50 Years on, w(h)ither the Ramsar convention?:A case of institutional drift

Wetlands have declined in area and quality at an accelerating pace in the last 50 years. Yet, the last 50 years is when international attention has been focussed on wetlands through the Ramsar Convention. An analysis of how the convention has evolved over the past 50 years suggests it has been drifting away from its original mandate in a maladaptive manner, and this drift is a problem for achieving its original objectives. A review of the strategic plans of the convention revealed two key conditions for institutional drifting and the associated lack of success. The first condition lies in its unique situation as a non-UN convention, which reduces the convention’s visibility and interactivity with other biodiversity-related conventions, agencies, or programmes. The second condition is an increasing number of conventions dealing with biodiversity issues, all forcing the Ramsar Convention to seek different roles in an increasingly competitive institutional landscape. A more effective future for the convention arguably lies in reasserting its original mandate, but with cognisance of the changed environmental pressures of the twenty-first century. While this would narrow its increasingly broad focus, such a reorientation will allow wetlands and waterfowl to start a track to recovery, backed by active and focused Contracting Parties in a renewed international convention on wetland conservation, management, and sustainable use

Taming Gaia 2.0: Earth system law in the ruptured Anthropocene

If the Anthropocene is a rupture in planetary history, what does it mean for international environmental law? When the Earth System crosses irreversible tipping points and begins a forceful, nonlinear transformation into a hostile state which I call the ruptured Anthropocene, the concept of protecting the global environment from humans would lose its meaning. Not only the dichotomy between humans and nature becomes irrelevant, but the environment itself will no longer exist as an object for protection. I argue that, for international environmental law to stay relevant in the ruptured Anthropocene, it needs to shift away from its traditional focus on restoring the planetary past, and instead play an active role in the making of planetary futures. Its new purpose will need to be active planetary stewardship, whereby humans add self-awareness for deliberate self-regulation of the Earth System. Such an attempt at ‘taming’ the so-called Gaia 2.0 will, however, create winners and losers, and the new form of law will have to address fundamental questions of justice on a planetary scale. Building on the concept of earth system law emerging in the earth system governance literature, I draw the contours of international environmental law 2.0 for the ruptured Anthropocene and discuss the challenges of instituting active planetary stewardship

Planetary Boundaries at the Intersection of Earth System Law, Science, and Governance: A State-of-the-Art Review

First developed in earth system science, the idea of planetary boundaries has gradually spilled over into social science research in the past decade. An interdisciplinary body of lit-erature has emerged as a result at the intersection of earth system science, law, and gov-ernance. In this paper we provide a bird’s eye view of the state of the art, and examine how social scientists frame the planetary boundaries framework and what they identify as key regulatory challenges and implications. To that end, we conducted a systematic review of 80 peer-reviewed articles identified through keyword search. Our survey finds that social scientists have approached the planetary boundaries framework using four key problem framings, which revolve around the notion of planetary boundaries as embodying a set of interdependent and politically constructed environmental limits that are global in scale. We also identify four key clusters of governance solutions offered in the literature, which broadly relate to the ideas of institutionalizing, coordinating, downscaling, and democra-tizing planetary boundaries. We then apply the foregoing insights to the legal domain and explore their implications for law. More specifically, we discuss how the recently proposed notion of earth system law is related to these emerging problem framings and how it might contribute to these responses

Towards earth-space governance in a multi-planetary era

The recent surge of private enterprise-led space activities is driving what is dubbed the New Space revolution. SpaceX as a frontrunner is working towards colonizing Mars by 2050, with the goal of transforming humans into a multi-planetary species. These developments and the imaginaries they generate are reshaping the discourse on planetary sustainability, where celestial bodies like Mars are seen as a solution to the challenges facing our Earth. Yet, space and its sustainability remain a rather distant concern in earth system governance. In this Perspective, we argue that the New Space revolution necessitates a corresponding shift in the governance paradigm from planetary to multi-planetary for a more integrated approach that recognizes the interdependencies of Earth and space sustainability. We propose a new governance model, earth-space governance, aimed at promoting justice and integrity for all forms of life in a multi-planetary context

The SDGs as integrating force in global governance? Challenges and opportunities

In 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an “integrated and indivisible” set of policy objectives with the aim, among others, to unite the diverse and vast system of international organizations under one shared normative agenda. And yet, have these SDGs really become such an integrative force in global governance? Our conclusion here is negative, and our research suggests that the SDGs have not lived up to these high expectations. We find instead that the 17 global goals have not been taken up by a substantial group of international organizations, and some organizations rather cherry-pick those goals that best fit their own agenda and interests. To overcome these challenges and to fulfill the promise of integrated global sustainability governance enshrined in the SDGs, we propose three urgent actions: first, to further push the use of the SDGs across all international organizations, in particular regional organizations outside the United Nations system; second, to facilitate better collaboration across policy domains; and third, to focus attention on those SDGs that are so far “left behind.

