Environmental politics and governance increasingly have a global dimension. This is not only because of ‘global’ environmental problems, but also because local human action has environmental repercussions in far-away places (Young et al. 2006). More and more, global interconnections driven by commodity chains, production networks or human migration have produced negative socio-ecological effects in both sending and receiving systems. For example, European meat production is dependent on imported Brazilian soy and, coupled through the global soy commodity chain, is causing surplus nitrate accumulation in several European regions, and tropical deforestation in South America. Different strands of literature have described such phenomena as ‘telecoupling’ (Liu et al. 2013; Eakin at al. 2014; Friis and Nielsen 2017) which, for their characteristics, pose challenges to global environmental sustainability (Liu et al. 2013), and to governance. These phenomena, connecting distal places through multidirectional flows of capital, production and information, escape typical governance frameworks that tend to focus on a particular spatial scale (global, transboundary, local), problem area (e.g. climate change or soil contamination) or type of governance actors (public vs. private) because they might cut across all of these dimensions.
Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to conceptualize the governance of telecoupled phenomena, with a particular focus on sustainability problems, governance types and governance challenges. By doing so, we draw on different strands of literature that tackle the governance of telecouplings – albeit often using different terminology – such as global environmental governance, global commodity chains and production networks, and private or multi-stakeholder governance initiatives. We empirically ground our discussion on first findings from comparative case study research and one in-depth case study. We aim to stimulate the debate by reflecting about the governance of telecouplings regarding (a) accomplishments and limitations of state, private and multi-stakeholder initiatives and the links between them, (b) scalar governance, particularly the “fit” of governance institutions to the addressed environmental problems, and (c) problems of traceability and uncertainty regarding complex social-ecological linkages across continents.
Furthermore, with this paper we aim to pave the way for more systematic and comparative empirical research on the governance of telecoupled phenomena. We also seek to progress the conceptualization of important but relatively under-researched aspects of global environmental governance, thus advancing conceptual debate in the field of environmental politics and governance more broadly.
