Four Faced How Sustainability Governance is Failing our Planet and What to Do About it

LIEPP's Environmental Policies research group, AIRE and Sciences Po's Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics research group "The State as produced or public policies" are pleased to convene the seminar: 

Four Faced How Sustainability Governance is Failing our Planet and What to Do About it

July 6th, 2023. 12.30-2.30pm

Location: Sciences Po, room K011, 1 place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris

Mandatory registration

Speaker:

Ben Cashore is the Li Ka Shing Professor in Public Management, and director, the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES), the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy National University of Singapore: sppbwc@nus.edu.sg. He specialises in global and multi-level environmental governance, comparative public policy and administration, and transnational business regulation/corporate social responsibility.

Abstract:

Never have scholars and practitioners spent so much time designing institutions and policies to govern catastrophic environmental challenges denoted by climate change and mass species extinctions, and never before have these problems accelerated in such startling fashion. This talk offers an innovative explanation as to why this has happened and more importantly, what to do about it. It draws on a manuscript in progress, as well as interdisciplinary collaborations spanning three decades.

I argue that there are four competing ways that scholars and practitioners conceive of, empirically measure, and prescribe solutions for, sustainability challenges. These “four faces” of sustainability are distinguished on two dimensions: whether or not they justify their orientation owing to key features or “structural attributes” of the problem at hand; and whether or not they champion some type of “utility” enhancing project. Each of these four faces are reinforced by four distinct schools of sustainability: Commons (Type 1); Optimization (Type 2); Compromise (Type 3); and Prioritization (Type 4).

While the Prioritization school was successful in championing Type 4 problem in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been a subtle but powerful drift towards Type 3, 2 and 1 conceptions that champion competing transformation projects, the success of which help explain the acceleration of environmental degradation.

Any effort to solve Type 4 problems requires undertaking two tasks. First, sustainability scholars must overcome their unconscious bias favouring Types 3, 2, 1 problem conceptions, which is largely reproduced through each school’s emphasis on mastering highly technical skills that biases the evidence their members collect, and the problems they target. This requires understanding the impacts of each school in the last three decades across international organizations, schools of the environment, and sustainability governance innovations. Second, a return to treating the climate and biodiversity crisis as Type 4 problems requires building “thermostatic” institutions at multiple scales. I illustrate my argument by drawing on successful cases of Type 4 successes including endangered species conservation in the US Pacific Northwest, acid rain in North America, the global ozone layer, and Covid-19.

Chair: Charlotte Halpern (Sciences Po, CEE, LIEPP)

This research is carried out within the CAPin GHG research project, which was selected in the IDEX-Université Paris Cité -NUS call for proposals 2021 for joint research projects.