The BlueGreen Governance project has published a thematic issue: “Transforming Coastal Governance: Challenges, Experiences, and Ways Forward” in the Journal Ocean and Society (2025, Volume 2) (Cogitatio Press).
Transforming coastal governance is key to ensuring the sustainable development and use of our coastal areas. This special issue explores how governance can evolve across five key dimensions: 🔹 Integration of land and sea planning & management 🔹 Use of scientific knowledge in decision-making 🔹 Stakeholder involvement in planning & policy processes 🔹 Strategic foresight for future-oriented governance 🔹 Digitalization & e-governance tools
Drawing on insights from the BlueGreen Governance project across diverse European coastal regions and Réunion Island, the contributions highlight: ✅ Real-world attempts to transform governance ✅ Challenges and obstacles faced ✅ Innovative solutions developed along the way 📖 All articles are Open Access!
This article argues that visions of transformation, or governed transition, need additional conceptual framings to discern to what extent steering and policy integration are possible towards processes we can call ‘transition’. It identifies a series of dilemmas of transformation which each unique transition must navigate through by means of governance. Such navigational effort can contextualize goals and strategies by making design choices and limitations for the transition process visible. It distinguishes further between two types of real dilemmas: structurally impossible combinations of features and discursively constructed dilemmas, which often build on false polarities of concepts and approaches. It illustrates the analysis with examples from four ongoing and/or attempted transitions towards a bioeconomy. It is argued that what applies to the analysis of compatibility and incompatibility, at the level of structural choices for institutional design, applies to the analysis of individual choices, where recognition of trade-offs, false friends, and polarities is equally helpful, yet framed by the key decisions in institutional design.
Privatisation, as a process that assigns more individual property rights, implies in most cases institutional change. Privatisation might occur on the level of society, when formal laws, but often also informal rules are changing, or it might take place on an organisational level when an asset under an open access regime, a cooperative, or a state-owned company is converted into a privately managed entity. From this perspective, it seems obvious that theories of institutional change provide a certain understanding of privatisation processes in the marine realm. Processes of marine privatisation are very heterogeneous in their characteristics: some processes are informal, some take part in the business world, others in the political realm, some are to a certain degree planned, others are emerging and have more evolutionary characteristics, some are characterised by huge power asymmetries others take place under more equal footing. Therefore, this paper interrogates a broad range of theories of institutional change. Our perspective does not proclaim or investigate superiority of one theory above the other, but rather inquires about fit. After elaborating on the theories, clarifying their focus, core concepts and assumptions, the paper illustrates the explanatory powers of the theories by looking at the case of privatisation of space in Saint Louis, Senegal. Due to strong restrictions for Senegalese fishers to fish in Mauritanian waters, the establishment of a marine protected area, and more recently the establishment of a gas field on the doorstep, fishers are confronted with an enclosure of their commons.
‘Always insightful, sometimes challenging, Strategy for Sustainability Transitions tackles global issues that have been piling up, from climate change to social inequality. The interdisciplinary approach of the authors is unique and inspiring. The crux of their argument is that the transition requires strategies underpinned by a comprehensive understanding of governance.’
– Fikret Berkes, University of Manitoba, Canada and author of Advanced Introduction to Resilience (Edward Elgar, 2023)
In this innovative work, Kristof Van Assche, Raoul Beunen and Monica Gruezmacher analyse the challenges and possibilities of sustainability transitions, presenting the dilemmas facing the path to more sustainable communities and societies, as well as proposing creative solutions. The authors deploy evolutionary governance theory as a conceptual framing for transition strategy, highlighting the importance of understanding governance and community strategy in any potential response to environmental crises.
This timely book expertly draws on a wide range of disciplines and theories, in considering the limitations imposed by unpredictable dynamics of power, discourse and affect and the shifting boundaries of what is governable. The authors demonstrate the creative potential of both instabilities and rigidities in governance. Chapters detail the basics of evolutionary governance theory, developing and applying it to transition strategy by engaging in an accessible manner with post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, institutional economics, systems theory and critical management studies. In a clearly constructed theoretical narrative, the results of this engagement become clear, in a new understanding of the weight of the past on governance and community, the construction of temporality, change and strategic change, contextual notions of good governance, and how these affect major shifts towards sustainability.
