Here are 70 books that Governing through Goals fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have spent my professional life exploring the roles social institutions play in guiding interactions between humans and the natural environment in a variety of settings. Along the way, I pioneered research on what is now known as global environmental governance, devoting particular attention to issues relating to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. Although I come from the world of scholarship, I have played an active role in promoting productive interactions between science and policy regarding matters relating to the Arctic and global environmental change.
Governance is a social function centered on steering societies toward collectively desirable outcomes.
By contrast, a government is an organization (or collection of organizations) authorized to deal with issues of governance in a particular society.
While governments are responsible for addressing needs for governance in many settings, this distinction allows us to explore situations featuring efforts to respond to needs for governance in the absence of a government.
This is a critical observation at the global level where there are many needs for governance but no world government.
It has freed the community to analyze a range of governance systems (often called regimes) dealing with matters of security, economics, and the environment, while setting aside unproductive debates about the pros and cons of efforts to create a world government.
A world government capable of controlling nation-states has never evolved. Nonetheless, considerable governance underlies the current order among states, facilitates absorption of the rapid changes at work in the world, and that direction to the challenges posed by interstate conflicts, environmental pollution, currency crises, and the many other problems to which an ever expanding global interdependence gives rise. In this study, nine leading international relations specialists examine the central features of this governance without government. They explore its ideological bases, behavioural patterns, and institutional arrangements as well as the pervasive changes presently at work within and among states. Within this…
I have spent my professional life exploring the roles social institutions play in guiding interactions between humans and the natural environment in a variety of settings. Along the way, I pioneered research on what is now known as global environmental governance, devoting particular attention to issues relating to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. Although I come from the world of scholarship, I have played an active role in promoting productive interactions between science and policy regarding matters relating to the Arctic and global environmental change.
In recent times, international regimes have arisen to address a wide range of specific needs for governance.
With regard to environmental concerns, specific regimes deal with marine issues like fishing and shipping, atmospheric issues like transboundary air pollution and ozone depletion, and global concerns like the loss of biological diversity and climate change.
Some regimes are effective (e.g. the regime to protect the stratospheric ozone layer). But others are much less effective (e.g. the regime to protect biological diversity). This makes it critical to focus on regime effectiveness.
What is the proper way to think about effectiveness? What are the determinants of effectiveness? Adopting a problem-solving perspective, this book initiates a process of addressing this subject systematically.
Some problems are more difficult to solve than others. Some regimes have a greater capacity to solve problems than others. Some issue-specific regimes are located within broader political settings that are more conducive…
This book examines why some international environmental regimes succeed while others fail. Confronting theory with evidence, and combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, it compares fourteen case studies of international regimes. It considers what effectiveness in a regime would look like, what factors might contribute to effectiveness, and how to measure the variables. It determines that environmental regimes actually do better than the collective model of the book predicts. The effective regimes examined involve the End of Dumping in the North Sea, Sea Dumping of Low-Level Radioactive Waste, Management of Tuna Fisheries in the Pacific, and the Vienna Convention and Montreal…
I have spent my professional life exploring the roles social institutions play in guiding interactions between humans and the natural environment in a variety of settings. Along the way, I pioneered research on what is now known as global environmental governance, devoting particular attention to issues relating to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. Although I come from the world of scholarship, I have played an active role in promoting productive interactions between science and policy regarding matters relating to the Arctic and global environmental change.
There is a tendency to focus on regimes as self-contained governance systems.
But in reality, there are typically more or less complex interactions between or among environmental regimes. Some regimes (e.g. the ozone regime and the climate regime) interact with one another in significant ways.
In other cases, a number of distinct regimes play influential roles in dealing with the same problem (e.g. climate change). This leads to the emergence of regime complexes regarded as sets of institutional elements that are not arranged in a hierarchical order but that all play roles in dealing with major issues like climate change.
The research challenge then is to identify conditions leading to mutually beneficial or synergistic interactions in contrast to conditions giving rise to interactions that are harmful or that produce interference in the operations of distinct regimes.
Experts investigate how states and other actors can improve inter-institutional synergy and examine the complexity of overlapping environmental governance structures.
Institutional interaction and complexity are crucial to environmental governance and are quickly becoming dominant themes in the international relations and environmental politics literatures. This book examines international institutional interplay and its consequences, focusing on two important issues: how states and other actors can manage institutional interaction to improve synergy and avoid disruption; and what forces drive the emergence and evolution of institutional complexes, sets of institutions that cogovern particular issue areas.
