Earth system governance: a research framework

The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop “strategies for Earth System management”. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient—they are also poorly understood. This article presents the science programme of the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research effort endorsed by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). It outlines the concept of earth system governance as a challenge for the social sciences, and it elaborates on the interlinked analytical problems and research questions of earth system governance as an object of study. These analytical problems concern the overall architecture of earth system governance, agency beyond the state and of the state, the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes as well as their accountability and legitimacy, and modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. The article also outlines four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem as well as for the integrated understanding of earth system governance: the role of power, knowledge, norms and scale.     

Access and allocation in food governance,a decadal view 2008–2018

Achieving food security worldwide raises a number of issues with regard to the distribution of global resources. On the one hand, access to resources and ecospace is essential for individuals in order to survive; on the other hand, the allocation of the earth’s resources as well as risks and responsibilities are relevant for the global community. Yet, elements of access and allocation are various and complex, encompassing social, environmental, and economic dimensions in an increasingly fragmented global governance structure. Drawing on the multidisciplinary governance framework on access and allocation by Gupta and Lebel, this paper provides a synoptical review of the literature on food security of the past decade from the perspective of the earth system governance scholarship. This article addresses the question: what have we learnt about access and allocation issues in the area of food governance and its implications for food security? In addressing this question, this review examines how institutions, norms and power affect access to and allocation of resources. The paper draws out key trends and lessons from the literature to conclude that research needs to be sensitive to the complexity and intersectionality of food, the systemic challenges that it poses, and the broader political economy around it.

     

Access and allocation in climate change adaptation

As climate change impacts become increasingly apparent, adaptation becomes increasingly urgent. Accordingly, adaptation to climate change has shifted towards the centre of attention in both policy and research. In this article, we review the last 10 years of adaptation research (2008–2018), with a focus on work within the Earth System Governance network. We use the lens of access and allocation to structure our review and examine how adaptation affects, and is affected by, access to basic needs, basic rights, and decision-making on the one hand, as well as allocation of responsibilities, resources, and risks on the other. We find that questions of justice, equity, and fairness are fundamental to all dimensions of adaptation. The access perspective, for example, suggests that we need to assess vulnerability, understood broadly, while the allocation perspective focuses on questions of responsibility for being vulnerable, e.g. when people live, or move to, hazard-prone areas exposed to climate risk. This also relates to questions of who is responsible for selecting, implementing, and funding adaptation measures. Overall, we find that the framework of “access and allocation” and its subcategories offer a detailed approach to adaptation and adaptation research, but that it is not intuitive. The notion of “climate justice” seems to resonate more with both academic and policy debates.

     

Access and allocation in global biodiversity governance: a review

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Access and allocation is one of the five analytical themes of the science plan of the Earth System Governance (ESG) project....     

What goes around,comes around? Access and allocation problems in Global North–South waste trade

Infamous cases of toxic waste trade and research on its health and environmental implications have made the global waste trade a prominent environmental and social justice issue. Recently, such trade has shifted towards extracting resources from waste as recyclable components and used goods which could create income-generating opportunities and reduce the environmental burdens of waste trade from Global North to Global South countries. Nevertheless, studies highlight persistent problems in the access to these resources and allocation of responsibilities, risks and burdens from processing and disposal of traded waste in Global South countries. This article aims to contribute to the lessons learnt on access and allocation with respect to waste trade by focusing on issues of equity, fairness and distributive justice. Two cases are analysed: trade in discarded electronic and electric equipment (EEE) between the EU and Africa and trade in plastic materials between the UK and China. This study shows that exports of used EEE and recyclable plastic materials exacerbate the environmental burdens of Global South countries while also exporting new environmental risks and social burdens. At the same time, new demands for justice have emerged from Global South countries through waste ship back initiatives, and new international measures have also been adopted. While the access and allocation lens enabled the identification of persistent problems in Global North–South waste trade, directing future Earth System Governance research to the demands emerging from the Global South countries could offer insights into how to better address these problems and deal with growing global inequalities.

