Collective environmental governance is our best hope to avert planetary ecological disaster

Daily Maverick

04-06-2025

With mounting global ecological crises, there is a growing need for humans to coordinate their actions across political and geographical boundaries.
World Environment Day is celebrated on 5 June to raise awareness about environmental issues and promote action to protect the planet.
We often hear and read about individual actions (eg, lifestyle changes, recycling, household solar etc), business initiatives (eg, environmental management systems, supply chain management, environmental, social, and governance — ESG etc), or efforts by governments (eg, environmental legislation, emission standards, carbon taxes, environmental assessment etc).
However, comparatively little attention is given to the opportunities and pitfalls of collective action in response to environmental problems, that is, the field of environmental governance and the topic of this article.
It is true that humans are part of the environment, but we are the only species with the responsibility to protect it. With mounting global ecological crises, there is a growing need for humans to coordinate their actions across political and geographical boundaries.
The burning question is whether humanity's attempts at environmental governance would be sufficient to avert ecological disaster on a planetary scale.
The field of environmental management seeks to limit human impact by caring for the Earth and for human life. However, evidence of escalating ecological crises casts legitimate doubt on the adequacy of environmental management systems to control the negative effects of human activities on the environment. Global environmental problems have outgrown the ability of environmental management systems to guarantee sustainability.
With the shortcomings of environmental management, the need arose to refer to governance which, at its core, focuses on addressing ' the problem of economic and political coordination in social life '. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom also observed that the problem of collective action needs to be solved through coordination and cooperation.
Norwegian scholar Arild Vatn points out that the emergent field of environmental governance explores how institutions beyond the state, along with a multiplicity of actors, are coordinating in social life in response to environmental problems at various scales.
Thinking on how to govern expanding environmental problems has shifted remarkably since the mid-20th century. As these problems — notably the effects of global climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification — became more apparent in the 1980s and 1990s, the need for global collective action and cooperation has also increased.
The term global governance implies that not only sovereign states, but ' all kinds of actors might contribute to transnational and international orders, establishing forms of governance even in the absence of an effective world government'.
Singular state-directed environmental policies, traditionally through regulations, moved to a ' plethora of different schemes of self-government, public–private partnerships, collaborative efforts, policy entrepreneurs, and participatory initiatives usually gathered under the umbrella term of 'governance' '.
Andrew Jordan and his co-authors point out in Public Administration (2003) that environmental governance has been associated with the rise of the 'new environmental policy instruments' (NEPIs), most notably market-based instruments such as environmental taxes and tradable pollution permits, eco-labels and voluntary agreements.
Such NEPIs have become more mainstream in the last few decades, but have not completely displaced traditional government-led regulatory instruments.
Environmental governance reimagined
Environmental problems transgress borders and in response, governments have to negotiate with each other, leading to a series of international environmental agreements (IEAs) — now counting over 1,500 multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and over 2,300 bilateral agreements. Pre-1960 IEAs were dominated by a concern for species, but after the 1960s, pollution and other concerns such as habitat, as well as climate — from the 1990s onwards — became more prominent.
In the last two decades, another major shift has occurred in the field of environmental governance. With the limited success of IEAs in reaching their intended effects (with some notable exceptions, such as the Montreal Protocol to protect the Earth's ozone layer) and with mounting evidence of ecological crises on a global scale, traditional multilateral responses to environmental problems are deemed to be insufficient.
Scientists published alarming evidence on the inevitable impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018; Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019) and argued that planetary boundaries are transgressed with possible serious threshold effects.
Some scholars now propose an alternative, transformative approach, or a 'swift transformative structural change in global governance' that includes 'effective and decisive governmental action'.
The focus in governance in this new emerging approach is ' the dynamics and change in governance systems and the actors therein '. In other words, because of perceived rapid change on a planetary level in which actors form a part, global governance needs to be restructured to support strong and decisive action by governments. By the sheer force of necessity, actors and institutions are swept up in detrimental planetary change, which leaves little freedom to act.
The important conceptual shift in such a response is away from a governance system of institutions, rules, or actors towards 'societal transitions', or a type of 'complexity-based governance' where societies are seen to transition to normative long-term goals for sustainability. A kind of governance is required that is both nimble on the feet to respond to change and stable enough to provide the rule of law and a consistent stream of public services.
The possibility of non-linear, interacting planetary boundaries therefore pose great challenges to a system of global governance. Proponents of such complexity-based governance concede that one can expect ' less than optimal governance systems for governing CAS [complex adaptive systems] '.
What is clear is that, in this view, governance needs not only to be improved, but foremost ' reimagined to better mediate the human environment interface '. However, practical and politically acceptable workable alternatives are not (yet) readily available.
My own contribution to the emerging debate on environmental governance is that, whether the coordination in social life takes place through multilateral institutions, rules and actors or through societal transitions and 'complexity-based governance', it must consider the human person as the only species with the responsibility to act.
One critical aspect to govern planetary limits in a humane way is recognising the 'other', not only as actors or as part of a society, but as human persons — and acting on that knowledge in seeking universal justice for everyone.
In a global world with weaker and indirect relations, a reliable recourse to maintaining justice is necessary for effective collective action. Upholding justice should be a primary concern of environmental governance to avert ecological disaster on a planetary scale. DM
Prof Martin de Wit is Academic Head: Environmental Management at the School of Public Leadership at Stellenbosch University.