Michele M. Betsill
Colorado State UniversityEarth System Governance: A New IHDP Research Initiative^38What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
In 2001, the four global change research programmes^39 declared in their joint Amsterdam Declaration an ‘urgent
need’ to develop ‘strategies for Earth System management’. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could
be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable they would be, remained unspecified. The International
Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) took up this challenge in March 2007
by mandating an international group of governance experts to develop a science plan for a new international long-
term research project within IHDP: the Earth System Governance (ESG) project. This paper introduces the ESG
with special attention to the potential contributions of sociology and sociologists to the challenge of governing
global environmental problems such as climate change.
People, Places, and the Planet: We define earth system governance as the interrelated and increasingly
integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human
society (from local to global) that are set up to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to
global and local environmental change and, in particular, earth system transformation, within the normative
context of sustainable development. On the one hand, earth system governance refers to an emerging social
phenomenon that is expressed in hundreds of international regimes, national policies, international and national
agencies, local and transnational activists groups, local community initiatives, and expert networks. At the same
time, we understand earth system governance as a political project that engages a wide range of actors who seek
to strengthen the current architecture of institutions and governance arrangements from the global to the local
level. In both meanings, we see earth system governance as a demanding and vital subject of research for the
social sciences.
Such research is no easy undertaking. It must bring together a variety of disciplines —including political
science, sociology, economics, policy studies, geography, and law. It must span the entire globe because only
integrated global solutions can ensure a sustainable co-evolution of natural and socio-economic systems. But
it must also draw on local experiences and insights and offer solutions to local governance problems. In other
words, research on institutions and governance in times of earth system transformation must be about people who
are drivers of global environmental change and at the same time part of any solution. It must be about places in
all their variety and diversity, yet seek to integrate place-based research in a global understanding of the overall
challenge to steer human interactions vis-à-vis earth system transformation. Eventually, this researchwill thus
need to be about our planet. It is the task of developing integrated systems of governance, from the local to the
global level, that ensure the sustainable development of the coupled socio-ecological system that the Earth has
become.
(^38) The Scientific Planning Committee for the Earth System Governance initiative includes Frank Biermann (chair), Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam; Ken Conca, University of Maryland; Bharat Desai, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Joyeeta Gupta, Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam; Norichika Kanie, Tokyo Institute of Technology; Louis Lebel, Chiang Mai University; Diana Liverman, Oxford University;
Heike Schroeder, Oxford University; Bernd Siebenhüner, University of Oldenburg; Simon Tay, Singapore Institute of International Affairs,
and Michele M. Betsill, Colorado State University; see http://www.earthsystemgovernance.org
(^39) The International-Geosphere Biosphere Programme, the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change,
DIVERSITAS, and the World Climate Research Programme. Together, these programmes make up the Earth System Science Partnership
(http://www.essp.org/).