     

Agency in earth system governance: refining a research agenda

In the face of global environmental change, a key question for the social sciences is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their natural environment. In this context, a new long-term research program, the Earth System Governance Project, proposes several key issues to be examined: architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountability, and allocation and access. The contributions to this special issue have focused on the analytical problem of agency. For example, they have examined newly emerging or understudied agents of global environmental governance, or offered a fresh assessment of agency in the context of existing governance mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism. This concluding article outlines several insights provided by the contributions to this special issue regarding four key questions underlying the study of agency in global environmental governance. First, they call attention to the ingredients or processes that characterize agency in the first place and thus distinguish actors from agents. Secondly, the authors highlight the differences among agents and how they interact with each other. Thirdly, they point toward variation in the ways that agents may acquire authority. Finally, the contributions to this special issue suggest that there may be several approaches to evaluating agency, with different consequences. Thus, taken together, the contributions to this special issue provide a starting point for broadening our understanding of agency in earth system governance.     

Corrections,implementation, and organizational ecology: an introduction to the Purveyor Core-Skills Model

It has been a decade since Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature was first published bringing Implementation Science into the mainstream of American corrections. Since that time much focus has been placed upon Implementer and organization level core implementation components, contributing to their disproportionate representation in the literature. This has led to a gap as it pertains to the Purveyor. What literature is available on the Purveyor largely reviews their activities and does not thoroughly identify what core-skills are necessary to be successful in those activities. To address this gap, this article weaves a conceptual framework using open systems and organizational ecology to illustrate key differences between correctional Purveyors and Implementers and to introduce The Purveyor Core-Skills Model, offering the following core-skill domains to the implementation lexicon: competency, change fluency, leadership, and systems thinking. Finally, an agenda for future research and practice implications are presented.     

Access and allocation: rights to water,sanitation and hygiene

This paper provides a decadal review of earth system governance (ESG) literature surrounding access and allocation to water, sanitation and hygiene. ‘access and allocation’ is one of five analytical problems, and ‘water’ a cross-cutting theme, identified in the ESG science and implementation plan (Biermann et al. 2010). A focused review of ESG and related literature reveals that the ESG literature is very robust in relation to access to water, sanitation and hygiene as a human right. However, the ESG literature lacks a robust, independent consideration of the right to hygiene or sanitation or its linkage and costs vis-à-vis other rights. There is no criteria for resolving competing demands on finite freshwater resources, as well as procedures for balancing rights. It is unclear how a transformed nuanced narrative of water access and allocation rights will address vulnerability and social inequality within this new balancing act.

     

Geoengineering governance-by-default: an earth system governance perspective

Geoengineering—the deliberate interference in the climate system to affect global warming—could have significant global environmental and social implications. How to shape formal geoengineering governance mechanisms is an issue of debate. This paper describes and analyses the geoengineering governance landscape that has developed in the absence of explicit geoengineering regulation. An Earth System Governance perspective provides insight into the formation of norms resulting from an overlap in international treaties and from the actions of engaged non-state agents. Specifically, the paper explores the instruments and actors having effect in existing formal and informal geoengineering governance mechanisms. It finds that geoengineering is subject to a form of ‘governance-by-default’. This is due to a situation in which state actors have not resolved the tension between two legal norms: that of ‘precaution’ and that of ‘harm minimisation’. This governance-by-default is characterised by uneven regulation from existing multilateral agreements established for other purposes, an absence of regulation specifically focused on geoengineering, guidance from an international ambition to hold global average warming below 2 °C and to achieve net-zero emissions in the second half of the century, and strong normative engagement by the research community. Governance-by-default is likely to be a stopgap development until more enduring and focused governance emerges.     

