Despite an increasing recognition of the need for an integrative approach to sustainable development, there remains a tendency for this to be anthropocentric. Attempts to govern sustainability are invariably focused on the pre-eminence of the human perspective and social systems in the pursuit of human goals. This often means either excluding or attempting to control the external environment rather than understanding and responding to it. This thesis explores more holistic approaches to governance that are based upon the need for an improved understanding about the interconnections between social, economic and ecological systems. It examines current literature on governance for sustainable development and systems thinking as applied to it, with specific reference to Socio-Technical Systems (STS), social learning about systems’ interrelations and the nature of public goods. On the basis of this analysis, a systemic conception of governance for sustainability is developed and translated into a provisional framework that can aid participatory social learning relating to sustainable development. Three initial Socio-Technical Systems (STS) case studies are drawn upon to populate the empty framework (the European Critical Electricity Infrastructure (ECEI), the Finnish security system and the transition of energy systems towards a post carbon society); these are then analysed thematically to derive common governance for sustainability criteria. The final modified framework is then applied to an in depth, and on-going, case study of food systems’ security and sustainability and a final discussion considers how this governance framework (GAME) might contribute to future holistic decision making for more sustainable Socio-Technical Systems. The multi-method GAME supports the generation of future scenarios and core sustainability criteria by multiple stakeholders; reflecting needs, capabilities and limits that can maintain systems’ equilibrium. It also implies a more normative governance for sustainability and a commitment to improved evidence-based decision-making that reflects systems’ complexity and contributes to bridging the gaps between science, policy and society. The GAME is currently being extended to incorporate the user-friendly geospatial representations of impacts.

Sustainability has been characterized and explored mostly from an environmental standpoint, with relatively less attention paid to social and economic dimensions. Because many sustainability organizations have grown out of the environmental movement, they tend to emphasize environmental priorities and retain many of the organizational strategies that were pioneered when the focus was on environmental conservation. However, to attain a more socially and economically informed environmental practice, broader procedural aspects, including recognition and participation, and substantive aspects, including issues of social need, distribution of wealth, and economic opportunity, need to be addressed as these matters are intimately linked to environmental concerns. In this thesis, I examined sustainability organizations against the concept of ‘just sustainability’, with specific consideration paid to uniting the substantive concerns of sustainability with the procedural concerns of environmental justice. I focused my examination on model forests and UNESCO biosphere reserves located in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, an area of high economic vulnerability and low political power. By looking to governance directives from environmental justice, entrepreneurship, and community development, I conducted a multi-case study analysis with organizations that have a mandate to address the environmental, social and economic imperatives of sustainability. Through engaging these organizations in a comparative learning situation, I was able to achieve the following objectives, to: i) assess the governance strategies used within these organizations against just sustainability theory; ii) understand the challenges faced by place-based organizations and examine strategies to better improve local understanding, community empowerment, as well as sustainability outcomes; and iii) assess the feasibility - conceptually and empirically – of incorporating social entrepreneurship into the governance practices of sustainability organizations to bring together the benefits of both approaches. The findings of this thesis make valuable contributions to the empirical evidence needed to advance our understanding of just sustainability, both conceptually and in practice. Overall, my findings point to the importance of understanding and improving our practice of sustainability governance through identifying and offering examples of innovative governance arrangements that are better able to address procedural and substantive concerns. Findings show that the stakeholder model typically used by biosphere reserves and model forests contributes to systemic challenges that limit procedural justice in these organizations. By looking to other literatures, including community development and social entrepreneurship, and to lessons learned from other place-based organizations, I propose ways to adapt governance strategies to improve community engagement and organizational outcomes, including a framework to inform place-based governance for just sustainability and a “hybrid model” that captures the benefits of stakeholder representation and social enterprise. This study speaks to the need for researchers and practitioners seeking to advance sustainability governance to extend their understanding beyond environmental sustainability to embrace more social dimensions. This thesis demonstrates the value of looking to broad literatures and new models to inform sustainability governance and encourage the adoption of new ways of thinking, new strategies, and new tools to help advance sustainability.