The book, a product of the Institutional Dimensions of…
I have spent my professional life exploring the roles social institutions play in guiding interactions between humans and the natural environment in a variety of settings. Along the way, I pioneered research on what is now known as global environmental governance, devoting particular attention to issues relating to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. Although I come from the world of scholarship, I have played an active role in promoting productive interactions between science and policy regarding matters relating to the Arctic and global environmental change.
The dramatic growth in human populations and the extraordinary increase in human capacities to affect the environment has led to a transformation of the setting in which issues of environmental governance arise.
The result is the onset of a new era commonly described as the Anthropocene and the rise of the idea of Earth system governance. The biophysical conditions that control the Earth’s climate system or the diversity of life on the planet play critical roles as determinants of human well-being.
But human actions also are now critical forces in determining the character of the climate system and the future of biological diversity on the planet. There is still a need for regimes dealing with specific environmental concerns, such as transboundary air pollution, persistent organic pollutants, or the spread of plastic debris.
At the same time, there is a critical need to focus on arrangements designed to sustain key planetary…
A new model for effective global environmental governance in an era of human-caused planetary transformation and disruption.
Humans are no longer spectators who need to adapt to their natural environment. Our impact on the earth has caused changes that are outside the range of natural variability and are equivalent to such major geological disruptions as ice ages. Some scientists argue that we have entered a new epoch in planetary history: the Anthropocene. In such an era of planet-wide transformation, we need a new model for planet-wide environmental politics. In this book, Frank Biermann proposes “earth system” governance as just such…
I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings.
This is one of my favourite books, as it provides a rigorous analysis of the environmental policy in the US from the 1970s and 2010.
It pinpoints the successes and failures of these policies at the subnational, regional, and state levels by using several case studies such as air and water pollution control, state and local climate change policy, open space preservation, urban growth, and regional ecosystem management.
What I also really like about this book is that readers can see various meanings of sustainability and understand that the concept can serve as a roadmap, which helps settlement systems evolve in a sustainable way.
This analysis of U.S. environmental policy offers a conceptual framework that serves as a valuable roadmap to the array of laws, programs, and approaches developed over the last four decades. Combining case studies and theoretical discussion, the book views environmental policy in the context of three epochs: the rise of command-and-control federal regulation in the 1970s, the period of efficiency-based reform efforts that followed, and the more recent trend toward sustainable development and integrated approaches at local and regional levels. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the new approaches and places these experiments within the larger framework of an…
While my childhood in a coastal community in South Africa contributed to my deep appreciation and love for nature, I was born and grew up as a person of colour in the apartheid era when barricades divided humans, the land, and the sea. I developed a profound understanding, rooted in my lived experience, of the interlinkages between justice, equity, and sustainability. I've remained actively involved and interested in developing and profiling transformative and inclusive approaches to sustainability from community to the international level. I've maintained this focus on the nexus between climate, nature, and inequality throughout my career, where I've led transformative and inclusive approaches to nature and climate policy and practice for 20+ years.
The book deals with the challenge of growth – how the South African economy needs to find a way to grow, and adopt policy choices and pathways that can help the country transition from a fossil fuel-intensive economy to a green economy, that is resource efficient, climate resilient, and equitable.
It grapples with the social complexity of post-apartheid South Africa and why a transition to a green economy in South Africa must be just transition.
This book examines issues ranging from global and domestic climate change and sustainable energy issues to the mineral-energy complex issues that have given rise to local and sector-specific problems. Each chapter seeks to convey policy choices and recommendations, at the centre of which is a clear articulation of the need for an integrated mix of policy instruments in South Africa to mitigate emissions and promote the development of a low-carbon economy through the low-carbon and sustainable energy technologies and low-carbon innovation across various sectors of the economy. The central theme of the book is that discourse and policy action on…
I have been teaching and writing about economics and the environment for over thirty-five years, and have been inspired by my students to work towards a new ecological economics that can underpin a sustainable planetary future. Many of the crises that I and colleagues have predicted – climate disasters, soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss – are now upon us, but the situation is not hopeless. I am working for a rapid transformation away from fossil-fuel and resource-intensive forms of economic growth, and hope that the expanding field of ecological economics can help to usher in this badly needed change.
Robby Richardson is an old friend and colleague who has led the way in developing practical ecological economics policies.
He has been on the front lines: fired by the Trump administration from a position at EPA for defending effective environmental protection, he returned to government in the Department of the Interior in the Biden administration, and in that role has developed natural resource accounting systems to guide government policy.
