Social Ecology and Practice — The Policy Process and the Social-Ecological Discourse

Abstract

Global environmental governance in the sense described by Biermann is confronted with two problems: protecting the ecological earth systern and managing a transition to the planetary co-evolution of natural and social systems in the sense of global sustainable development. The global environmental and resource use problems that require response through political and social action appear as complex and unsolvable, no longer manageable as the new terms of adaptive management and adaptive governance signal: management when the era of management is over (Ludwig 2001). In analyses connecting the concepts of global governance and sustainable development as performed by Biermann, as “co-evolution of natural and social systems”, no answers are available yet for transitions to global sustainability. The paradoxical situation in the sustainability discourse was formulated years ago in the debate of the Austrian social ecologists: global sustainability requires the invention of a new socio-metabolic regime, but we do not know how to build it. What we need to discover about a new socio-metabolic regime after industrial society has to be discovered during attempts to change societal practices of resource use. The scientific “trial and error” model of knowledge creation seems to have become a guiding idea for the future global policy process.

Policy-makers in the twentieth century gained much experience in managing confined ecosystems, such as river basins, forests, or lakes. In the twenty-first century, they are faced with one of the largest political problems humankind has had to deal with: protecting the entire system earth, including most of its subsystems, and building stable institutions that guarantee a safe transition and a co-evolution of natural and social systems at planetary scale. I call this the challenge of earth system governance, as a new paradigm to describe this particular challenge of planetary coevolution of humans and nature.

(Biermann 2011: 4)