La gouvernance des systèmes socio-écologiques

Abstract

Governance can either support or hinder the sustainability of socio-ecological systems. Like socio-ecological systems, governance is also a complex adaptive system, featuring path dependency, surprises, thresholds, and cascades. Frameworks characterize the dynamics of socio-ecological systems and include governance or some of its components. However, governance is often portrayed in a simplistic and static manner that does not reflect the complexity of governance. This paper presents a new framework that considers the governance system as a "political reactor" between politics and policies in open-ended cycles of action and reaction. The political reactor consists in iterations of politics, action, policy, and reaction, whose metabolism depends on the configuration, influence, interaction, and impact of actors, ideas, instruments, and ecosystems across space, time, and sectors. The Political Reactor Framework (PRF) adopts a systems approach, opening new avenues for research, including new typologies, for instance, of "fluid" and "jammed" governance systems, of political processes and implementation policies as subsystems, and of collective action and reaction as feedback loops. This framework allows better understanding the inertia and path dependency of governance systems and subsystems. Their partial self-referentiality, especially at the level of the political process and implementation policies, complicates the assessment of effectiveness. The framework also allows identifying drivers of systemic transformation, including ideas and environmental change. Lastly, this framework suggests that the analysis of the components of the governance systems is an interdisciplinary exercise that requires sustainability science to understand the governance of socio-ecological systems as a whole. The contents and conclusions of the book Ecoregionalism: analyzing regional environmental processes and agreements, which has just been published, will also be presented and discussed. ; La gouvernance peut soit soutenir, soit ...