Modernity and the Institution Gap: How to Govern Sustainability?

The contemporary crises of modernity, above all environmental and security issues, have led to an enormous boom of transnational institutions and infrastructures for crisis governance. For a close examination of these efforts and resulting problems, this paper will focus on issues of climate change governance, based on research conducted in Botswana and South Africa. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement significant instruments for transnational climate change governance have been implemented. National governments are requested to produce National Development Plans and Climate Change Strategies in which they outline their sustainability policy agendas. Every five years they need to report to the UNFCCC on the progress they have made. Annually COPs are organized on which national governments, transnational bodies, and NGOs negotiate the situation. Despite such institutional efforts, the 2015 defined Sustainable Development Goals are, according to the UN, far from being accomplished, often delayed. In the Southern African region large percentages of the people are climate change illiterate; in many countries 50% and more of the population still have not heard about climate change at all, although the region is extremely vulnerable to drought, extreme weather events, and food insecurity. Our research confirms a significant gap between government representational politics on institutional meta-level and a missing communication to and collaboration with local communities. This strand is stressed by the tendency to understand climate change governance according to a paradigm of development that derives from a classic understanding of modernity and its timely regimes. Such regime of modernization neglects the needs of local communities and marginalized actors and opens a significant gap between the successfully represented institutions on the one hand and the vulnerably affected communities on the other.