Strategy for Sustainability Transitions is an important addition to an ever-expanding and crucial field. Particularly relevant to practitioners and policy-makers interested in sustainable development and environmental governance, it will greatly appeal to students and scholars of human geography, public policy and administration, environmental politics and planning and development studies.
‘This excellent volume examines a key question of our time – the possibility of sustainability transitions – through an evolutionary governance lens. In addition to exploring how climate change, biodiversity and energy crises, water and food scarcity require societal transitions, it keeps a firm eye focused on the lessons that have been learned about why societal transitions occur (or not) and especially on the role played in these processes by governing institutions writ large. Drawing on earlier work by the authors and others in the field, the book introduces and applies the idea of a “governance path” in assessing how likely any sustainability transition might be and in what directions any such transition is likely to go. Concluding with a discussion of the interplay between governance and policy strategies, the book highlights the need for both good governance and good strategies if any kind of successful transition is to occur.’ – Michael Howlett, Simon Fraser University, Canada
This ground-breaking Encyclopedia provides a nuanced overview of the key concepts of urban and regional planning and design. Embracing a broad understanding of planning and design within and beyond the professions, it examines what planners and designers can do in and for a community.
Covering both classic and novel planning theories, this Encyclopedia adopts an evolutionary perspective, reflecting on the changing meanings of terms over time. Featuring over 140 contributions drawn from diverse fields, it highlights the cross-disciplinary nature of planning and design. Contributors give practical insight into the field, and advance scientific knowledge and public conversation on planning and design.
The Elgar Encyclopedia in Urban and Regional Planning and Design will be an essential resource for students and scholars of planning, design, urban studies and governance. It will also be highly useful for practitioners and civil servants seeking to deepen their understanding of public works, planning and environmental policy.
Risk is always constructed: one sees something, expects something, is afraid of something, and all this emerges as real in stories about self and environment. Things become more problematic when one story about one type of risk starts to dominate policy and planning. This means that alternative ideas of risk and opportunity, and alternative understandings of types of risks, are marginalized. Things get worse when formal policies and plans addressing one type of risk simply ignore the limits of formality, of the formal institutional order, in organizing anything. One can hit rock bottom when governmental actors, defining risk and creating policies and plans, are embroiled in conflicts with locals whose lands and livelihoods are affected by those policies and plans, and when those conflicts are not recognized.
This, alas, is what happens often when climate risk policy meets southern urbanism. In Bhubaneswar, capital of the Indian state of Odisha, climate policy was handily used by pro- development actors, threatening to displace droves of dwellers in informal settlements, aggravating latent conflicts. Hence, (climate) shocks are likely to produce more unanticipated effects, conflicts function as the unobserved middle term, and the formal policies and plans to mitigate climate risk contribute to the creation of new and largely unobserved risk.
This paper explores the institutionalization process regarding ideas about a more prominent role for citizens’ initiatives in planning. Citizens’ initiatives are often considered important for the transition towards sustainable urban development. Although this claim is not undisputed, many planning reforms in Western societies have promoted the inclusion of citizens in planning policies and projects. In the new Dutch Environment and Planning Act (EPA), which is expected to come into force in 2023, similar intentions are stated. The EPA claims to enhance participation of citizens, amongst other stakeholders, such as societal organizations, governmental bodies and businesses, at an early stage in decision-making processes, while in addition the planning system should become better suited to stimulate and facilitate societal initiatives. This study reveals that these ambitions have not resulted in clear rules or norms that strengthen the role for citizens’ initiatives in urban planning. The analysis of the development of the EPA shows that the institutionalization process can be characterized by 1) an emerging discrepancy between the rhetorical key message that all citizens’ initiatives will benefit from the EPA and the limited legal assurance, 2) the assumption that the myriad of forms citizens’ initiatives come in can be moulded into general participatory schemes and 3) a lack of reflections on how lenient planning rules are likely to advance market parties and governments rather than citizens’ initiatives. Because the institutionalization process continues after effectuation, in particular local governments are urged to develop additional policies to ensure a stronger position for citizens’ initiatives in planning.