Sustainable Development Goals fail to advance policy integration: A large-n text analysis of 159 international organizations

While most of today’s global challenges are deeply interconnected, international organizations often operate in silos. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2015, have been advanced as a new agenda to break up these silos and to better integrate environmental, social and economic policies. Yet little is known about whether the SDGs had any effects in advancing policy integration. To investigate this, we conducted a quantitative content analysis on the website texts of 159 international organizations. Our study addresses two questions: (1) whether international organizations increasingly engage with the SDGs in their work; and (2) whether this engagement increased their attention for policy integration. Our results show that the SDGs are indeed increasingly used by most international organizations. However, this has not affected policy integration. We conclude with some possible explanations for this lack of effect and propose several research avenues

International organisations as ‘custodians’ of the sustainable development goals?: Fragmentation and coordination in sustainability governance

It is widely assumed that the fragmentation of global governance can affect coordination efforts among international institutions and organisations. Yet, the precise relationship between the fragmentation of global governance and the extent to which international organisations coordinate their activities remains underexplored. In this article, we offer new empirical evidence derived from the so-called custodianship arrangements in which numerous international organisations have been mandated to coordinate data collection and reporting for 231 indicators of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These complex custodianship arrangements provide a fertile testing ground for theories on the relationship between fragmentation and coordination because the institutional arrangements for each of the 17 SDGs have emerged bottom–up with varying degrees of fragmentation. Through a comparative approach covering 44 custodian agencies and focusing on the most and least fragmented custodianship arrangements, we make three key contributions. First, we offer a novel operationalisation of institutional fragmentation and coordination. Second, we present empirical evidence in support of the claim that fragmentation negatively affects coordination. Third, we provide nuances to this claim by identifying factors that affect the strength of this relationship. Based on our analysis, we suggest further steps that might facilitate coordination in global sustainability governance

The impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on a network of 276 international organizations

Global sustainability governance is marked by a highly fragmented system of distinct clusters of international organizations, along with states and other actors. Enhancing inter-organizational coordination and cooperation is thus often recognized as an important reform challenge in global sustainability governance. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by the United Nations in 2015, thus explicitly aim at advancing policy coherence and institutional integration among the myriad international institutions. Yet, have these goals been effective in this regard? We assess here the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on the network structure of 276 international organizations in the period 2012–2019, that is, four years before and four years after the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals. The network structure was approximated by analyzing data from the websites of these 276 international organizations that were joined by more than 1.5 million hyperlinks, which we collected using a custom-made web crawler. Our findings are contrary to what is widely expected from the Sustainable Development Goals: we find that fragmentation has in fact increased after the Sustainable Development Goals came into effect. In addition, silos are increasing around the 17 SDGs as well as around the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development

New directions in earth system governance research

The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant and relevant research community. This framework is composed of contextual conditions (transformations, inequality, Anthropocene and diversity), which capture what is being observed empirically, and five sets of research lenses (architecture and agency, democracy and power, justice and allocation, anticipation and imagination, and adaptiveness and reflexivity). Ultimately the goal is to guide and inspire the systematic study of how societies prepare for accelerated climate change and wider earth system change, as well as policy responses

The CBD Post‐2020 biodiversity framework: People's place within the rest of nature

Recognizing two decades of failure to achieve global goals and targets, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are in the final phase of negotiating a Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework for the conservation, sustainable use and benefit sharing of biodiversity. The framework attempts to set out pathways, goals and targets for the next decade to achieve positive biodiversity change. This perspective intends to help that framework set people firmly as part of nature, not apart from it. Despite work done so far through four meetings, new thinking and focus is still needed on ‘what’ changes must be conceptualized and implemented, and ‘how’ those changes are to be delivered. To help achieve that new thinking, as a broad range of people, many with a focus on aquatic systems, we highlight six key foci that offer potential to strengthen delivery of the framework and break the ‘business as usual’ logjam. These foci are as follows: (i) a reframing of the narrative of ‘people's relationship with the rest of nature’ and emphasize the crucial role of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in delivering positive biodiversity change; (ii) moving beyond a focus on species and places by prioritizing ecosystem function and resilience; (iii) supporting a diversity of top-down and bottom-up governance processes; (iv) embracing new technologies to make and measure progress; (v) linking business more effectively with biodiversity and (vi) leveraging the power of international agencies and programmes. Given they are linked to a greater or lesser degree, implementing these six foci together will lead to a much-needed broadening of the framework, especially those of business and broader urban civil society, as well as those of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog