Of laws and limits: An ecological economic perspective on redressing the failure of contemporary global environmental governance

Abstract

The persistent failures of international environmental governance initiatives to halt the degradation of the global commons are directly linked to the implicit worldview and assumptions fueling the proliferation of industrial society. These include an instrumental conception on non-human nature, rampant materialism, technological optimism, and an expansionary economics premised on the axiomatic necessity of unconstrained growth. Permeating contemporary environmental governance regimes, it is argued that these premises are fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of environmental sustainability. Proceeding from the perspective of ecological economics, it is further argued that achieving environmental sustainability in industrial society requires foremost that we restructure and constrain the scale of economic activities relative to global biocapacity. It is concluded that a scale-based approach to governing the environmental commons, operationalized by a strong world environment organization, offers at least a partial solution to this conundrum.