Yes, governance is complex and yes, many forms of knowledge and methods of knowledge creation are involved. Many think that it’s a matter of completing a puzzle. While neither governance nor the construction of knowledge work like that. Within the same governance system, very different forms of thinking and organizing can coexist, and the result is not a comprehensive map of the world, nor a set of compatible tools to reshape that world. Models and simulations are alluring but contribute to this forgetting that it’s not a puzzle.
This Special Issue explores evolutionary perspectives on environmental policy and governance. It focuses on human attempts to plan, organize and steer their physical environment. Steering is a matter of coordination, of managing the effects of policy in the world and in governance itself. Environmental governance can be a matter of limiting damage to and enhancing the quality of physical environments, it can be natural resource governance and it can be focused on the development of rural economies—often tied to their physical environment. In other words, through environmental governance, people try to understand and attempt to organize their environment. The authors in this Special Issue demonstrate that understanding and organizing are constantly co-evolving. How something is conceptualized within governance and the position that perspective takes in governance, shapes and at the same time is shaped by traditions of organizing, rooted in the presence of particular actors, institutions and forms of knowledge. The co-evolution of these different elements never ceases, and therefore the interplay between power and knowledge takes places before, during and after the formulation of policies, plans and laws for the environment. Policies are reused, reinterpreted, reinforced and undermined in a context of changing actors, institutions and forms of knowledge implied in the taking of collectively binding decisions.
Raoul Beunen, Kristof Van Assche and Monica Gruezmacher
The attention to sustainability transformations and related processes of learning, innovation, and adaptation has inspired a growing interest in theories that help to grasp the processes of change in governance. This perspective paper and the Special Issue of which it is part explore how evolutionary perspectives on environmental governance can enrich our understanding of the possibilities and limits of environmental policy and planning. The aim of this paper is to highlight some key notions for an evolutionary understanding of governance theory and to show how such an evolutionary perspective can help to develop a more integrated perspective on environmental governance in which the temporal dimension and the effects of steering attempts play a pivotal role. It is argued that the effects of environmental governance on the material environment, community, and governance itself must be considered in their interrelation. Such insight in couplings and co-evolutions can be of great value in the everyday practice of environmental policy and governance and even more so when attempting to transform the governance system towards more ambitious and coordinated goals. View Full-Text
Roel During, Kristof Van Assche and Rosalie Van Dam
Social resilience and ecological resilience are related and distinguished, and the potential of social resilience to enhance resilience of encompassing social-ecological systems is discussed. The value of resilience thinking is recognized, yet social resilience needs to be better understood in its distinctive qualities, while resisting identification of social resilience with one particular form of governance or organization. Emerging self-organizing citizen’s initiatives in The Netherlands, initiatives involving re-relating to nature in the living environment, are analyzed, using a systems theoretical framework which resists reduction of nature to culture or vice versa. It is argued that space for self-organization needs to be cultivated, that local self-organization and mobilization around themes of nature in daily life and space have the potential to re-link social and ecological systems in a more resilient manner, yet that maintaining the diversity of forms of knowing and organizing in the overall governance system is essential to the maintenance of social resilience and of diverse capacities to know human-environment relations and to reorganize them in an adaptive manner. Conclusions are drawn in the light of the new Biodiversity Strategy. View Full-Text
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic offers an opportunity for dealing with persistent problems, through a transformative recovery process. It is a crisis that offers opportunities for dealing with three interrelated crises: the ecological crisis (climate change, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, pollution and ecosystem destruction), the confidence crisis (people losing trust in government, politics, companies, regular news channels, science, each other and the future), and the inequality crisis (the widening of the gap between rich and poor). Our argument is that sustainability transitions will not succeed without a different economy and another social contract with rights and duties of care for the environment and the well-being of others, including future generations. A different social contract is not only desirable from the point of view of sustainability and fairness, and justice and equality, but it is also necessary to restore citizens’ trust in politics, government, companies and each other. In the paper we discuss mechanisms towards a Natural Social Contract: systemic leverage points for system transformations and possibilities for co-evolutionary governance by actor coalitions interested in transformative change. The combination of those three elements helps to synchronize different agendas and reduce the chance that they will work against each other. View Full-Text
