Bordering sustainability in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

While environmental matters rarely respect political boundaries, efforts to govern resource, pollution, wildlife and numerous other matters are often profoundly shaped by territorial jurisdiction. Direct regulation, trade restrictions and forms of international cooperation have all shaped global efforts at environmental governance, while fortress conservation ideas frequently invoke territorial exclusivity. The context for these measures has been changing both as a consequence of the growth of the global economy and as a result of the biophysical transformations that are integral to this expansion through the period of the great acceleration. Climate adaptation practices frequently invoked practices of enclosure and expulsion that are often counter-productive. Novel circumstances due to accelerating Anthropocene change now shape the policy landscape, while numerous policy-makers grapple with how to implement the Sustainable Development Goals. These require rethinking the bordering practices that govern environmental matters and the relationships of territory to ecological function. This is necessary now not least because of increased natural system instability, the new condition of non-stationarity and the inadequacy of stable base line assumptions for dealing with rapid change across boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• sustainability
• territory
• climate change
• governance

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Simon Dalby http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3455-0735

Additional information

Funding

This paper is part of a Partnership Research Grant on ‘Borders in Globalization’ funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 895-2012-1020].