Two Truths and a Lie: In re John Z. and Other Stories at the Juncture of Teen Sex and the Law

Laws governing adolescent sexuality are incoherent and chaotically enforced, and legal scholarship on the subject neither addresses nor remedies adolescents’ vulnerability in sexual encounters. To posit a meaningful relationship between the criminal law and adolescent sexual encounters, one must examine what we know about adolescent sexuality from both the academic literature and the adults who control the criminal justice response to such interactions. This article presents an in‐depth study of In re John Z., a 2003 rape prosecution involving two seventeen‐year‐olds. Using this case, I explore the implications of the prosecution by interviewing a variety of experts and analyzing the contemporary literature on sexual norms among youth. I also relate a series of interviews conducted with the major players in the prosecution. Examining this case from a variety of perspectives permits a deeper understanding of how the law regulates adolescent sexual encounters and why it fails.     

Access and allocation in earth system governance: water and climate change compared

A significant percentage of the global population does not yet have access to safe drinking water, sufficient food or energy to live in dignity. There is a continuous struggle to allocate the earth’s resources among users and uses. This article argues that distributional problems have two faces: access to basic resources or ecospace; and, the allocation of environmental resources, risks, burdens, and responsibilities for causing problems. Furthermore, addressing problems of access and allocation often requires access to social processes (science, movements and law). Analysts, however, have tended to take a narrow, disciplinary approach although an integrated conceptual approach may yield better answers. This article proposes a multi-disciplinary perspective to the problem of access and allocation and illustrates its application to water management and climate change.     

Feminist lawyering,violence against women,and the politics of law reform in India: An interview with Flavia Agnes

The history of the women’s movement’s relationship to law in India cannot be written without acknowledging the pioneering work of activist, advocate, and scholar Flavia Agnes. Her own life’s journey, engagement with the movement, involvement in women’s rights litigation, feminist jurisprudential scholarship, and outreach work through Majlis (the organisation she co-founded) offer key insights into the kind of movement-based legal pedagogy, awareness, and training that the women’s movement has fostered in India. Flavia’s activism and scholarship over the last three decades have opened up sophisticated critiques of rape law and family law reform in India that have become foundational to the field of what can be called Indian feminist jurisprudence. This interview offers insights into the autobiographical, the feminist, and the scholarly convergences in Flavia’s thinking and writing. She speaks with candour and conviction and introduces ways of thinking about feminist lawyering, violence against women, and the politics of law reform in India that are historically and theoretically grounded in an ethics of self-reflexivity and quotidian wisdom that the insulated nature of clinical legal education in India has much to learn from.

     

Yoga in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa

Though scholarship on diverse methods of yoga in the Indian traditions abounds, there has not been sufficient research that examines the traditions of yoga in the purā?as. The present paper explores yoga articulated in the Vi??u Purā?a (fourth century CE) and argues that what seems like a unified teaching is a composite of an eight-limbed yoga embedded within an instruction on proto-Sā?khya. An evaluation of the key elements of yoga as developed in this text as a whole, clarifies our understanding of the emergence of yoga and its relationship to epic formulations on the one hand and to the Classical System of the Yogasūtras of Patañjali on the other.     

Cause Lawyering and Movement Tactics: Disability Rights Movements in South Korea and Japan

We investigate cause lawyers’ roles in movements for the domestic adoption of international human rights norms. Social movements scholarship often assumes that lawyers will divert activism toward institutional tactics, while the sociolegal studies literature emphasizes that lawyers are active in diverse ways across venues. A paired comparison of antidiscrimination movements in South Korea and Japan reveals how critical junctures in regime history shape the tactical repertoires that cause lawyers bring to their interactions with movement actors, and thus also movement tactics. This research advances scholarship on professionals in social movements, cause lawyers as norm entrepreneurs, and legal mobilization in East Asia.     

