Achieving Sustainable Development: The Challenge of Governance Across Social Scales

Bressers, Rosenbaum, and their contributors analyze what, until recently, has been among the least examined issues implicit in the growing global discourse about sustainable development: the creation of institutions and processes for effective governance of sustainability policies. The creation and endurance of governance institutions capable of implementing sustainability policies is, in fact, fundamental for any viable conception of sustainable development. The analyses focus not only on how societies can organize, but on how they do organize to overcome such daunting obstacles in the Netherlands, the Northwest United States, Costa Rica, Madagascar, Senegal, and the European Union.

The writers focus particularly upon the special problem embedded in the sustainability paradigm, that of organizing governance across scales―that is to say, across and between geographic, political, ecological, or other social levels in a sustainable regime. In recent years the scale problem has emerged as a major and enlarging concern, as international efforts proliferate to implement various sorts of sustainability policies. The analyses focus not only on how societies can organize, but on how they do organize to overcome such daunting obstacles. The analyses place considerable emphasis upon the history and lessons to be learned from ongoing efforts to achieve such governance in several diverse international settings including the Netherlands, the Northwest United States, Costa Rica, Madagascar, Senegal, and the European Union.