project defined global governance through new mechanisms of public-private and private-private cooperation along with the traditional system of legal treaties negotiated by states. This has been the focus of the research group MECGLO (New Mechanisms of Global Governance ). Third, the project conceptualized global governance as increasing segmentation of different layers and clusters of rule making and rule implementing, vertically among supranational, international, national, and subnational layers of authority and horizontally between different parallel rule-making systems maintained by different groups of actors. This fragmentation stood at the center of the research group MOSAIC (Multiple Options, Solutions, and Approaches: Institutional Interplay and Conflict). To increase academic debate on global (environmental) governance, the Global Governance Project initiated an international conference series on the human dimensions of global environmental change in Berlin in 2001, which has evolved into a regular venue in this field, with the tenth event held in October 2010. More than two thousand scientists have participated in this international conference series since its inception , with broadly equal numbers of colleagues from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Important conceptual developments have been triggered and supported at the conferences, for example, on the relationship of global environmental change and the nation state (2001 Berlin Conference ), on the role of knowledge and scientific information in global environmental governance (2002 Berlin Conference), on the influence of international environmental organizations (2005 Berlin Conference), or on the role of equity and social issues in global environmental governance (2010 Berlin Conference). The Global Governance Project has been the largest and longeststanding research network in this field in Europe. It involved core members of thirteen research institutions: the Institute for Environmental Studies of the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands; the Environmental Policy Research Centre of the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany; Sciences Po Bordeaux, France; Bremen University, Germany; the Institute for European Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; The Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway; the German Development Institute, Germany; the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland; the London School of Economics and Political Preface xi Science, United Kingdom; Lund University, Sweden; Oldenburg University , Germany; the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany; and the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University , the Netherlands. The project was directed by Frank Biermann, who initiated it in 2001 at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and continued to lead the network from the Institute for Environmental Studies at the VU University Amsterdam, which he joined in 2003. The deputy director was first Bernd Siebenhüner at the University...