In this edited volume, he brings together leading ecological economics scholars to offer a variety of perspectives on building a green economy that places human welfare above consumerism and resource-intensive growth.
The first decade of the twenty-first century has been characterised by a growing global awareness of the tremendous strains that human economic activity place on natural resources and the environment. As the world's population increases, so does the demand for energy, food, and other resources, which adds to existing stresses on ecosystems, with potentially disastrous consequences. Humanity is at a crossroads in our pathway to future prosperity, and our next steps will impact our long-term sustainability immensely.
In this timely volume, leading ecological economics scholars offer a variety of perspectives on building a green economy. Grounded in a critique of…
I am Sumit Lodhia, a Professor of Accounting at the University of South Australia who has a primary research interest in sustainability accounting and reporting. Sustainable development is something that I am very passionate about, and I consider myself lucky enough to research in this area and to teach a course on this subject matter to third year undergraduate accounting students. I am a former resident of the beautiful Fiji Islands, and my lived experiences here and in my current country of residence, Australia, have shaped my worldview that focuses on equity, transparency, democracy, morality, and compassion.
I found this to be a very informative book, which stated a simple but significant proposition–climate change impacts our future economic viability. While many texts have addressed climate change from a moral as well as a scientific perspective, the economic implications were not fully outlined.
As someone with a business background, more specifically an accounting background, I found this book very interesting, as I could use the arguments in it to justify why business needs to be involved in sustainable development.
There is now clear scientific evidence that emissions from economic activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels for energy, are causing changes to the Earths climate. A sound understanding of the economics of climate change is needed in order to underpin an effective global response to this challenge. The Stern Review is an independent, rigourous and comprehensive analysis of the economic aspects of this crucial issue. It has been conducted by Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the UK Government Economic Service, and a former Chief Economist of the World Bank. The Economics of Climate Change will be invaluable for all…
I am Sumit Lodhia, a Professor of Accounting at the University of South Australia who has a primary research interest in sustainability accounting and reporting. Sustainable development is something that I am very passionate about, and I consider myself lucky enough to research in this area and to teach a course on this subject matter to third year undergraduate accounting students. I am a former resident of the beautiful Fiji Islands, and my lived experiences here and in my current country of residence, Australia, have shaped my worldview that focuses on equity, transparency, democracy, morality, and compassion.
I found this book to be the definitive guide to understanding why businesses need to address environmental issues. This was the first book on environmental accounting that I had read in 1998, and it started a whole research agenda on environmental/sustainability accounting, which has continued to this day.
I learnt a lot from the book in relation to the tools businesses can use to be accountable for their environmental impacts. Reading this book helped shape my career and has made me proud of my research area.
The original edition of Accounting for the Environment was the first comprehensive overview of a subject ranging from environmental management to sustainability, and its publication helped shape the developing agenda of environmental accounting. This long-awaited new edition integrates the major advancements that have occurred since - in both research and practice - resulting in a user-friendly text that provides a solid grounding in both environmental accounting and environmental management.
Environmental concerns are now of real importance to accountants because of the extensive range of business issues they impact upon, whether legislative or market-based, profitable or cost incurring. Accounting for the…
As an environmental educator over the past 18 years, I have come to see that the central question of our work is no longer “how do we get more people to care?” Our work now is to keep ourselves sustained for the long haul of climate justice advocacy that lies ahead. People now care, a lot, and need to know how to avoid burnout and “amygdala hijack”, cope with the hard emotions of it all, and build community. The solutions are no longer just political, technological, or economic. We need to develop existential tools, resources of interior sustainability, and cultural resilience if we have any hope of thriving in a climate-changed world.
Kelsey builds an air-tight case for why the planet needs us to get more in touch with our emotions. Emotions dictate all our behavior and action in the world, and so we ought to know which emotions are most effective and in what situations to catalyze actions for climate justice. Because Kelsey is a scientist herself, she buttresses her case about the role of emotions in saving the planet with powerful data. We don’t need more books on “ten things you can do to save the planet.” What we do need is more books like this, which show us why doom and gloom isn’t the only game in town.
"This book comes at just the right moment. It is NOT too late if we get together and take action, NOW." -Jane Goodall
Fears about climate change are fueling an epidemic of despair across the world: adults worry about their children's future; thirty-somethings question whether they should have kids or not; and many young people honestly believe they have no future at all.
In the face of extreme eco-anxiety, scholar and award-winning author Elin Kelsey argues that our hopelessness-while an understandable reaction-is hampering our ability to address the very real problems we face. Kelsey offers a powerful solution: hope itself.…