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abstract: City governments are increasingly incorporating urban and peri-urban agriculture into their policies and programs, a trend seen as advancing sustainability, development, and food security. Urban governance can provide new opportunities for farmers, but it also creates structures to control their activities, lands, and purposes. This study focused on Mexico City, which is celebrated for its agricultural traditions and policies. The study examined: 1) the functions of urban and peri-urban agriculture that the Government of Mexico City (GMC) manages and prioritizes; 2) how the GMC’s policies have framed farmers, and how that framing affects farmers’ identity and purpose; and 3) how the inclusion of agrarian activities and lands in the city’s climate-change adaptation plan has created opportunities and obstacles for farmers. Data was collected through participant observation of agricultural and conservation events, informal and semi-structured interviews with government and agrarian actors, and analysis of government documents and budgets. Analysis of policy documents revealed that the GMC manages agriculture as an instrument for achieving urban objectives largely unrelated to food: to conserve the city’s watershed and provide environmental services. Current policies negatively frame peri-urban agriculture as unproductive and a source of environmental contamination, but associate urban agriculture with positive outcomes for development and sustainability. Peri-urban farmers have resisted this framing, asserting that the GMC inadequately supports farmers’ watershed conservation efforts, and lacks understanding of and concern for farmers’ needs and interests. The city’s climate plan implicitly considers farmers to be private providers of public adaptation benefits, but the plan’s programs do not sufficiently address the socioeconomic changes responsible for agriculture’s decline, and therefore may undermine the government’s climate adaptation objectives. The findings illuminate the challenges for urban governance of agriculture. Farms do not become instruments for urban sustainability, development, and food security simply because the government creates policies for them. Urban governments will be more likely to achieve their goals for agriculture by being transparent about their objectives, honestly evaluating how well those objectives fit with farmers’ needs and interests, cultivating genuine partnerships with farmers, and appropriately compensating farmers for the public benefits they provide. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2017

The food industry is one of the main drivers of climate change, with serious impacts on the living and working conditions in developing countries. Due to these sustainability issues, consumers, governments, and non-governmental organizations are pressuring food companies to rethink their current business concepts of food production. Food companies rely on supply chain governance and its mechanisms to implement sustainability standards across all tiers of their supply chains. This study examines the sustainability governance at all stages of a cocoa supply chain, from the raw material production to the retailer, by using a qualitative case study approach. The results show a differentiation of the sustainability governance according to the different supply chain stages. At the raw material production stage, sustainability is mainly improved using contracts, extensive and frequent knowledge sharing, and audits. After the raw material production stage, environmental and social sustainability is almost exclusively coordinated by certificates, while other governance mechanisms are used to foster long-term economic business relationships. This study gives detailed insights into the application intentions and the functioning of sustainability governance mechanisms and provides propositions on how to efficiently improve sustainability in food supply chains.

Die immer offensichtlicher werdende Verflechtung der vielfältigen sozialen und ökologischen Krisen stellt Risikogesellschaften weltweit vor der Herausforderung, grundlegende Transformationen der vorherrschenden gesellschaftlichen Modelle und Lebensweisen vorzunehmen, welche sich an den kulturellen Vorstellungen des wohlhabenden globalen Nordens orientieren. Bisher haben sich jedoch sowohl internationale als auch lokale Versuche, globale Entwicklungspfade in Richtung „faire und nachhaltige“ Zukunft zu lenken, als weitgehend erfolglos erwiesen. Der weltweite Ressourcenverbrauch und die Degradierung der Biosphäre haben sich weiter verschärft und beschleunigt. In Anlehnung an die deutsche hermeneutische Tradition sowie an den französischen Poststrukturalismus und den amerikanischen symbolischen Interaktionismus versucht diese theoretische und empirische Dissertation, die strukturellen Zwänge zu modellieren, mit denen individuelle change agents konfrontiert sind, und sie daran hindern, sozial-ökologische "reale Utopien" (Bloch) voranzutreiben. Darüber hinaus nimmt diese Dissertation eine Typisierung möglicher Wege zur Überwindung solcher Einschränkungen vor, nämlich durch Eingriffe einer bestimmten Art von auf der meso-gesellschaftlichen Ebene operierender Agency, die wir als Para-Governance bezeichnen. Die Dissertation schließt mit einer Reflexion über die sich verändernden Formen und Funktionen von Governance im Anthropozän, die über herkömmliche, eng definierte rationalistische und institutionalistische Ansätze hinausgehen. / The increasingly apparent imbrication of the multiple social and ecological crises creates an imperative for “risk societies” worldwide to undertake fundamental transformations to the currently prevalent model of social organization shaped after the cultural imaginaries of the affluent Global North. So far, however, both international and local attempts at bending global developmental trajectories towards “fair and sustainable” futures have proven largely futile, with global resource-consumption and biosphere degradation further reinforcing and accelerating. Drawing on the German hermeneutic tradition, as well as on French post-structuralism and American symbolic interactionism, this theoretical cum empirical dissertation seeks to model the structural constraints weighting over ‘change agents’, thus preventing them from advancing social-ecological “real utopias” (Bloch), and typify possible ways of overcoming such constraints through interventions of a specific kind of agency identified as operating at the meso-societal level, which we refer to as para-governance. The dissertation concludes by reflecting on the changing forms and functions of governance in the Anthropocene beyond conventional narrowly defined rationalist and institutionalist approaches.