ABSTRACT
Climate change is the defining environmental issue of the present era, both a product and embodiment of the increasing interconnectivity of global economic, technological and ecological processes falling under the rubric of ‘globalization’. As a physical process, changes in the global climate present a wide and complex range of ecological, social and economic implications. Climate change, along with other different yet linked forms of ecosystem shifts such as deforestation, has contributed to the growing integration of thinking about the environment and the global economy. With climate change assuming the central position in the global environmental discourse, transnational efforts to mitigate the impacts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are poised to reshape institutional arrangements for natural resource governance at local, national and global scales. How this reshaping takes place is, however, very much uncertain and contingent on ongoing negotiations, changing narratives and discourses, and the ability of different groups of people, and groups of nations, to influence efforts to regulate the global climate ‘commons’. What is clear, however, is that there are both major risks and opportunities for local resource governance regimes in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, and that the imperative to address global climate change is shifting the institutional scale of environmental management to the transnational level, away from local and even national concerns and controls.
