Despite scientific evidence and available solutions, climate change remains unresolved. The real crisis lies in governance, not the environment. Details here.
Why is climate crisis failure of governance, not science or technology
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible – Voltaire
Like Voltaire’s snowflakes position in the avalanche, environmental problems are everyone’s fault and nobody’s problem. As Walt Kelly summarises, we have indeed met the enemy, and it is us. Environmental problems represent a crisis of governance, not a virtue of crisis of the environment or a failure of the market.
Even when we have solutions, technologies, and scientific evidence to address urgent crises like climate change, we still struggle to take meaningful action. So, the real question might be: why isn’t the climate crisis treated with the same urgency?
Environmental issues are no longer a merely scientific or technological challenge, but a political, social and economic one. Addressing them requires not just better policies, but a fundamental shift in how environmental governance is understood and enacted.
Governance
Governance can be defined as an act of coordination and cooperation amongst members of society towards any defined objective or end. There are three core principles of Governance:
A commitment towards collective action
Recognition of importance of rules to guide interaction (rules are necessary)
Acknowledging that new ways of doing things is essential and would mean going beyond the state.
Environmental issues are global in nature and require a wide array of people to act collectively. There are different actors, institutions and power dynamics involved in the process of governance. In governance, scale becomes extremely important.When looking at any particular environmental issue, what is the scale of governance we are looking at?
These institutions can scale across national level, state level and at the local level. For example, air pollution may be a national issue, or it could be an issue of interaction amongst a few states. If we are looking at a river running across three countries, then the scale of governance will have to be adjusted accordingly.
When looking at Environmental and Resource Governance, three key questions must be looked at:
Who should make decisions over environment and natural resources? (A question of justice and sustainability)
Who should have the right to use and benefit from natural resources? (Trade-offs and competing users and uses)
Who should make decisions vis-à-vis environmental ‘bads’ and hazards?
The rationale (why) and the process (how) behind these normative questions must be looked at critically. These must always be re-negotiated and thought over considering new values and changes.
Environmental governance represents a wicked problem, a problem that resists solutions. There exist various challenges that impede collective action, these exist in the form of scientific uncertainty, conflicting values and interests, issues of scale and boundaries, excessive drive for competition rather than cooperation, and unending complexity.
Uncertainty
Environmental issues are characterised by high levels of uncertainty. Normally, there is a linear pattern present in policymaking: scientists first get the facts right, then decision makers decide what to do based on those facts. Rational decisions based on an objective reality. However, complex systems such as the atmospheric-oceanic system that controls global climate have an ontological uncertainty built into it – meaning that the there is uncertainty about its functioning, not a lack of our understanding of it. So, while we need precise and backed information about the global climate, it is a system that is characteristically chaotic and unpredictable. Similarly, we have uncertainty about ecosystem responses, which are non-linear systems that are prone to shocks and surprises, we do not know their threshold capacity and their resilience, till what point is it tolerable? Finally, even when asking what level of risk is tolerable, and what is ‘acceptable’ depends on who is being asked and thus becomes a political question.
Subjectivity
Different actors have conflicting values and interests. People cannot even agree on whether climate change is a problem, let alone can they reach a consensus on how to solve it. Even when there are solutions present that can be implemented based on rationality, history also tells us that most actors tend to pursue their own short-term interests. Drawing from the game of ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ where two prisoners are given a choice to either remain silent or collaborate with their captors to obtain a lenient punishment. The best course of action would be to remain silent so that they receive minimal punishment, however out of fear that the other may talk, both prisoners end up collaborating with their captors and as a result receive a heavy punishment, achieving the worst outcome. In terms of greenhouse emissions is that countries tend to pollute the atmosphere because they cannot be sure that they will stop if they do.
There’s also an issue of the free-rider problem, which is driven by the fact that there is an asymmetric distribution of costs and benefits, interests can be highly concentrated or dispersed. Sometimes, a pressure group can derail a rational course of action (as it happens a lot).
Transboundary – Boundaries of Governance
Environmental problems don’t follow political boundaries and borders. They cut across existing political jurisdictions. Acid rain is transboundary, while climate change is global. It is difficult to make decisions concerning global issues in a world organised into nation-states and reaching a viable consensus.
Competition rather than Coordination
There is immense lack of internation cooperation, where countries have spent the last few centuries competing to gain advantage over one another. There is a sea of tension between the developing countries and the developed countries over appropriate courses of action. It is exceptionally hard to know where, and what level, to target actions to address them.
Thus, to attempt to solve environmental issues, we need to look at them from a multiscale perspective. The complexity, immediacy and ubiquity of environmental problems and crisis demand novel and unusual human responses. Now more than ever, there is a need for hybrid models of thinking and governance, leading into a triad of the State, Markets and Communities.For example, we have the joint-forest management in India, where the forest department and village communities work together to improve use and conservation of small patches of forests. There’s a plethora of examples that exists all across the world that are using a multifaceted approach to solving governmental issues. No single agency possesses the necessary capabilities to address multiple facts, scales and interdependencies of environmental problems.
(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own and do not reflect those of DNA)
