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Sustainability
Special Issues
Governing for Sustainability in a Changing Global Order
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Special Issue "Governing for Sustainability in a Changing Global Order"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2021.

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Oran Young
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara
Interests: environmental politics and policy; governance for sustainable development; environmental institutions; the ecology of war

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Growing human population, rising levels of affluence, and a continuing cascade of technological advances have turned the Earth into a human-dominated system, opening up a new era often described as the Anthropocene. This has brought about transformative change in the character of the prevailing global order and triggered a need to address a range of novel policy issues, including the governance of the internet, the management of biotechnology, the control of climate change, the containment of pandemics, and the regulation of artificial intelligence, robotics and various uses of big data. While individual societies can respond effectively to some of the resultant challenges, more often than not they generate a need for governance that requires international or transnational responses. In most cases, they raise questions about the extent to which it makes sense to operate within a conception of the international system as a society of sovereign states seeking to promote their own interests in a competitive environment. Governing for sustainability in this setting will call for significant innovations in the institutional arrangements used to steer human actions toward outcomes that are desirable in societal terms and away from undesirable outcomes.

This Special Issue will bring together a collection of articles that address this challenge from a variety of perspectives. Some of the articles in the collection will approach these challenges in broad terms, asking questions about the changing character of the international order and the implications of this change regarding governance for sustainability. Other contributions will drill down on particular policy concerns, considering how responses to specific issues may feed into larger developments in the overarching global order.

Prof. Oran Young
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • global order
  • new governance challenges
  • institutional innovations
  • sustainable development
  • anthropogenic effects
  • Anthropocene

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Article
Meeting Cyber Age Needs for Governance in a Changing Global Order
by
Oran R. Young
,
Jian Yang
and
Dan Guttman
Sustainability 2020, 12(14), 5557; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145557 - 10 Jul 2020
Viewed by 741
Abstract
The advent of the cyber age has created a world in which digital systems, operating on their own and interacting with more conventional material or physical systems, have become an increasingly prominent feature of the landscape of human affairs. This development, affecting every [...] Read more.
The advent of the cyber age has created a world in which digital systems, operating on their own and interacting with more conventional material or physical systems, have become an increasingly prominent feature of the landscape of human affairs. This development, affecting every aspect of human life, has generated a class of increasingly critical needs for governance that are difficult to address effectively within the confines of the current global order in which sovereign states compete to maximize their influence in the absence of any overarching public authority. These needs include concerns associated with the management of powerful digital technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, blockchain technology, the internet of things, and big data) as well as problems relating to the use of these technologies by many actors to exercise influence from the level of the individual (e.g., identity theft) to the level of international society (e.g., foreign interventions in national electoral systems). The challenge of meeting these needs prompts an analysis of processes leading to change in the prevailing global order, energized at least in part by the growing role of the digital systems of the cyber age. Our analysis includes both Western perspectives highlighting changes in the identity and behavior of key actors and Chinese perspectives emphasizing the spread of social narratives embedded in the concepts of tianxia and gongsheng. While it is premature to make explicit predictions, we conclude with some observations about the most important trends to watch regarding efforts to meet cyber age needs for governance, and we note the connections between these developments and the overarching challenge of fulfilling the suite of goals commonly associated with the idea of sustainable development. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Governing for Sustainability in a Changing Global Order)
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