Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-02-20DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2025.100247
Katherine Owens , George Carter , Susan Park , Gemma Viney
{"title":"Bridging the adaptation-finance gap: Pathways for the green climate fund in the Pacific","authors":"Katherine Owens , George Carter , Susan Park , Gemma Viney","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100247","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100247","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Pacific Island Countries (PICs) face significant challenges accessing essential climate finance for adaptation as these states become increasingly vulnerable to climate change. The Green Climate Fund (GCF) aims for a ‘paradigm shift’ toward climate-resilient development, but its structural innovations have yet to benefit the most vulnerable Pacific communities or establish strong local connections. The GCF's stringent accreditation requirements and complex project proposal processes hinder local adaptation efforts, leading to reliance on traditional donor-recipient relationships and international accredited entities. To address this, we identify how the GCF can reform its modalities to provide direct, simplified, and small-scale grants that prioritise locally-led adaptation approaches. Using metrics for success identified in Community-Based and Locally-Led Adaptation approaches, the article proposes criteria for structuring and evaluating these modalities. It advocates for a transformative funding window within the GCF to increase local adaptation grants in PICs and facilitate fund percolation from global to local levels.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"24 ","pages":"Article 100247"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-02-27DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2025.100243
Tanvi V Deshpande
{"title":"Municipal capacities and institutional responses in the age of climate uncertainties","authors":"Tanvi V Deshpande","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100243","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100243","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Municipal governments in the global South with weak governance capacities and resources must urgently build their capacities to address climate impacts. Building on the concept ‘bringing the state back in’, the paper discusses the influence of ideational evolution within municipal governments on their capacity to pursue contextual climate policies. Ideational evolution within the government was traced by unpacking policymaking processes (learning, puzzling, and powering) and actors (governmental and non-governmental) involved. The framework explains how a global South municipal government improved its capacity to formulate and adopt an integrated, cross-sectoral and contextual climate policy without any domestic or international mandate. Triangulated information –(climate) policy documents, existing literature, interviews with policymakers-forms the basis of the study. In theorising from and for the global South, the study presents a framework, supported by empirics, on the influence of local and contextual ideation on municipal decision-making capacity to institutionally respond against climate change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"24 ","pages":"Article 100243"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143508248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-03-25DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2025.100251
Augusto Heras , Joyeeta Gupta
{"title":"North-south relations, responsibilities, and agendas in Earth System Governance: Have these changed in the Anthropocene?","authors":"Augusto Heras , Joyeeta Gupta","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100251","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100251","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>On the G77's 60<sup>th</sup> anniversary and the 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Declaration for a New International Economic Order, this paper explores the enduring complexities of North-South relations in development and climate governance. We ask: <em>What is the continuing relevance of the North-South narrative in Earth System Governance and climate change?</em> Utilising North-South literature, this paper examines these relations and responsibilities, emphasising the need to decolonise ESG by challenging entrenched power structures in climate governance. The analysis concludes: (a) the North-South dynamic is a flexible dichotomy reflecting the dominance of powerful nations/actors over the less powerful; (b) recurring patterns of North-South behaviour in controlling forums, agendas, and decisions marginalise Southern perspectives; and (c) such imbalances result in failures to govern ecological and social problems, while the North risks losing control over them. Without a more just approach addressing the North-South dichotomy, we all risk losing a stable and predictable climate.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"24 ","pages":"Article 100251"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143696992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"","authors":"Fronika de Wit","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100246","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100246","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"24 ","pages":"Article 100246"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143487661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-12-15DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2024.100232
Jeffrey E. Blackwatters , Michele Betsill , Eugene Eperiam , Trina Leberer , Geraldine Rengiil , Elizabeth Terk , Rebecca L. Gruby
{"title":"Environmental justice in conservation philanthropy: Do intermediary organizations help?","authors":"Jeffrey E. Blackwatters , Michele Betsill , Eugene Eperiam , Trina Leberer , Geraldine Rengiil , Elizabeth Terk , Rebecca L. Gruby","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2024.100232","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2024.100232","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Many private philanthropic foundations are engaging intermediary organizations as a strategy to better integrate justice into their grantmaking. This study examines how intermediary organizations work in practice and how they can or cannot contribute to justice in conservation funding. We employed Q methodology and a knowledge co-production approach to examine grantees’ experiences of justice in their grantmaking relationship with a funding intermediary, the Micronesia Conservation Trust (MCT). Using a collaborative process of knowledge creation and interpretation, we identified three distinct perspectives: 1. <em>Intermediaries bridge gaps in justice</em>; 2. <em>Intermediaries are helpful but constrained</em>; and 3. <em>Intermediaries cannot solve injustice in conservation</em> <em>funding</em>. Our findings indicate that while intermediaries can play a vital role in advancing justice in grant-making relationships, they are not a silver bullet for addressing injustices that are inherent to funding dynamics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100232"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143149472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2025-01-24DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2025.100238
Cornelia Fast, Oscar Widerberg
{"title":"Governance through goals in action: How multi-stakeholder partnerships translate and connect the SDGs","authors":"Cornelia Fast, Oscar Widerberg","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100238","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100238","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflect a ‘governance through goals’ approach to earth system governance, which requires collaborative action through multi-stakeholder partnerships and tailored responses that address SDG interactions. This article focuses on goal-setting as a possible response to the SDGs. By bridging governance through goals and SDG interaction literature, we develop a two-dimensional framework to explore specificity (how precise are the goals?) and connectivity (how are SDGs, institutions, and actors connected?) in goals. From examining a sample of 414 goals belonging to 64 multi-stakeholder partnerships with the potential to address SDG13 on Climate Action, the article contributes to the special issue by providing a novel account of how multi-stakeholder partnerships translate and address combinations of SDGs differently. The article engages with academic and policy debates on the steering effects of governance through goals, by discussing the potential of lofty goals to facilitate an integrated, accelerated approach to SDG implementation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100238"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2025-01-28DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2025.100237
