What are the main constraints to successful Earth System governance and what are our options for addressing these constraints in a timely, effective and accountable manner?

The failure to make adequate, or any progress on Earth System issues such as poverty, ecosystem degradation or greenhouse gas emissions are related to society’s inability to fully grasp the gravity of the situation, to envision acceptable outcomes, and to create a system of incentives, disincentives and accountability mechanisms that would make ignoring these as priorities by a wide range of social actors hard if not impossible.

We need to understand much more clearly what are the formal and informal barriers and biases in our policy mechanisms, public and private institutions (down to the role and interests of the individual decision-maker) that help prolong unsustainable patterns of practices and behaviour. We must also identify and tackle the barriers to introducing the necessary alternatives that often work at the pilot level already into the mainstream. This includes but should go beyond the study and reinvention of global environmental governance. Governance and policies that promote essentially unsustainable forms of behaviour are found in domains where other paradigms, such as economic growth dominate.

While the social sciences have come to grips with the analysis of governance, this has not generated enough momentum to integrate Earth System sustainability as a priority into mainstream development plans and strategies, witness the haste with which national governments were prepared to indebt future generations just to return to a path of GDP growth and increasing resource consumption.

There are many obstacles, ranging from the availability of longitudinal data on governance to political or cultural sensitivities. There are also strong vested interests in the status quo, but the momentum generated by the series of recent global crises represents an opportunity that mustn’t be missed.

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