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Building a compound and collaborative governance framework to improve international space sustainability

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Abstract

As a particular common pool resource (CPR), space has undergone tremendous changes and the current space governance has already shown its negative effects. To promote sustainable space development, this paper aims to establish a new compound and collaborative governance framework. The framework consists of four parts, including institutional arrangements, organizational system, implementation mechanism, and implementation actors. Institutional arrangements for space governance refer to the related laws and regulations, which are core part of the entire system and can be reflected throughout the organizational systems, implementation mechanism, and implementation actors. Organizational systems should contain three levels—international level, regional level, and state level. The implementation mechanism covers five procedures—information sharing, negotiation, collaboration, evaluation, and feedback. And the implementation actors mainly include relevant governments, international organizations, enterprises, experts and scholars, universities and research institutes, news media, and others. In this framework, all implementation actors are associated to formulate a “honeycomb” architecture, which means the actors should avoid the way of working separately and facilitate the implementation of multi-collaboration in space governance so that the true collaboration can be actualized.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Key Project of the National Social Science Fund of China (18VZL001) and the Key Project of the National Social Science Fund of China (14ZDB143). The author would like to thank Professor Zhiyong Lan and late Professor Vincent Ostrom for comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper.

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Correspondence to Lihua Yang.

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Yang, L., Du, Z., Cheng, C. et al. Building a compound and collaborative governance framework to improve international space sustainability. GPPG 1, 202–224 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-021-00018-7

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