Governing for Sustainability in a Changing Global Order

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 Collection 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
Collection 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. All submissions that pass pre-check are 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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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-anonymized 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 2400 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.