Book of Abstracts
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Book of Abstracts Contents Architectures of Earth System Governance ...................................................................................................................... 2 Agency in Earth System Governance .............................................................................................................................. 38 Accountability, Legitimacy and Democracy in Earth System Governance ...................................................................... 80 Allocation, Access and Equity in Earth System Governance ......................................................................................... 103 Adaptiveness, Resilience and Transformation of Earth System Governance ............................................................... 129 Theoretical and Methodological Foundations of Earth System Governance ............................................................... 162 Architectures of Earth System Governance Participatory Consent in Blue Economy Decision-Making Lisa Uffman-Kirsch University of Tasmania-Faculty of Law, Hobart, Australia. Centre for Marine Socioecology, Hobart, Australia Conflicts over government decisions on economic development projects in the marine space are common and geographically widespread. Under the agency aspect of Earth System Governance, this paper focuses on how and what official decisions are reached for marine development projects. It considers governmental institutions functioning as agent trustees under a public trust model of ocean governance.[1] Legal recognition of the marine space as public property that is an asset of the public trust corpus, commonly owned by humankind as trust beneficiaries, can have significant effects in the process of marine project decision-making. The model envisions a legal framework under which grants of governance authority are in a fiduciary capacity, encompassing uncompromisable substantive and procedural governmental duties. It is proposed that one of these procedural duties is upholding a right of participatory consent by stakeholder beneficiaries before reaching significant decisions affecting trust assets, i.e. the marine space and its natural resources. Introduced is a preliminary rubric for decision-making protocol that follows the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). Under conventional usage, the FPIC principle is limited to indigenous rights agreements. Under this proposed ocean governance protocol, marine-based economic development projects incorporate all affected citizen stakeholders in the decision-making process by legal mandate. The author hypothesizes that embedding elements of the FPIC process of participatory consent into official approval procedures for marine development activities provides a template for mutually beneficial social licensing relationships between stakeholders. To test this hypothesis, preliminary results of empirical research with diverse stakeholders in two marine development industries—aquaculture in Tasmania, Australia and proposed offshore oil and gas drilling in proximity to Nova Scotia, Canada—will explore whether there is a positive relationship between levels of social license in diverse marine stakeholder relationships and the government decision-making processes utilized. Included is an early overview of the potential for and benefits of legal reform in ocean governance. Decision Tools for Earth System Governance Brian Dermody Centre for Complex Systems Studies, Utrecht, Netherlands The rapid socioeconomic changes that have occurred in the last decades have led to increasing interdependencies between humans and the environment across regions, sectors and scales. As a result, complexity in governance has increased, with policies often having unintended consequences. Decision tools exist to help policy makers navigate some of the interdependencies arising from human-environment interactions within the earth system. For example, Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) provide estimates of how driving factors induce a range of impacts across sectors and regions. IAMs capture these processes at high aggregation owing to a history of data scarcity and computational limitations as well as a stated desire to maintain transparency. As a result, IAMs cannot capture the surprising and non- linear changes we see in human-environment systems. There is a recent recognition of the need to capture these complexities in a new wave of Earth System Models. As these new generation of decision tools begin to emerge, it is critical to establish what the governance community regard as relevant dynamics to include in such models. In addition, how can these new generation of models be developed to increase engagement with governance end-users? In this paper, I sketch out the history of interaction between the governance community and previous generation of decision tools. I outline the directions being taken in developing a new generation of decision tools and how these new tools may be developed to meet the needs of governance end-users. 2 The Design and Diffusion of Carbon Markets: Implications for Applied Policy Research Lars Gulbrandsen1, Jørgen Wettestad1, Arild Underdal2, David Victor3 1Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Lysaker, Norway. 2University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. 3University of California at San Diego, San Diego, USA This paper discusses findings from and policy implications of a large-scale research project on the design and diffusion of emissions trading systems (ETS) around the world. Because that project was designed to contextualize our understanding of national and regional trading systems, the tenor of the case studies presented in this article find much more ETS design divergence than might be expected from theory on policy diffusion. Moreover, contrary to expectations of a more interconnected, global carbon market emerging, we find that emissions trading is increasingly becoming an “introverted” policy instrument, serving primarily as a national or regional policy tool. Our findings of divergence and introversion have sobering implications for the vision of a global carbon market. With this backdrop, we discuss three key implications for fundamental and applied policy research. First, we discuss the micro foundations of convergence and divergence. Why do we see convergence in some areas but divergence in others? And why is this issue area so different in the case of carbon markets from the rest of the diffusion literature, which has tended to see convergence? Second, we discuss processes of learning and adjustment. How to different jurisdictions process or construct information about the success or failure of policy in other jurisdictions? We examine this question by investigating reactions to perceived ETS “success” and “failure” in different jurisdictions. Third, we examine implications for linking of trading systems that have different rules and institutions. Here we discuss our finding in relation to all the ETS linking debates in the literature on carbon markets We argue that research needs to operate in the “real world” of political economy, where deep underlying forces, mainly within jurisdictions, act as strong intervening variables and have an impact on the actual design and implementation of trading systems. Insofar as one believes that these forces are robust and will not change even in the presence of international carbon markets, then they will be THE central issue when it comes to the globalization of carbon markets. Security and Environmental Change: An Indian Perspective Dhanasree Jayaram Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India The contemporary discourse on environmental security, a concept that began to be discussed in the 1960s and 70s, has until recently struggled to attain an eminent position in the International Relations/security studies discourse. It has been torn between ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’; ‘national’ and ‘human’; and ‘global’ and ‘local’. This largely makes the act of theorising environmental security a critical or analytical exercise at the outset. India is considered one of the most environmentally vulnerable countries in the world with adverse implications for all major sectors. Environmental issues form an important part of academic and policy discussions in India, but environmental change is not securitised according to conventional definitions of securitisation. The security establishment does not perceive environmental change as an ‘existing’ security threat, although concerns exist regarding their probable effects in the ‘future’. There are a growing number of references to the relevance of environmental issues in security discourses (both academic and policy) in recent times, but these are at best a representation of existing perspectives based on discourse analysis (mainly of the West) and not entirely policy- oriented or directed towards integration with security strategy – like the incorporation of environmental security in the Joint Doctrine Indian Armed Forces 2017. The reasons for non-securitisation or “partial securitisation” include theoretical, academic, constitutional, geopolitical and strategic factors. For instance, India has steadfastly opposed introduction of security implications of climate change at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on several grounds including differences with the Western model of securitisation. The Western discourse on environmental security is dominated mainly by resource scarcity, environment-conflict nexus (intra-state, inter-ethnic and inter-state rivalries)