Dear Colleagues, We are pleased to edit a Special Issue of the journal, *Sustainability*, entitled “Environmental Governance for Sustainability”.
Since the publication of Dietz et al. (2003), “The Struggle to Govern the Commons” in the journal *Science*, scholars have increasingly focused on the governance challenges inherent in complex adaptive systems—nonlinearities and tipping points, evolving and dynamic social and ecological agents, and emergent behavior. In dealing with such phenomena in subsequent research, scholars have identified a number of specific challenges in the sustainable governance of social-ecological systems including: 1. Working across scale, the nesting of institutions, and linking governance decision-makers horizontally and vertically; 2. Creating institutional arrangements that change through adaptation and evolutionary forces to maintain robustness and resilience in a dynamic, ever changing environment; and 3. Building collaborative arrangements across political and administrative barriers and boundaries to govern at the scale of the sustainability challenge. In this Special Issue, we seek to operationalize the “adaptive” element of adaptive governance. We want to emphasize specific examples of adaptation in governance, whether through theoretical extensions or multiple methodological approaches, such as meta-analyses, modeling, and case studies. We see the most prominent type of adaptive process as an evolutionary one. An evolutionary process is well defined and contains widely accepted principles and components. As such, viewing social-ecological adaptation as an evolutionary process serves as a likely candidate for clarifying exactly what is meant by adaptation in environmental governance. *Submission date is May 31, 2017. * More information can be found at: https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.mdpi.com_journal_sustainability_special-5Fissues_environmental-5Fgovernance&d=CwIFog&c=AGbYxfJbXK67KfXyGqyv2Ejiz41FqQuZFk4A-1IxfAU&r=SeWQN-L1wZxV60Z-mxsUkFOPIatjtelFDh8M783eLLo&m=TBfZp7n84lK56sFdULat5fqFpV8Rsnh0WBsr4VF-OZ4&s=grBsauY8NQKquU4OaafK8Jg5Kl6JdpTR55vjK_V6x_c&e= *Guest Editors* Dr. Michael Schoon Affiliation: School of Sustainability, Arizona State University Homepage: https://michaelschoon.com/ E-Mail: [email protected] Dr. Michael Cox Affiliation: Department of Environmental Studies, Dartmouth College Homepage: http://dartmouth.edu/faculty-directory/michael-cox E-Mail: [email protected] Apologies for cross-postings! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
