Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 2009, volume 27, pages 762 ^ 765

doi:10.1068/c2705bed

Revisiting ... The governance of sustainable development:

taking stock and looking forwards

Andrew Jordan
School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, England;
e-mail: a.jordan@uea.ac.uk
Received 11 August 2009

Introduction
When my co-Managing Editor Andrës Rodr|¨ guez-Pose and I originally launched this
particular feature of the journal in 2008 (Jordan and Rodr|¨ guez-Pose, 2008), little did
we know that I would be writing the second of these retrospective analyses of `the most
downloaded papers'. Clearly, my 2008 paper on the governance of sustainable develop-
ment (Jordan, 2008) has struck a chord with a large number of readers, which of
course is a source of great pleasure for me but also, I think, bodes well for the journal's
efforts to be recognised as an influential disseminator of popular contemporary envi-
ronmental social science analysis. It is both an honour and a privilege to have this
opportunity to reflect on my original reasons for writing that paper, to summarise
the reactions it has generated, and to explain how my own work has evolved since
I finished writing it in December 2007.

Background
Why did I start writing the paper in the first place? The impetus originally came from
the founding (and previous) Managing Editor, Bob Bennett, who in early 2007 was
putting together a twenty-fifth anniversary issue of EPC (subsequently published in
volume 26, issue 1). He asked (and rightly expected) his coeditors to write papers that
both critically reflected on the main contributions made by the journal since its
founding in 1983 and opened up new research avenues. As I had been wrestling with
the environmental implications of the shift from government to governance for at least
ten years, it seemed an obvious topic to choose.
However, Bob's aim with that particular special issue was partly to celebrate what
the journal had achieved but, even more importantly, to draw in new readers and new
contributors. That is why, in the second part of my paper, I reviewed how well papers
published in EPC since 1983 had engaged with the debates surrounding the governance
of sustainable development. To the extent that my paper has drawn greater attention
to EPC's ability to host and disseminate such work, it has succeeded far better than
I originally expected.

The substantive themes of the paper

With the paper I sought to explore the intellectual territory between two important
but, I argued, essentially contested terms: governance and sustainable development.
I set out to explore what meanings had been attached to these two terms and to assess
the extent to which the scholarly material on them could be said to constitute an
important, coherent, and cumulative body of scholarship. I began by recognising that
sustainable development was, to quote Katherine Farrell, ``a political concept, replete
with governance questions'' (Farrell et al, 2005, page 143). I identified two such ques-
tions and set about probing them in some detail. These were: (1) the core meaning of
Revisiting ... The governance of sustainable development 763

sustainable development; and (2) the modes and instruments of governance that could
be used to implement it. As the literature on the former was already voluminous,
I decided that on balance it would be better to devote most of the paper to the latter.
In my analysis I concluded that the two terms were powerful bridging concepts
around which interdisciplinary debate could take place. However, I also noted that they
have not always been used in a sufficiently consistent or coherent manner, and argued
that this had served to limit the development of a cumulative body of knowledge.
In an effort to consolidate the field, I demonstrated that the relationship between the
two can be approached from three distinct but intimately interconnected perspectives:
(1) building theory (what I termed `governance as theory'); (2) describing what has
been done to put sustainable development into effect (ie `governance as an empirical
phenomenon'); and (3) identifying what should be done in the future (ie `governance
as a normative prescription').
Having done that I laid down some markers to guide future research in this rapidly
developing fieldönamely:
. to go beyond grand theories and typologies, and to undertake more detailed
empirical work that measures the extent to which the world is really witnessing
a shift from government to governance with all its associations (more policy
integration, more public participation, wider ownership, softer forms of steering,
etc);
. to explore the relationship between governance and sustainable development in a
more dynamic and interactive manner;
. to better understand the structural conditions which affect the governance of (and
for) sustainable development.

Reactions
Clearly the paper has been greatly downloaded from the EPC website, but this interest
has not yet translated into citations. This is probably a function of timeömy paper
was, after all, written only in late 2007 and published in early 2008. Nonetheless, the
informal feedback I have received on it and an accompanying volume edited with Neil
Adger (Adger and Jordan, 2009), has mostly been very encouraging. People do seem to
appreciate my attempt to disentangle and recategorise the many meanings of the term
governance and to clearly relate them to the debates around the meaning and imple-
mentation of sustainable development. I am particularly pleased to report that a large
number of recent submissions to this journal have tried to take on and engage with the
research priorities that I identified at the end of the paper, which (as noted above) was
one of the main purposes for writing it in the first place.
Two years on, how much has changed in my own thinking and in the wider world?
In general, the relevance of the topic is as great as ever. Since the paper was written,
the debate about how to govern sustainability has run and run, amongst both
academics (Adger and Jordan, 2009; Delmas and Young, 2009) and policy makers
(European Commission, 2009; OECD, 2007). Earlier this year the International
Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change adopted a new
long-term research programme entitled Earth System Governance (Biermann et al,
2009). It identified five analytical foci which mesh very well with the main themes
and priorities that I originally identified. These include evaluating the performance
of different modes of governance, understanding the politics surrounding the gover-
nance of sustainability, and exploring the legitimacy of the governing processes used.
I firmly believe that these five foci fit nicely with EPC's continuing mission to under-
stand the evolving relationship between `government and policy' and I look forward to
them being covered and critiqued in future issues.
764 A Jordan

Meanwhile, there are many other areas of environmental social science that, while
not explicitly badged as being related to sustainability and governance, would certainly
benefit from engaging with some of the literatures reviewed in my paper. For example,
there are untapped opportunities to feed a governance dimension into the rapidly
emerging debate about what could be broadly termed `sustainability transitions'. This
literature has its roots in technological systems research (Geels, 2005; Kemp et al,
2007) and the Dutch government's policy of managing a national transition to sustain-
ability. In at least in its early phases it had an obvious tendency to adopt a rather
managerialist tone. This was quickly challenged by those interested in the more
politics-related and policy-related aspects of social life [for a flavour of this debate,
see Shove and Walker (2007), Smith et al (2005), and Rotmans and Kemp (2008)].
At the heart of the debate between the various protagonists lie the vexed questions
of governanceönamely, how will technological and economic systems be guided in
a more `sustainable' direction (however defined), who will guide them, and what kinds
of governing interventions could and should be made if they move off track? Crucially,
many of the transitions described by scholars have tended to emerge in a rather organic
and undirected manner. It is a very moot point as to whether the new transitions that
analysts claim are needed to actively and fully support sustainable development will
emerge in a similar fashion, or will require much more active steering (ie governing).
Second, there is the whole issue of climate change, which in recent years has tended
to eclipse sustainable development as both a mainstream political priority and, in
consequence, a focus of government-funded research. In the richer and more heavily
industrialised states, the issue of climate change has been appropriated and reframed
as a justification for a different kind of economic growth, which relies on more secure
supplies of energy (eg renewables rather than imported gas) and harnesses new forms
of technological innovation (eg electric cars rather than fossil fuelled ones). But,
despite all the easy political rhetoric about the importance of securing a `low carbon
economy', experience already strongly suggests that responding to the threat of
irreversible climate change will require much more fundamental changes to the way
in which societies are run. In other words, climate change has to be seen as, yes,
an economic and an environmental issues, but also as a societal one. As much as the
Northern states would prefer to frame climate change in terms of a worldwide search
for new synergies between the economic, the technological, and the environmental, the
poorer parts of society (and especially those lying in the developing world) will con-
tinue to push another agenda which highlights the justice, fairness, and inequality
aspects of governing. In other words, climate change may well be political flavour of
the month right now, but lurking in the background are all the unresolved tensions
that the concept of sustainable development was originally designed to confront
(Meadowcroft, 2009). Moreover, experience already suggests that any societal shifts
to lower carbon lifestyles will not automatically or autonomously `happen'. Theyöand
their associated policy dilemmas öwill need to be actively and painstakingly governed
(Meadowcroft, 2007), a point which I am now beginning to explore in more recent
work (Jordan et al, 2010).

Where next?
Two years on from writing ``The governance of sustainable development'' I see no reason
to amend its main conclusion which was that, as slippery and as essentially contested
as the terms governance and sustainable development may appear, they cannot possibly
be avoided by anyone seeking to find a better reconciliation between humans and
their environment. I hope this retrospective encourages other people to consider the
multifaceted relationship between the two and to publish their thoughts in the pages
Revisiting ... The governance of sustainable development 765

of this journal. In fact, I would like nothing more than the most downloaded paper
in 2009 ^ 10 to be about the vexed relationship between governance and sustainable
development.
Acknowledgements. I would like to thank Andrës Rodr|¨ guez-Pose and Alex Haxeltine for their
helpful comments on a first draft of this paper. I am entirely responsible for any remaining errors.
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