Relationships between extractive industries and local northern communities are under intensive discussion. Scenarios are a way to explore uncertain futures and have been used for envisioning potential consequences of climate-related and political changes in the Arctic. However, existing Arctic scenarios do not target the relationship between extractive industries and local communities. By combining a review of published scenarios with insights from a series of scenario workshops carried out across Nordic Arctic, we have identified a series of wild cards that would have major implications for relations between extractive projects and local communities. By connecting these to existing general scenario archetypes, we enrich the established scenario narratives on plausible Arctic futures. We furthermore suggest linking participatory scenario exercises with efforts to elucidate the impacts of different drivers of change to examine the social-ecological-technological systems in which mining and local communities are embedded. Such efforts would be relevant for developing a more robust and anticipatory/proactive knowledge base for making political decisions about extractive industries.

A confluence of crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, is exacerbating inequalities in many countries around the world, leaving Africans particularly vulnerable to hunger, unemployment, and worsening poverty. The climate emergency reinforces these inequalities and vulnerabilities. Globally, the need for an environmental rights-based approach to sustainable development, founded on principles of equity, has received increasing attention. In Africa specifically, more work needs to be done to integrate rights into environmental and climate frameworks and support communities in protecting their territories and stopping violations. Climate cases, supported by international human rights frameworks, have increasingly asserted environmental rights, in response to the need for intergenerational justice and to protect communities from the threats of climate change. Three court cases from Kenya and South Africa, Save Lamu, Earthlife Africa, and PHA Food and Farming Campaign, all driven by grassroots campaigns, illustrate how climate change concerns have been successfully brought before the courts and how these judgments set a hopeful precedent for other communities.

This chapter contends that international law is structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. Many of international law’s basic concepts, such as sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development and human rights, have evolved in trajectories unsuited to perceiving or respecting ecological limits. International law treats nature as a resource for wealth generation and environmental degradation as an economic externality to be managed through special regimes. This chapter traces the coevolution of such assumptions about nature alongside formative disciplinary concepts, arguing that such understandings have been central to making international law, and that the discipline helps universalise and normalise them. Thus, to engage with environmental challenges, disciplinary tenets would have to evolve in directions that radically transform the nature of law.

Development, and particularly sustainable development, face a growing threat of being undermined by a changing climate, particularly through the impacts of frequent and extreme weather events. It is common knowledge that disasters can wipe out and set back development gains. Conversely, the social, political, economic, and environmental development decisions, options, and the paths chosen, contribute to an increase in inequality, poverty, environmental degradation, vulnerability, and exposure to hazards. Unfortunately, global commitments to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) development planning and programming still do not adequately consider or act upon these risks. Despite advances in linking DRR, CCA, and development, albeit conceptually, there is not much progress on how integration should be carried out. In 2015, three important UN agreements, (1) the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction; (2) the Paris Agreement for Climate Change, and (3) the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, were adopted. These three agreements brought coherency on how to reduce the risk and impacts of disasters thus making development gains sustainable. The disparities of locating CCA within environmental authorities, DRR within disaster management authorities, civil service and home affairs, and addressing sustainable development goals through different sectors impede such endeavors to address disaster risk and the negative consequences of disasters coherently. This, in turn, undermines sustainable development. Despite the identified differences between DRR and CCA, they are complementary development issues. Addressing disaster and climate risks to achieve sustainable development goals requires close coordination among the different organizations and sectors. It requires working coherently, avoiding duplication, and taking advantage of synergies and co-benefits in their actions. By examining how interorganizational theory conceptualizes integration, the chapter will provide a theoretical grounding for integrating DRR and CCA, taking into consideration sustainable development, by proposing an analytical framework to integrate the three policy areas.

The final chapter brings the insights of the book together under the overarching question of whether the Sustainable Development Goals have had any political impact after their adoption in 2015. The chapter draws the conclusion that the Sustainable Development Goals have so far had only limited effects in global, national and local governance. We mainly see discursive effects of the goals with some normative and institutional effects as well. The global goals have however not (yet) become a transformative force in and of themselves. Their effects are neither linear nor unidirectional. While the 2030 Agenda and the 17 goals with their 169 targets constitute a strong set of normative guidelines, their national implementation, translation to the local level, and dissemination across societal sectors remain a political process.

