In 2001, the four global change research programmes declared in their joint Amsterdam Declaration 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 they would be, remained unspecified. The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) took up this challenge in March 2007 by mandating an international group of governance experts to develop a science plan for a new international long-term research project within IHDP: the Earth System Governance Project.


People, Places, and the Planet

We understand earth system governance first of all phenomenol-ogical: as a description of an emerging social phenomenon that is expressed in hundreds of international regimes, national policies, international and national agencies, local and transnational activists groups, local community initiatives, and expert networks. At the same time, we understand earth system governance as a political project that engages more and more actors who seek to strengthen the current architecture of institutions and networks at local and global levels. And in both meanings, we see earth sys-tem governance as a demanding and vital subject of research for the social sciences.

Yet such research is no easy undertaking. It must bring together a variety of disciplines—including political science, sociology, policy studies, geography, and law. It must span the entire globe because only integrated global solutions can ensure a sustainable co-evolution of natural and socio-economic systems. But it must also draw on local experiences and insights and offer solutions to local governance problems. In other words, research on institu-tions and governance in times of earth system transformation must be about people who are drivers of global environmental change and at the same time part of any solution. It must be about places in all their variety and diversity, yet seek to integrate place-based research in a global understanding of the overall challenge to steer human interaction vis-à-vis earth system transformation. Eventually, this research will thus need to be about our planet. It is the task of developing integrated systems of governance, from the local to the global level, that ensure the sustainable development of the coupled socio-ecological system that the Earth has become.


Analytical Problems of Earth System Governance

The development of theories to understand, and of strategies to advance, earth system governance evolves today into one of the most important but possibly also most difficult tasks for the social sciences. It involves questions of the emergence, design and effectiveness of governance systems as well as the overall integra-tion of global, regional, national and local governance—that is, the quest for effective architectures of earth system governance. It also requires understanding the actors that drive earth system governance and that need to be involved—that is, the question of agency in earth system governance. Third, earth system governance must respond to the inherent uncertainties in human and natural systems; it must combine stability to ensure long-term governance solutions, with flexibility to react quickly to new find-ings and developments, and to learn. In other words, we must understand and further develop the adaptiveness of systems of earth system governance. Fourth, the more we confer regulatory competence and authority upon formal and informal institutions and systems of governance—especially at the global level—the more will we be confronted with questions of how to ensure the accountability and legitimacy of the governance systems that are created and made more effective. Simply put, we are faced with the need to understand the democratic quality of earth system governance. Fifth and finally, earth system governance is, as is any political activity, about the distribution of material and immaterial values. It is, in essence, a conflict about the access to goods and about their allocation—it is about justice, fairness, and equity. The novel character of earth system transformation and of the new governance solutions that are being developed, puts questions of access and allocation, debated for millennia, in a new light. It might require new answers to old questions.

The Earth System Governance Scientific Planning Committee believes that these five A's—the problems of architecture; agency; adaptiveness; accountability and legitimacy; and access and allocation—are the key questions of a new research effort on the theory and strategies of earth system governance. We see as the core research interest of this programme the question of how integrated systems of governance can support a co-evolution of nature and human societies that leads towards sustainable development. The five A's are the central analytical problems of this research programme.


Earth System Governance as Crosscutting Research Programme

A research programme on earth system governance, in all its complexity, must build on the interaction and collaboration of many colleagues in the social sciences all over the world. On the one hand, it will need to build on the achievement of the individual researcher or of small teams that succeed in shedding new light on one aspect of the theory and practice of earth system governance. On the other hand, cumulative progress can only occur when individual research efforts draw on a common set of questions, concepts, and methods. The Science Plan that is currently developed is meant to provide such an overarching outline. We see it as a proposal of a common set of questions that could stand, we argue, at the centre of the emerging research agenda on earth system governance.

In developing this new research activity, the scientific planning committee can rely on the results from a related earlier research programme, the IHDP core project Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. This programme—headed for most of its duration by the political scientist Oran Young—ended in 2006 in a major Synthesis Conference in Bali, Indonesia, and its core findings are currently in press or under review for publica-tion. The Earth System Governance Project will build upon, and further develop, the legacy of this successful predecessor pro-gramme.

In addition, the Earth System Governance Project will be designed to cut across the Earth System Science Partnership community. Many IHDP and ESSP projects touch upon questions of governance and institutions. Many projects are therefore consulted in the drafting process to this Science Plan, and the Plan itself seeks to strengthen the knowledge base on governance issues in other global change research programmes.

Although the Earth System Governance Project will be social science-oriented, it will also be relevant for natural scientists and the entire global change research community. The Project will contribute to methodological progress in integrated assessments through investigating methods for the integration of governance mechanisms—institutions, partnerships or legal agreements—in modelling and scenario exercises. The Earth System Governance Project shall strengthen also the critical role of the social sciences in the global change research community, for example in making science itself an object of study.

The Earth System Governance Scientific Planning Committee thus envisages and supports direct collaboration with colleagues from other global change programmes in the joint projects of the Earth System Science Partnership. It is in these issue-specific research networks where practical interaction between different disciplines is most likely to bear fruit, hopefully leading back to general methodological progress in interdisciplinary research.


Towards a Global Research Network

For all its activities, the Earth System Governance Project will need to rely on a large network that reflects the interdisciplinary, international, and multi-scale challenge that lies ahead. To this end, the Project will spend substantial resources on building a network and implement a project design that is as open as possible. In addition, the planning committee organises a variety of roundtables and conference side-events to solicit the views from the research community as well as from practitioners. Among other things, the 2007 Amsterdam Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change was held under the overall theme of ‘Earth System Governance: Theories and Strate-gies for Sustainability’ and served as the launch event of the planning process for this Science Plan. In addition, the planning committee has organised, among other things, four roundtable consultations at the 2007 Amsterdam Conference; side-events at the 2007 Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and at the 2008 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association; a series of annual Earth System Governance summer schools; along with numerous presentations and lectures by members of our group. The Scientific Planning Committee

The Earth System Governance Scientific Planning Committee is chaired by Frank Biermann, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and further includes: Michele Betsill, Colorado State University, United States of America; Ken Conca, GECHS, and University of Maryland, United States of America; Bharat Desai, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India; Joyeeta Gupta, GWSP, and UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, The Netherlands; Norichika Kanie, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan; Louis Lebel, Chiang Mai University, Thailand; Diana Liverman, GECAFS, and Oxford University, United Kingdom; Heike Schröder, Oxford University, United Kingdom; Bernd Siebenhüner, University of Oldenburg, Germany; and Simon Tay, Singapore Institute of International Affairs, Singapore. The secretary is Ruben Zondervan, IHDP, Germany.

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Any comments, suggestions and ideas for this initiative are more than welcome. They can be addressed to Frank Biermann at frank.biermann@ivm.vu.nl

Text: © ESG SPC February 2008
Photo: Evan Leeson