Franziska Ehnert
{"title":"Sustainability transitions as contextual reconfiguration: Governance innovation through local experimentation","authors":"Franziska Ehnert","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100237","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100237","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In a context of complex and unprecedented challenges, innovations in governance are called for to embrace uncertainty and contingency. As a novel form of governance urban experimentation is intended to foster innovation and promote societal change. Building on the concepts of reconfiguration and multiplicity, scholars direct attention towards the multidimensional, hybrid and recursive nature of transformative change. The article provides an empirical exploration of local experimentation and contextual reconfiguration, illustrating how experimentation is mediated by and transforms local governance settings. It builds on “Dresden – City of the Future: Empowering Citizens, Transforming Cities!“, a transdisciplinary research project that aims to facilitate the co-creation of knowledge by researchers and practitioners, and advance the governance of local sustainability transitions. The exploratory study sheds light on processes of re-alignment between old and new forms of governance, illustrating the shift from hierarchy to co-creation, and from planning and accountability to experimentation and exploration.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100237"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143149410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-12-02DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2024.100230
Korhonen-Kurki K., D'Amato D., Belinskij A., Lazarevic D., Leskinen P., Nylén E.-J., Pappila M., Penttilä O., Pitzén S., Pykäläinen N., Turunen T., Vikström S.
{"title":"Transformative governance: Exploring theory of change and the role of the law","authors":"Korhonen-Kurki K., D'Amato D., Belinskij A., Lazarevic D., Leskinen P., Nylén E.-J., Pappila M., Penttilä O., Pitzén S., Pykäläinen N., Turunen T., Vikström S.","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2024.100230","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2024.100230","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Transformative change is becoming a key concept in the scientific conceptualization of sustainability. We assess five environmental governance approaches: adaptive, earth system, evolutionary, transformative and transition governance. We ask 1) What characterizes the different governance approaches, and how do they understand the dynamics of change? 2) How is the role of law conceptualized in the context of these governance approaches? The five studied approaches present different and complementary ways of describing change and how it unfolds or can be steered. According to our literature review, collaboration, leadership, learning, plurality, empowering, innovation and vision are seen as key mechanisms for change, while law is often oversimplified in these governance approaches, either as an enabler of or as a barrier to change towards sustainability. Future avenues of research could include how disruptive elements could be introduced as a way of catalyzing change and how to strengthen legal analysis to transformative change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100230"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143149409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-12-02DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2024.100229
Daniel Black , Geoff Bates , Andy Gibson , Kathy Pain , Ges Rosenberg , Jo White
{"title":"What is “good” co-production in the context of planetary health research, and how is it enabled?","authors":"Daniel Black , Geoff Bates , Andy Gibson , Kathy Pain , Ges Rosenberg , Jo White","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2024.100229","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2024.100229","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Involvement of non-academic stakeholders in research is essential when seeking to address global challenges, yet there is considerable uncertainty on how to do this well given the complexity. This paper aims to define more clearly what ‘good’ co-production looks like in the context of urban-planetary health research and how to operationalise it in research design, drawing on existing literature alongside case study experience from operationalising a major research programme. The first sections of the paper set out the rationale, and analyses key issues identified relating to co-production. The case study analysis is based on six headline themes: clarity of mission, language, societal impact, complexity, new approaches and limitations. Eight principles are presented alongside associated questions for research teams. Logic model development and co-production activities are plotted along the ten-year research trajectory, which reveals five key decision points and potential opportunities for optimising mission-oriented co-production in research design.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100229"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143149471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earth System GovernancePub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2025-01-28DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2025.100239
Anne van Veen, Ingrid Visseren-Hamakers
{"title":"The emancipatory inclusion of nonhuman animals in the Dutch sustainable food system transition: An embodied critical discourse analysis","authors":"Anne van Veen, Ingrid Visseren-Hamakers","doi":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100239","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esg.2025.100239","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>There is increasing agreement among scientists and policy makers that we need transformative change, change at the deepest levels of society, to become sustainable. There is also increasing attention for politics, power relations and justice in studying and governing sustainability transitions. This attention has however largely been limited to <em>human</em> politics, power relations and justice, even though other animals are also stakeholders in these transitions. This article focuses on the inclusion of nonhuman animals in the food system transition in the Netherlands. Through an embodied critical discourse analysis of academic papers and policy texts we show that there is a lack of inclusion of other animals as stakeholders, and how anthropocentric ontological and epistemological assumptions lead to reproducing power inequalities and the perpetuation of practices of nonhuman animal exclusion and oppression. In addition, our analysis demonstrates how terms such as ‘intrinsic value’ serve human rather than nonhuman interests because they are interpreted in such a way that they simultaneously assuage guilt and legitimize continued owning and killing of other animals by humans. We also contribute methodologically by adding the practice of re-embodiment of texts to the close reading method generally used in Critical Discourse Analysis, thereby making this method less anthropocentric. Finally, we propose steps towards the emancipatory inclusion of nonhuman animals in environmental governance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":33685,"journal":{"name":"Earth System Governance","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100239"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143149475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}