Advancing Sustainability Governance

‘Transgovernance: Advancing Sustainability Governance’ analyses the question what recent and ongoing changes in the relations between politics, science and media – together characterized as the emergence of a knowledge democracy – may imply for governance for sustainable development, on global and other levels of societal decision making, and the other way around: How can the discussion on sustainable development contribute to a knowledge democracy? How can concepts such as second modernity, reflexivity, configuration theory, (meta)governance theory and cultural theory contribute to a ‘transgovernance’ approach which goes beyond mainstream sustainability governance? This volume presents contributions from various angles: internationalrelations, governance and metagovernance theory, (environmental) economicsand innovation science. It offers challenging insights regarding institutions andtransformation processes, and on the paradigms behind contemporary sustainability governance.This book gives the sustainability governance debate a new context. It transforms classical questions into new options for societal decision making and identifies starting points and strategies towards effective governance of transitions to sustainability.

Dr. Louis Meuleman has an MsC in environmental biology and a PhD in public administration. He has 30 years of public-sector experience. His PhD thesis (Springer, 2008) focuses on metagovernance: how to create and manage situationally successful combinations of hierarchical, network and market styles of governance. He concludes that optimal governance mixtures depend among others on national/regional/local cultures and traditions. His academic affiliations include being a senior fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability of the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA and research fellow at the VU University, Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was (2010-2011) Project director of the TransGov project of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, Germany, which resulted in two publications on transgovernance: transformative governance, based on metagovernance and other social science concepts like knowledge democracy and second modernity. He was director of the Netherlands Advisory Council for Research on Nature, Environment and Spatial Planning (RMNO)(2002-2009) and head of unit and project director at the Netherlands Ministry for Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (1991-2001). He is currently a seconded national expert at DG Environment of the European Commission. As a 'reflexive practitioner' he continues to participate in scholarly and other discussions on the quality of governance, sustainable development and impact assessment. See for (downloadable) publications his personal website www.ps4sd.eu