ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the links between governance, sustainability, and globalization. It suggests that the core of governance involves rule systems in which steering mechanisms are employed to frame and implement goals that move communities in the directions they wish to go or that enable them to maintain the institutions and policies they wish to maintain. Local communities and groups are acquiring greater autonomy and a heightened readiness to contest the integrative forces of globalization. The chapter explains globalization as rooted in two basic and contrary processes. One involves all those forces that press for centralization, integration, and globalization, and the other consists of those forces that press for decentralization, fragmentation and localization. Environmental issues and their potential for sustainability fall squarely between fragmentation and integration. They are profoundly and quintessentially fragmegrative dynamics. Indeed, the protests have reinforced a long-term process whereby the very idea of sustainability has undergone a significant change of meaning.
