Climate Change and Good Governance Workshop

The presence of efficient, transparent and equitable forms of governance across scales is central to the realisation of sustainable development objectives. Despite this general appreciation, however, there are significant knowledge gaps in our grasp of the complex relationships among the different agents, scales and/or attributes of (good) governance and vulnerability to global environmental change (GEC), including climate change. START (an NGO based in Washington) collaborating with the Earth System Governance (ESG) Project and the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies (University of Ghana) convened a small group of experts, academics and thought leaders from diverse disciplines to explore priority knowledge needs in governance dimensions of GEC impacts, in the African region. Professor Sandy Paterson from the Institute was fortunate to be invited to participate in the Workshop held in Accra, Ghana, from 25-27 September 2013. The principal objective of the Workshop was to bring together an interdisciplinary team of experts from African Universities and Research Centers to exchange experiences, views and insights on knowledge and capacity needs related to governance aspects of vulnerability to climate change in Africa. Specifically, the workshop aimed to: explore (good) governance dimensions of climate change in Africa through the ESG analytical framework; take stock of experiences in interdisciplinary research relevant to GEC and governance research in Africa, and identify where important knowledge gaps exist; discuss ways of promoting interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in governance – GEC research in Africa; and identify concrete workshop follow-on activities. One of these concrete outcomes is a discussion paper on knowledge and capacity needs in good governance, vulnerability and resilience in the African context, which is currently jointly being authored by the workshop participants.

A copy of the Workshop Booklet is available here.