Governing inside or outside the box?

Despite decades of environmental governance, environmental degradation continues to worsen worldwide. This is partly because actors and institutions often operate “inside the box”, focusing on technical optimization rather than societal transformation. Without fundamental changes to the social (e.g., cultures, behaviors), institutional (e.g., laws, regulations), and economic (e.g., sectors, trade) system structures that perpetuate environmental problems, environmental problems will persist and gradually escalate into creeping crises—as seen with climate change and environmental pollution. This highlights the urgent need for environmental governance approaches that operate “outside the box”, driving a broader systems’ transformation to tackle the societal root causes of environmental problems. While such transformative environmental governance has been widely theorized and conceptualized, its practical implementation remains underexplored. The risk is that approaches that seem promising in theory may, in practice, still reinforce the status quo. This thesis seeks to bridge this gap by providing scientific insights into the application of transformative environmental governance. The empirical focus is the problem of subsidence in the low-lying western peatlands in the Netherlands. The scarce land in the Dutch western peatlands has been used mostly for livestock farming and housing. However, the drainage needed to facilitate livestock farming and the heavy weight of buildings and infrastructure on soft peaty soils have resulted in subsidence. Subsidence and other environmental land-use problems require governance approaches addressing the deep system structures that perpetuate unsustainable land use. Using the case of subsidence, this dissertation investigates typical environmental governance challenges (chapter 2), the transformative potential of two existing environmental governance approaches (chapters 3 and 4), and practitioners’ perspectives on the feasibility of more transformative environmental governance for sustainable land use (chapter 5). Together, these insights seek to answer the central research question: What is the potential of transformative governance approaches to contribute to sustainable land use? The research indicates that both actor involvement and institutional structures impede a policy shift toward sustainable land use. I argue that for environmental governance to effectively contribute to a transformation, it must first transform itself. Such a governance transformation entails fundamental shifts in all three governance dimensions: 1) Actors – empowering the “losers” of environmental problems (citizens, future generations, and other-than-humans) while holding the “winners” of unsustainable land use (industries, lobbyists, and their political representatives) accountable. 2) Institutions – establishing new rules, procedures, and legal frameworks that promote sustainability while phasing out institutions that perpetuate unsustainable practices. 3) Policy – prioritizing environmental concerns as a public interest rather than subordinating them to private economic interests. To drive these shifts, I recommend action in three key domains: 1) Research – enhancing the role of social sciences in research programs to counteract the bias toward technocratic knowledge production. 2) Education – fostering critical thinking and radical imagination. 3) Policy – advocating for sustainable land use for the sake of security, justice, and public health (by policy entrepreneurs). I conclude by arguing for the need for personal or inner transformations in terms of values, norms, ethics, and relationships to (re)connect with ourselves and other living beings.

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