62 books like Governing through Goals

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.

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… show more.

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.

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… show more.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

Newell’s Globalization and the Environment provides a thorough overview of the international political economy forces which shape global environmental governance. 

He applies a critical gaze to the roles of capitalism, trade, finance, and multinational corporations, along with a focus on the power exercised by the private sector which makes effective global environmental governance difficult. 

This classic book, published a quarter of a century ago, redefined the field of emergency management and has influenced my work and writing in this subject area for the past two decades.

Natural disasters are, in this landmark assessment, not events to be addressed in isolation. They are symptoms of broader problems. These broader problems require that emergency management be linked to broader concerns such as the management of natural resources, economic and social resilience, and public health and safety. This requires an orientation that emphasizes hazard mitigation to reduce the impact of disasters (natural and human-caused) and promotes the building of sustainable communities. This insight became the emphasis of the field in the decades that followed the publication of this book.

This book was certainly the most important influence on my work in the study of disaster management.