Abstract
The present paper introduces for the first time the concept of Integrated Climate Governance (ICG) and critically discusses its implications for EU research and policy on ‘sustainable development’. ICG is understood as a transition-oriented appraisal approach focused on the creation of assessment tools, policy instruments, and agent-based capacities aimed at dealing in an integrated way with multiple scales and domains related both with mitigation and adaptation. The goal of ICG is to support agent transformation for sustainable development. ICG constitutes both a descriptive and normative synthesis of a large corpus of literature and research within the fields of Integrated Assessment (IA), Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA; Rotmans et al. 2008), Social and Sustainability Learning (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2008), and research on the institutional dimensions of global environmental change (Young 2008).
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Notes
- 1.
In contrast to Young (2008:124) I understand that cumulative environmental problems are those which their feedback effects become forces of environmental change by themselves. In this regard, climate change is both a cumulative problem and a systemic one.
- 2.
This does not mean, however, that all societies need to follow the same structuration pattern, but on the contrary, that many different patterns and configurations and organisation are required – and not only one – in a more complex society which aims to cope with the challenge of growing unsustainability.
- 3.
Which are the Tisza floodplain in Hungary, the Guadiana river basin in Iberia and the Inner Mongolia region in China; (www.adamproject.eu; Tàbara 2010; Tàbara et al. 2010).
- 4.
The recent experience at the EU level – with the Impact Assessment procedures and the EU SDS – shows that to a large extent, the failure to produce a robust and systematic procedure as well as a set of convincing tools and methods to assess sustainability progress relates to a large extent to the difficulty of finding an alternative – and equally powerful-measure to that of GNP.
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Acknowledgements
This paper and reflection could have never been made without the inspiration and intensive years of EU research with Alex Haxeltine, Jill Jager, Carlo Jaeger, Claudia Pahl-Wostl, Jan Rotmans, and Paul Weaver. I am also grateful to the reviewers of an earlier version of the paper and to the colleagues and researchers of the MATISSE and ADAM projects. Responsibility for any possible bias or flaws in the arguments presented is only mine.
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Tàbara, J.D. (2011). Integrated Climate Governance (ICG) and Sustainable Development. In: Jaeger, C., Tàbara, J., Jaeger, J. (eds) European Research on Sustainable Development. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19202-9_8
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