Governance

Governance

An inclusive and comprehensive approach to the full range of means to decide, manage, implement and monitor policies and measures. While governance is strictly defined by the nation-state, the broader concept of governance recognizes the contribution of different levels of government (global, international, regional, sub-national and local) and the role of the private sector, non-state actors and civil society in addressing the many types of problems facing the global community.

Adaptive governance

Concept emerging in the literature for the development of formal and informal governance institutions that give priority to social learning in the planning, implementation and evaluation of policies through iterative social learning to manage the use and protection of natural resources, ecosystem services and the sharing of natural resources, especially in situations of complexity and uncertainty.

Climate Governance

Specific mechanisms and measures designed to steer social systems towards prevention, mitigation or adaptation to the risks of climate change (Jagers and Stripple, 2003)

Deliberative management

Deliberative governance involves decision making through inclusive public conversation, which offers the possibility of developing policy options through public debate rather than collecting individual preferences through votes or referendums (although the latter governance mechanisms can also be driven and legitimized through public deliberation processes).

Flexible governance

Strategies of governance at different levels that give priority to the use of social learning and rapid feedback mechanisms in planning and policymaking, often through incremental, experimental and iterative management processes.

Governance capacity

The capacity of government institutions, leaders, and non-governmental and civil society to plan, coordinate, finance, implement, assess and adapt policies and measures in the short, medium and long term, taking into account uncertainties, rapid change and far-reaching impacts, and a wide range of actors and requirements.

Multi-level governance

Multi-level governance refers to the negotiated, non-hierarchical exchange between institutions at a transnational, national, regional and local level. Multi-level governance identifies relationships between governance processes at these different levels. Multiple-level governance includes both negotiated relationships between institutions at different institutional levels and a vertical “stratification” of governance processes at different levels. Institutional relations take place directly between the transnational, regional and local levels, thus bypassing the state level (Peters and Pierre, 2001).

Participatory governance

A governance system that enables direct public participation in decision-making by means of various techniques, such as referenda, municipal consultations, citizens’ juries or participatory budgeting. The approach can be applied in formal and informal institutional contexts from national to local, but is usually associated with decentralised decision-making. This definition builds on Fung and Wright (2003) and Sarmiento and Tilly (2018).

Reference:

IPCC, 2018: Annex I: Glossary [Matthews, J.B.R. (ed.)]. In: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds.)]. In Press