New Agents of Change to the Rescue? Exploring the Building Blocks of a Pragmatic Bottom-up Approach to Global Environmental Governance

In the past two decades, new agents of change such as businesses, cities and NGOs have started to fill the implementation gap left by intergovernmental efforts to address global environmental problems. In light of this change in political set up and given the increasing urgency, a more pragmatist and bottom-up governance approach is needed that takes into account the different drivers and logics of change that guide new agents of change. What are the building blocks of such a governance approach? Based on a broad review of the literature on transnational and adaptive governance, we identify seven building blocks for such a bottom-up approach: partnerships and participation, disclosure and accountability taking win-win prospects as a starting point, upscaling potential, social learning and governance capabilities for complex problems. We apply our framework to three case studies on forests, agri-food supply chains and land restoration.