Preventing Genocide: Measuring Success by What Does Not Happen

Although the concept of genocide prevention is recognized in international jurisprudence and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, its content remains vague and peripheral to legal scholarship and policy-making. Effective prevention is particularly challenging to grasp because success must be measured by what does not happen. Reaction to mass-atrocities must be replaced by early warning and rapid engagement through modest and feasible measures. With escalating violence, there may be greater attention to a situation, but also less willingness to intervene as humanitarian intervention through force and similar means becomes increasingly costly. A better understanding of the norms, institutions, and tools within reasonable reach of decision-makers is essential to translating genocide prevention from an elusive ideal into reality. This article evaluates and elucidates the law and practice of early warning and genocide prevention. First, the far-reaching potential of a preventive approach is illustrated based on the example of Rwanda where measures as modest as jamming radio broadcasts inciting hatred could have substantially constrained genocidal violence. Second, scholarship on the indicia and prediction of mass atrocities will be explored with a view to understanding the timeliness of action. Third, the legal and institutional dimensions of an obligation to prevent genocide and other mass-crimes will be addressed with a focus on recent developments within the UN system. And fourth, success stories from Macedonia, Côte d??Ivoire and Burundi will be examined in order to demonstrate the practical impact of early warning and prevention     

Can Non-state Governance 'Ratchet Up' Global Environmental Standards? Lessons from the Forest Sector

The failure of the worlds' governments to agree on a binding global forest convention at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit led many leading environmental groups to advance eco-labelling 'forest certification' programmes that, they hoped, would achieve greater success in implementing sustainable forest management. Eschewing traditional State-centered authority, supporters of this 'non-State market driven' (NSMD) approach turn to customers of wood products to create compliance mechanisms, either through positive incentives such as market access or price premiums, or negative incentives such as 'direct targeting' or 'boycott' campaigns. Understanding how such systems might 'ratchet up' global forestry standards, we argue, requires that existing scholarship place greater attention on the role of public policies in helping to facilitate the impacts of private solutions. Specifically, we argue that scholars and practitioners need to assess strategic decisions not only on the basis of their appropriateness at present, but what they might do to trigger a global 'race to the top' at a later time.     

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response; HHS Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise implementation plan for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats. Notice

The United States faces serious public health threats from the deliberate use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)--chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN)--by hostile States or terrorists, and from naturally emerging infectious diseases that have a potential to cause illness on a scale that could adversely impact national security. Effective strategies to prevent, mitigate, and treat the consequences of CBRN threats is an integral component of our national security strategy. To that end, the United States must be able to rapidly develop, stockpile, and deploy effective medical countermeasures to protect the American people. The HHS Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE) has taken a holistic, end-to-end approach that considers multiple aspects of the medical countermeasures mission including research, development, acquisition, storage, maintenance, deployment, and guidance for utilization. Phase one of this approach established the HHS PHEMCE Strategy for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Threats (HHS PHEMCE Strategy). The HHS PHEMCE Strategy, published in the Federal Register on March 20, 2007, described a framework of strategic policy goals and objectives for identifying medical countermeasure requirements and establishing priorities for medical countermeasure evaluation, development and acquisition. These strategic policy goals and objectives were used to establish the Four Pillars upon which this HHS Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise Implementation Plan (HHS PHEMCE Implementation Plan) is based. The HHS PHEMCE Implementation Plan considers the full spectrum of medical countermeasures-related activities, including research, development, acquisition, storage/maintenance, deployment, and utilization. The HHS PHEMCE Implementation Plan is consistent with the President's Biodefense for the 21st Century and is aligned with the National Strategy for Medical Countermeasures against Weapons of Mass Destruction.     

Social Movements and the Politics of Bureaucratic Rights Enforcement: Insights from the Allocation of Disability Rights in France

While research on legal mobilization shows how social movements contribute to the definition and implementation of rights, it remains excessively centered on litigation to the detriment of administrative rights enforcement. This article maps out how street‐level bureaucracies impact rights enforcement by distinguishing between allocation, access, and process, and analyzes how social movements intervene in these three aspects. It then focuses on allocation, using the case of French disability policy to analyze the forms of advocacy deployed by movement actors who take part in the rights allocation process at the local level. The article argues that conformity to institutional norms derives not so much from a pressure to conform as from the knowledge and experience of the limited means locally available to make rights effective. Further, it shows how advocacy is reframed from the defense of individual claims to a role of scrutiny and control of the bureaucratic allocation of rights.