Take home

In this module you have been exposed to a small subset of governance tools.

You should now be able to define governance and understand how management relates to this. You should know what the main criteria is for good governance are:

• Efficiency,
• Effectiveness,
• Equity and
• Legitimacy.

Also, you should have an understanding of the dynamics of governance as well as how institutions form in action arenas. Regarding institutions, you should have a good idea what the components of institutions are and how one can use this knowledge to compare different institutions.

Many sustainability issues are being addressed using markets, such as carbon emission trade, and you need to have an understanding of how the market dynamics can regulate supply and demand. The most common form of directing behavior for sustainability by governments are taxes and subsidies. Make sure you have thoroughly understood the dynamics of changing the incentives to achieve either reductions or increases in undesired and desired actions respectively.

Lastly, stakeholder participation, whether government initiated or by collective action processes, is becoming a key, ground based approach to solving local sustainability problems. You should have gotten a good understanding of its intended goal and the potential problems, as well as the different perspectives of outcomes from the social and natural systems domain.

The next and final module in this course, “invoking change” focuses on how this subset of tools and concepts we have learn can be applied in the real world.