Agency in earth system governance: refining a research agenda
Eleni Dellas; Philipp Pattberg; Michele Betsill
International Environmental Agreements Politics, Law and Economics 11(1): 85-98
2011
ISSN/ISBN: 1573-1553 DOI: 10.1007/s10784-011-9147-9Document Number: 305147
In the face of global environmental change, a key question for the social sciences is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their natural environment. In this context, a new long-term research program, the Earth System Governance Project, proposes several key issues to be examined: architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountability, and allocation and access. The contributions to this special issue have focused on the analytical problem of agency. For example, they have examined newly emerging or understudied agents of global environmental governance, or offered a fresh assessment of agency in the context of existing governance mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism. This concluding article outlines several insights provided by the contributions to this special issue regarding four key questions underlying the study of agency in global environmental governance. First, they call attention to the ingredients or processes that characterize agency in the first place and thus distinguish actors from agents.