The book discusses how to tackle long-term social and ecological problems by using different environmental governance approaches to creating sustainable development. It explores opportunities and requirements for the governance of long-term problems, and examines how to achieve a lasting transformation. When investments are made to mitigate climate change or preserve biodiversity, future generations can reap benefits from the efforts of the present generation. However, long-term social-ecological change towards sustainable development is disrupted by the fact that the costs and benefits of action are seen by different generations. With a global focus that includes case studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, this book attempts to address the difficulty of developing and implementing effective long-term governance solutions. The authors examine what distinguishes long‐term problems from other policy problems, what governance responses are available and used, and how different governance mechanisms, namely economic incentives, participation, as well as knowledge and learning, help to address them. Combining the perspectives on the different governance approaches and featuring cases studies on national, regional and global issues, Long-Term Governance for Social-Ecological Change will be of interest to policy-makers, students and scholars of global environmental governance, development, sustainability, politics, economics, law and sociology.

An exploration of the legal features compatibility with the theories of social-ecological resilience and their applicability for effective governance frameworks.

The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems provides a synthetic guide to the range of methods that can be employed in social-ecological systems (SES) research. The book is primarily targeted at graduate students, lecturers and researchers working on SES, and has been written in a style that is accessible to readers entering the field from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds. Each chapter discusses the types of SES questions to which the particular methods are suited and the potential resources and skills required for their implementation, and provides practical examples of the application of the methods. In addition, the book contains a conceptual and practical introduction to SES research, a discussion of key gaps and frontiers in SES research methods, and a glossary of key terms in SES research. Contributions from 97 different authors, situated at SES research hubs in 16 countries around the world, including South Africa, Sweden, Germany and Australia, bring a wealth of expertise and experience to this book. The first book to provide a guide and introduction specifically focused on methods for studying SES, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability science, environmental management, global environmental change studies and environmental governance. The book will also be of interest to upper-level undergraduates and professionals working at the science–policy interface in the environmental arena.

This book reviews the major ways in which social scientists are conceptualizing more integrated perspectives on society and nature, from the global to local levels. The chapters in this volume, by international experts from a variety of disciplines, explore the challenges, contradictions and consequences of socialecological change, along with the uncertainties and governance dilemmas they create.

The world is undergoing unprecedented changes in many of the factors that determine its fundamental properties and their in- ence on society. These changes include climate; the chemical c- position of the atmosphere; the demands of a growing human population for food and ?ber; and the mobility of organisms, ind- trial products, cultural perspectives, and information ?ows. The magnitude and widespread nature of these changes pose serious challenges in managing the ecosystem services on which society depends. Moreover, many of these changes are strongly in?uenced by human activities, so future patterns of change will continue to be in?uenced by society’s choices and governance. The purpose of this book is to provide a new framework for n- ural resource management—a framework based on stewardship of ecosystems for human well-being in a world dominated by unc- tainty and change. The goal of ecosystem stewardship is to respond to and shape change in social-ecological systems in order to s- tain the supply and opportunities for use of ecosystem services by society. The book links recent advances in the theory of resilience, sustainability, and vulnerability with practical issues of ecosystem management and governance. The book is aimed at advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students of natural resource management as well as professional managers, community leaders, and policy makers with backgrounds in a wide array of d- ciplines, including ecology, policy studies, economics, sociology, and anthropology.

This book offers a comparative analysis of the experiences, responses, and adaptations of people to climate variability and environmental change across the Americas. It foregrounds historical ecology as a structural framework for understanding the climate change crisis throughout the region and throughout time. In recent years, Indigenous and local populations in particular have experienced climate change effects such as altered weather patterns, seasonal irregularities, flooding and drought, and difficulties relating to subsistence practices. Understanding and dealing with these challenges has drawn on peoples’ longstanding experience with climate variability and in some cases includes models of mitigation and responses that are millennia old. With contributions from specialists across the Americas, this volume will be of interest to scholars from fields including anthropology, archaeology, geography, environmental studies, and Indigenous studies.

This book advances a social-ecological theory to reconnect nature and society through sustainable transformation of interacting social and ecological systems. Social ecology develops as an interdisciplinary science by using knowledge from the social sciences, especially sociology and economics, and from natural-scientific ecology. Knowledge integration across the boundaries of social and natural sciences is not widespread, blocked by the specialisation of theories and their competing forms of explanation and interpretation. Chapters in this book describe a new social-ecological theory that connects concepts and theories from both sides to create a new interdisciplinary theory. Inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge synthesis creates possibilities to analyse global environmental problems more systematically by integrating specialized research on environmental problems. The author uses social-ecological theory to analyse and explain problems and processes of global change in modern society such as climate change and adaptation to it, ecosystem change, and transformation of the industrial energy regime , finally offering pathways of transformation to a future sustainable society.

Climate change, development and development cooperation are, individually and jointly, three politically sensitive, complex issues, especially in the context of relations between developed and developing countries. This book tackles these issues by combining theoretical, political, and practical perspectives, analysing the dominant paradigms and exploring the meaning of the concept of mainstreaming. At the practical level, it presents the results of case studies focusing on assistance provided by the European Union and key member states and the climate needs articulated by developing countries. At the political level, it highlights the sensitivities between developed and developing countries and examines the mainstreaming debate in various fora. This book is valuable for policymakers, academics, politicians and non-state actors working in the fields of development studies, international law, politics, international relations, economics, climate change, and environmental studies.

The book presents an overview and historic perspectives of a novel scientific field coming of age today: coastal and ocean management. It covers diverse and changing issues, ranging from conflict resolution to governance and ethical-political imperatives, natural disasters and climate change, culminating in coastal and ocean typologies, the basis for a future theory of coasts and oceans. Eighteen chapters, written by two main authors in cooperation with international experts, review 25 years of research. The authors address challenges to society related to global change issues that have been generated by human activity in both temperate (Sweden, Germany and the United States) and tropical regions (Brazil, Indonesia). Ultimately, the book documents the maturation of a field and responds to changing societal needs and scientific outlooks. It gathers recent analyses along with important earlier research, with a foreword by Biliana Cicin-Sain and Richard Delaney, globally renowned as coastal and ocean experts in theory and practice. Its broad approach makes the book a must-read for graduate and postgraduate students, as well as coastal management and marine spatial planning practitioners, and for researchers in the fields of geography, anthropology, history of science, human and social ecology, and environmental and development studies.

There is persuasive evidence suggesting we are on the brink of human-induced ecological disaster that could change life on Earth as we know it. There is also a general consensus among scientists about the pace and extent of global ecological decay, including a realisation that humans are central to causing the global socio-ecological crisis. This new epoch has been called the Anthropocene. Considering the many benefits that constitutional environmental protection holds out in domestic legal orders, it is likely that a constitutionalised form of global environmental law and governance would be better able to counter the myriad exigencies of the Anthropocene. This book seeks to answer this central question: from the perspective of the Anthropocene, what is environmental constitutionalism and how could it be extrapolated to formulate a global framework? In answering this question, this book offers the first systematic conceptual framework for global environmental constitutionalism in the epoch of the Anthropocene.