Date: 30 September 2014

Time: 1- 2pm

Venue: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT  


Governance of climate change: challenges and opportunities

This lecture addresses three topics: 1) Governance in the current network society; 2) The specific governance challenges of climate change; 3) Adaptive governance as promising concept.

Climate change is expected to have serious impacts on social-ecological systems throughout the world These systems are facing the challenge to mitigate and to adapt to climate change. This is not only a technical issue but also a demanding matter of governance. In the current network society governance is more than government. The assumption of the state as the centre of political power and authority, is being replaced by less hierarchical forms of governance in polycentric networks of public, private and civil society actors.  Governance of climate change will face all the usual difficulties of  dealing with complex problems. On top of that, however, climate change poses some specific, particularly demanding governance challenges like: important uncertainties; long term perspective; fragmented policy contexts; cross-scale dynamics; and complex science-policy relations.  Adaptive governance is regarded as a promising concepts to deal with these specific challenges. It has been put forward as a governance approach that can handle the complexity and unpredictability of dynamic social-ecological systems. Starting point is the acknowledgement that social-ecological systems will change as a result of human intervention, that surprises are to be expected, and that uncertainties are not going to disappear.

Prof. Dr. ir. C.J.A.M. (Katrien) Termeer is  full professor of Public Administration and Policy at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Her research addresses the governance of adaptation to climate change, food security and sustainable agriculture. She studies new forms of governance, varying from self-governing communities and collaborative practices to global round tables and private certifying systems. She uses research findings for designing innovative governance arrangements. Her research is both scientific relevant and useful and recognizable to practioners. She is author and (co-) author of many refereed publications and (edited) books and has (co) chaired many interdisciplinary research programs such as: Governance of climate adaptation; Informational Governance; Scaling and Governance;  and Transitions towards sustainable agriculture.