Journal ArticleDOI
Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change
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TLDR
It is argued that an “applied forward reasoning” approach is better suited for social scientists seeking to address climate change, which is characterized as a “super wicked” problem comprising four key features: time is running out, those who cause the problem also seek to provide a solution, the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent, and policy responses discount the future irrationally.Abstract:
Most policy-relevant work on climate change in the social sciences either analyzes costs and benefits of particular policy options against important but often narrow sets of objectives or attempts to explain past successes or failures. We argue that an “applied forward reasoning” approach is better suited for social scientists seeking to address climate change, which we characterize as a “super wicked” problem comprising four key features: time is running out; those who cause the problem also seek to provide a solution; the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent; and, partly as a result, policy responses discount the future irrationally. These four features combine to create a policy-making “tragedy” where traditional analytical techniques are ill equipped to identify solutions, even when it is well recognized that actions must take place soon to avoid catastrophic future impacts. To overcome this tragedy, greater attention must be given to the generation of path-dependent policy interventions that can “constrain our future collective selves.” Three diagnostic questions result that orient policy analysis toward understanding how to trigger sticky interventions that, through progressive incremental trajectories, entrench support over time while expanding the populations they cover. Drawing especially from the literature on path dependency, but inverting it to develop policy responses going forward, we illustrate the plausibility of our framework for identifying new areas of research and new ways to think about policy interventions to address super wicked problems.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Coral reefs in the Anthropocene
Terry P. Hughes,Michele L. Barnes,David R. Bellwood,Joshua E. Cinner,Graeme S. Cumming,Jeremy B. C. Jackson,Jeremy B. C. Jackson,Joanie Kleypas,Ingrid A. van de Leemput,Janice M. Lough,Janice M. Lough,Tiffany H. Morrison,Stephen R. Palumbi,Egbert H. van Nes,Marten Scheffer +14 more
TL;DR: The global challenge is to steer reefs through the Anthropocene era in a way that maintains their biological functions and will require radical changes in the science, management and governance of coral reefs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Tensions in Corporate Sustainability: Towards an Integrative Framework
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a systematic framework for the analysis of tensions in corporate sustainability, which is based on the emerging integrative view on corporate sustainability and stresses the need for a simultaneous integration of economic, environmental and social dimensions without, a priori, emphasising one over any other.
Journal ArticleDOI
Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability
James Patterson,Karsten Schulz,Joost Vervoort,Sandra van der Hel,Oscar Widerberg,Carolina Adler,Margot Hurlbert,Karen Anderton,Mahendra Sethi,Aliyu Salisu Barau +9 more
TL;DR: A variety of conceptual approaches have been developed to understand and analyse societal transition or transformation processes, including: socio-technical transitions, social-ecological systems, sustainability pathways, and transformative adaptation as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
What is data justice? The case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally:
TL;DR: The increasing availability of digital data reflecting economic and human development, and in particular the availability of data emitted as a byproduct of people's use of technological devices, is discussed in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual
Christopher Wright,Daniel Nyberg +1 more
TL;DR: In the space of two centuries of industrial development, human civilization has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and oce... as discussed by the authors, the challenge of climate change represents the grandest challenge facing humanity.
References
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Climate change 2007: the physical science basis
Susan Solomon,Dahe Qin,Martin R. Manning,Melinda Marquis,Kristen Averyt,Melinda M.B. Tignor,H. L. Miller,Z. Chen +7 more
TL;DR: The first volume of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report as mentioned in this paper was published in 2007 and covers several topics including the extensive range of observations now available for the atmosphere and surface, changes in sea level, assesses the paleoclimatic perspective, climate change causes both natural and anthropogenic, and climate models for projections of global climate.
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The Tragedy of the Commons
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Book
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
TL;DR: In this paper, an institutional approach to the study of self-organization and self-governance in CPR situations is presented, along with a framework for analysis of selforganizing and selfgoverning CPRs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Dilemmas in a general theory of planning
TL;DR: The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, becuase of the nature of these problems as discussed by the authors, whereas science has developed to deal with tame problems.
Journal ArticleDOI
Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches
TL;DR: This article synthesize the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches, and identify three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based upon normative approval; and cognitive, according to comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness.
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