Governance
The track that I followed within Sustainable Development was Earth System Governance, and was thereby the common thread during my entire master. It focusses on using social sciences to explore governancy, policy, and politics of sustainability across scales from local to global. I thereby learned to analyse and examine actors, policies, and arrangements to steer society towards sustainability. Additionally I learned to investigate the performance of governance considering aspects as effectiveness, fairness, legitimacy, and accountability.
Governance theories
As governance was the core of the track it was a backbone throughout most of my master courses, but two truely emphasised on it in Governance Theories and International Governance for Sustainable Development. Within the first many different theories and thus analytical tools were introduced. Within the second we set out to investigate the issues that arise within the Kavango-Zambezi national park in southern Africa on participation, transparency, and accountability. Assignments like this truely highlighted the different issues that can be formed within governance and policy.
Multi-level perspective
In Governance Theories I learned many different theories to analyse a governance situation, but the one that sparked the most interest and which I used the most afterwards was the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP). In MLP three different scales are introduced in the niche, the regime, and the landscape. Put simply, the theory tries to explain changes in the social-technical regime. Pressure from the higher scale landscape causes the regime to become unstable due to shifting demands of that regime. This unstability creates a window of opportunity for niche actors to become part of a new regime. There are different ways and causes why this new regime can form, but this is the basic thought behind it. It intrigues me as it can explain how new technologies and solutions can be introduced into a society, which to me is the main problem we struggle with.
