Governance

Overview

Institutional, political and policy processes shape which pathways to sustainability are enabled and which constrained or blocked. Today, these processes are globalised and multi-level, cutting across public and private spheres. They often involve fragile states, are pervaded by informal transactions and pluralised governance and delivery systems.

Constrain or enable?

Given these highly complex and dynamic systems, the STEPS Centre's Governance theme will explore how different institutional and policy arrangements constrain or enable particular pathways to sustainability, through framing, innovation processes, arrangements for access and control, and regulation.

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Explainer:Governance

• Understanding the instiutional and political processes across global and local scales that shape systems dynamics and pathways to Sustainability or otherwise.

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STEPS work on Governance:

• Framing: A comparative understanding across domains of the governance processes and power relations that influence the framings of environmental, scientific and technological issues, and whose versions count.
• Innovation: An assessment of the social and institutional arrangements for innovation including mechanisms influencing access to and control over technologies and environmental resources and services, including, for example, property regimes, service delivery arrangements and new forms of public-private partnership and learning alliance.
• Regulation: Exploration of actual and potential arrangements for the regulation, both formal and informal, of technologies and environmental and social practices in contexts where risks and uncertainties prevail and where capacities for formal regulation vary.
• Policies that work: A comparative evaluation of policies that work where different temporal (long-term stresses, short-term shocks) and spatial (localised impacts, global consequences) dynamics impinge, and where different political conditions prevail.
  

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Working Paper 2: Understanding Governance

• Understanding Governance: pathways to sustainability (pdf 519kb)
  By Melissa Leach, Gerald Bloom, Adrian Ely, Paul Nightinglae, Ian Scoones, Esha Shah, Adrian Smith

The challenges of understanding the governance of dynamic social, technological and environmental systems, and thier implications for sustainabilityand social justice, are addressed by this paper.

• Download this paper (pdf 519kb)
• Order a copy of paper from the IDS bookshop, cost £5.00 per paper or order the set of seven STEPS titles for £20.00
• Read a summary of this paper

This work is licenced under a
Creative Commons Licence.

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STEPS briefing 2: Governance and pathways to Sustainability

 

Melissa Leach
Download this briefing (pdf 345kb)

 

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Research Projects: cutting across domains & themes

• Crop, disease and innovation in Africa - focussing on dryland Kenya, maize and farming system dynamics in areas affected by climate change.
• Urbanisation in Asia - urbanisation and sustainability in Asia's growing cities, on the expanding peri-urban fringe of a major city, indicative of conditions for an increasing proportion of global poor.
• Rethinking regulation -addressing the gap between current assumptions about regulation in the cases of drugs, seeds and water in China and Latin America, and more complex realities.
• Risk, uncertainty and technology - how different institutions and groups frame and respond to risks and uncertainties in areas of rapid scientific and technological advance.
• Epidemics, livelihoods and politics - HIV-AIDS, SARS, avian flu, BSE - procedures for addressing epidemics that support rather than compromise poor people and support social justice.

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Related research & events

• 'The Direction of Innovation - new challenges in the governance of technology' - view presentation given by Andy Stirling, STEPS co-director in December 2008
• Call for papers: The Publics of Public Health. On politics, ethos and economy of 21st century African bioscience. Kilifi, Kenya (pdf 138kb) 7-11 Dec 2009. An opportunity to explore challenging new arrangements for health research and care that are emerging amidst globalisation, privatisation and the rise of new marketised and pluralized systems, and to address their policy implications. What are the 'new publics' emerging in this context? Who is benefiting and who is losing? This is an open call for participants, inquiries and applications to Linda-Amarfio@lshtm.ac.uk
• Building inclusive citizenship and democracies
  Citizens are disillusioned with government and democracy and are challenging corporations and global institutions to be more responsible. New id21 Focus publication
• Reframing Resilience The STEPS Centre's theme for 2008 is resilience; engaging with resilience thinking and exploring practical implications for policy in agriculture, water, peri-urban dynamics, epidemics and regulation.
• Moving Inside or Outside? Positioning the governance of sociotechnical systems, by STEPS member Adrian Smith and co-director Andy Stirling.
• Locked out of the innovation process? Adrian Smith blogs on the ecent Zurich conference on Innovation, Institutions and Path Dependency: the management of variation in innovations systems.
• Knowledge, power and politics in environment and development. STEPS director Melissa Leach gave this year's Linacre Lecture at Oxford University. She explored how and why policy approaches to environment and development problems conflict with user knowledge and argues for alternative approaches taking human-ecological dynamics seriously.
  

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