Accountability in Environmental Governance

The inadequacy of responses to problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and economic inequality invites theorization and empirical analysis of mechanisms that coordinate i) behavior, strategy, and investment at the level of individuals and organizations and ii) regulation at the level of communities, sectors, and nation states. Combining ideas from environmental governance scholarship and critical institutional analysis -- study of the implications of existing and imagined socioeconomic coordination mechanisms -- I present an integrated co-evolutionary model of cognitive, institutional, socioeconomic, and biophysical dynamics. The model highlights pathways to address socioecological problems and raises difficult questions regarding intersections between liberalism, justice and sustainability.