Abstract
In light of increasing concerns about the efficacy of environmental governance (EG) to address the global sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene era, more integrative, transversal, and far-reaching approaches, referred to here as sustainability governance (SG), are gaining ground both in governance praxis and in research. Empirical and methodological challenges emerge from this conceptual analytical cleavage between EG and SG. Through a combination of bibliometric and network analysis, the objective of this article is to explore the structure and trends in the field of EG/SG research in Chile, internationally regarded as the posterchild of Latin-American EG/SG, and derive empirical insights to feed the analytical distinction between EG and SG that informs global debates about ways forward towards an effective governance in the Anthropocene. Our results show that scientific research on EG/SG has experienced a significant increase since the 1990s. We find that while the topical range of the field is broad, including water governance, biodiversity conservation, environmental institutions, climate change and energy issues, and environmental conflicts and justice, key cross-cutting socio-economic and cultural dynamics underpinning the prevalent, yet fundamentally unsustainable, ways of life and economic model are virtually absent from the field, against their growing presence in diagnoses of “sustained unsustainability”.
Highlights
The very existence of any human collectivity entails the addressing of problems, whose cultural and political resolution makes up the basis of the social fabric [1,2]
The insights we sought to derive about environmental governance (EG)/sustainability governance (SG) research where drawn from the study of academic production through the method of network analysis [30,31], based on the tools of bibliometrics [32]
The EG/SG research field has developed in parallel to the consolidation of an environmental institutional and policy framework in Chile, which have served as catalyzer of national public debates around the environment
Summary
The very existence of any human collectivity entails the addressing of problems, whose cultural and political resolution makes up the basis of the social fabric [1,2]. Governance encompasses a broad set of entities and phenomena and refers to the processes of decentralizing authority in order to define social problems and responses within a context of growing diversity and complexity in society [4,5,6]. It seeks to account for the hybridization of all kinds of efforts to govern the res publica by different socio-political actors (public and private, each oriented by their own interests and rationalities) on different geographical scales [3]. During the late 20th century, with the increasing awareness of the impacts of human activities on natural ecosystems, the relation between human societies and their ecological environment gradually entered the sphere of governance, as attested by an exponential increase in environmental accords, norms, and regulations at the diverse levels of sub-, supra- and trans-national governance [4,7,8]
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