Governing Environmental Sustainability in a Globally ‘Telecoupled’ World

Abstract

Globalisation is often said to have unsustainable environmental consequences. Growing interconnectedness through commodity chains and global production networks has intensified the impacts on environmental sustainability so that localised human activity or globalised environmentally harmful phenomena may have repercussions in distant places across the globe. In line with recent developments in literatures on global social-ecological systems, we describe such phenomena in terms of ‘telecoupling’ (Liu et al. 2013; Friis and Nielsen 2017) and recognise that this poses significant challenges for environmental governance (Lenschow et al. 2016; Eakin et al. 2017). Different strands of academic literature have analysed global connections and their environmental implications, as well as institutional arrangements, agencies and actors to govern the global environment (Pattberg and Widberg 2015; Biermann et al. 2009). Nevertheless, attempts to study, and indeed to govern, such globally interconnected phenomena and their environmental implications have remained relatively isolated (Dauvergne and Clapp 2016). This panel aims to stimulate a rich discussion on globalisation and environmental sustainability – with specific reference to environmental problems arising from distant global interconnections, or telecouplings – and appropriate governance approaches to address such environmental problems. Hence, in this panel we aim to dig deeper into the challenges of governing globally interconnected phenomena and will discuss questions such as: How could spillover effects be governed? How could private governance of complex global commodity chains and public governance approaches be better coordinated? What kind of institutions could manage social and environmental trade-offs across multiple scales? and How to effectively address environmental impacts that are masked and often disregarded? The panel consists of theoretical and conceptual papers addressing the framings of such globalised environmental interconnection, as well as empirical papers which focus on specific case studies and discuss their governance implications and governance options to effectively enhance environmental sustainability in globally telecoupled systems.