Effective governance and inter-organisational cooperation is key to progressing Australia’s journey toward the circular economy. At the local governance level, inter-municipal cooperative partnerships in waste management (‘IMC-WM’ partnerships) are a widespread phenomenon throughout Australia, and the world. This paper aims to analyse waste management in Australia through a governance perspective and inaugurate the scholarship on understanding the complex interactions between actors and institutions designed for regional cooperation. To this end, we explore the partnerships’ institutional characteristics, joint activity outputs and the internal relations observed between participants. Data were collected through a nationwide census survey of Australia’s IMC–WM partnerships and a short online questionnaire to the municipal policy actors (councillors, executives and council officers) who participate in them. The investigation observes that a diversity of innovative institutional responses has emerged in Australia. However, within these partnerships, a culture of competitiveness antithetical to sustainability is also detected. Despite competitive behaviours, the partnerships perform very well in cultivating goodwill, trust, reciprocity and other social capital values among their participants—as well as a strong appreciation of the complexity of municipal solid waste (MSW) policy and the virtues of regional cooperation. This dissonance in attitudes and engagement dynamics, it is suggested, can be explained by considering the cultural-cognitive influence of broader neoliberalist paradigms. As the first scholarly investigation into Australia’s experience with regional cooperation in waste management, this research reveals the macro-level structures and ascendent micro-institutional dynamics shaping the phenomenon. View Full-Text
Martijn Gerritsen, Henk-Jan Kooij, Martijn Groenleer and Erwin van der Krabben
Experimentalist forms of governance have burgeoned across policy areas and institutional contexts in recent years. Recognizing that experimentalist forms of governance can evolve along a plethora of distinct pathways, this paper inquires how the evolutionary nature of experimentalism can be explored in greater depth. Linking the framework of experimentalist governance to that of Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT), the paper identifies three driving mechanisms of contingency in experimentalism: governance being (1) self-referential, (2) rooted in observation, and (3) steered by dependencies. The paper then refers to recent efforts in the realm of energy transition governance in the Netherlands to illustrate how these contingency mechanisms can help to interrogate the variegated evolutionary pathways that experimentalist governance may have in practice. Building on this Dutch empirical context, the paper puts forward evolutionary path- and context-mapping as a fruitful tool for identifying and disentangling the myriad of pathways along which experimentalism may manifest itself. View Full-Text
Kristof Van Assche, Monica Gruezmacher and Raoul Beunen
In this paper, we present a framework for the analysis of shock and conflict in social-ecological systems and investigate the implications of this perspective for the understanding of environmental governance, particularly its evolutionary patterns and drivers. We dwell on the distinction between shock and conflict. In mapping the relation between shock and conflict, we invoke a different potentiality for altering rigidity and flexibility in governance; different possibilities for recall, revival and trauma; and different pathways for restructuring the relation between governance, community and environment. Shock and conflict can be both productive and eroding, and for each, one can observe that productivity can be positive or negative. These different effects in governance can be analyzed in terms of object and subject creation, path creation and in terms of the dependencies recognized by evolutionary governance theory: path, inter-, goal and material dependencies. Thus, shock and conflict are mapped in their potential consequences to not only shift a path of governance, but also to transform the pattern of self-transformation in such path. Finally, we reflect on what this means for the interpretation of adaptive governance of social-ecological systems. View Full-Text
Commons (or common-pool resources) are inherently dynamic. Factors that appear to contribute to the evolution of a stable commons regime at one time and place may undergo change that results in the collapse of the commons at another. The factors involved can be very diverse. Economic, social, environmental and political conditions and various drivers may lead to commonisation, a process through which a resource is converted into a joint-use regime under commons institutions and collective action. Conversely, they may lead to decommonisation, a process through which a commons loses these essential characteristics. Evolution through commonisation may be manifested as adaptation or fine-tuning over time. They may instead result in the replacement of one kind of property rights regime by another, as in the enclosure movement in English history that resulted in the conversion of sheep grazing commons into privatized agricultural land. These processes of change can be viewed from an evolutionary perspective using the concepts of commonisation and decommonisation, and theorized as a two-way process over time, with implications for the sustainability of joint resources from local to global. View Full-Text
International Institute for Innovation in Governance 