Chapter 13 focuses on sustainable development in contemporary Latin America and, more specifically, on the impact of neoextractivism–the exploitation of primary products–on the quality of life of the communities where this economic activity is based. It shows that, although neoextractivism has led to short-term economic growth, it has also created environmental damage that has been especially detrimental to indigenous peoples and the rural poor. It explores protests against neoextractivism through case studies of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, and shows that affected communities had some success in ameliorating the negative consequences of neoextractivism only in Bolivia. Finally, to explain the impact of protests it highlights several factors. Democratic institutions and decentralization create incentives for greater accountability at the local level. Moreover, in some cases, the mobilizational strength and political coordination of local communities leads to collective action. However, the impact of protests is reduced most critically because leaders across the political spectrum have been committed to neoextractivism and have co-opted the mechanism of prior consultation.

In the wake of the ‘golden age’ of economic growth in the early 1970s, public provision of urban infrastructure came under the close scrutiny of governments seeking to reduce the size of their bureaucracies in the face of expanding budgets, rising prices, and increasing unemployment. Australian governments and water utilities followed the UK and USA by introducing price mechanisms to attain more efficient water use. This coincided with severe droughts that affected urban water supplies and led state governments to impose residential water restrictions, save for Brisbane, where catastrophic floods in 1974 reminded residents of their vulnerability to the elements. Growing concern for the environment, as well as the implications of environmental degradation for human health, meant that the sights, smells, and sounds of the Australian suburbs were on the eve of change. The use of suburban waterways as drains for industrial and domestic waste would no longer be tolerated, as local residents campaigned to protect built and natural environments from pollution and development projects. Such health and ecological concerns collided with the neoliberal reform agenda of the 1990s, when newly restructured water utilities faced a series of crises in their provision of water and disposal of wastes.

This chapter focuses on the environmental diplomacy surrounding the World Commission on Environment and Development, popularly known as the “Brundtland Commission.” This process popularized the concept of sustainable development. The chapter begins by detailing the substantial changes seen in international environmental conditions through the mid-1980s, brought about largely by the Third World Debt crisis. These shifts created a rapidly deteriorating global environmental context and necessitated significant changes in institutional arrangements. The need for institutional change was a central finding of the important 1987 “Brundtland report,” titled Our Common Future. The Brundtland Commission highlighted a rapid deterioration in the world environment and underlined the need for major institutional change. Some actors sought to realize such change at the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, when the report and its call for action were presented to world leaders. Coordination was hindered, however, by divergent expectations and the absence of a Temporal Focal Point. While states were incentivized to cooperate rapidly to address problems in global environmental governance, the institutional status quo prevailed.

The conclusion summarizes and discusses the principal findings of the book, highlighting the role of temporal coordination dilemmas and Temporal Focal Points in patterns of continuity and change in international institutions. After relating these findings to other theoretical approaches, the chapter discusses the theoretical implications of the analysis contained in this book for the study of change in international institutions. The chapter provides an extended discussion of policy implications, including how international actors can employ the logic of temporal coordination in modernizing global institutions in the current international setting. It concludes with an analysis of the current context in global environmental and sustainable development politics, analyzing progress in combatting global challenges, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It argues that the international community has incentives to realize institutional change and that a Temporal Focal Point could soon emerge.

This chapter focuses on the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the Rio “Earth Summit.” It shows how, despite incentives to address institutional dysfunction and mounting global environmental problems by institutionalizing sustainable development within the United Nations system, divergent expectations persisted until momentum built toward UNCED. The Rio conference, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm conference, emerged as a Temporal Focal Point in United Nations environmental politics. Convergent expectations triggered a significant increase in political and analytical investments in change processes from state and non-state actors, leading to a transformation of the informational and political context. These investments produced significant institutional change, including the creation of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the institutionalization of the World Bank-operated Global Environment Facility. States also launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, a set of Forest Principles, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

This chapter analyzes United Nations environmental politics from 1993 to 2021, focusing heavily on the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), or the “Johannesburg summit,” and the 2012 “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). The chapter examines the institutional ambiguities created by the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” and international efforts to address them. It analyzes in detail failed institutional bargaining surrounding WSSD and carries the empirical investigation forward to the Rio+20 summit. The second Rio Earth Summit constituted a Temporal Focal Point in the history of United Nations environment governance and precipitated large-scale institutional change. Among the significant institutional changes emerging from the conference were the transformation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the creation of a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), and the approval of a process for articulating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda. The chapter also provides a brief discussion of more recent UN environmental cooperation, focusing on UNEP, the HLPF, and the SDGs, including progress in combatting climate change and the loss of biodiversity.