From environmental governance to governance for sustainability

Scholarship on environmental governance has provided invaluable contributions that usefully broadened the field of environmental policy from its narrow focus on central governments and state agencies. The inclusion of new agents and their interests, mechanisms of governance, and motivational foundations strengthened analyses of environmental challenges and outcomes. But the revolution of environmental governance remains incomplete. To address the complex, interrelated, non-linear socio-environmental sustainability challenges threatening societies and ecosystems, we call for a shift from environmental governance to governance for sustainability. Such a shift will fundamentally change how scholarship on socio-environmental challenges analyzes causes, processes, outcomes, and proposed solutions. It will attend closely to the interlinkages between social, economic, and environmental systems and their causes, processes, and patterns of outcomes. It will recast governance from analyses of rules and institutions to a field concerned with choices and actions aimed at transformational change toward sustainability.