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Sustainability: the need for a new form of governance

Sara Wolcott | Monday 9th March 2009

Environmental economics (and other merges of the two ideas) is growing fast right now, but climate change dishes out more problems than we easily know how to confront. There are a lot of unknowns, making the idea of prediction - and making policy for the future based on such predictions - particularly difficult. Which is why the quest for sustainability requires new forms of governance. As Dane's blog recently asked, how do we respond to what we don't know we don't know?

The older, simple models of making policy - which probably never worked that well - implied that if you had enough data/evidence, then experts could make a rational decision about a given (often seen as technical) problem. Of course, 'rationality' is only one part of any policy-decision-making process - political pressure, values, and power all play a vital role.

But in times of climate change, we can't even pretend that we have the necessary data - where will the next tsunami hit? when will a river suddenly flood? which climate model will be most accurate? what will the polar bears do when they move further south? And those are just hte questions we know we don't know; not to mention all the questions where we don't know what we don't know.

How do we make policy in situations like this? There's been some interesting thinking about this in the sustainable development literature recently. One strand is that we need to open the policy-process to go beyond the experts. Too often, scientists and economists make the call about 'acceptable risks', and the decisions about migration/displacement, food safety, disaster-plans and others do not adequately include the people who will be most strongly affected by the decisions.

Less talked about, but also important, is the need to stop trying to predict the future - and to create more responsive policies - 'flexible' policies that can easily adapt to changing circumstances. This requires entirely different modes of visioning - and of operation.

Greater inclusion; more flexible operations - sounds like good principles not just for climate change, but for governance in general.

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