ABSTRACT
Some of the key limitations and obstacles to sustainable development and to avoiding the dangerous consequences of environmental change are partly due to the structures and workings of political institutions. This chapter aims to bring together some of the key observations made in the other chapters, to utilise the rights-based framework developed earlier and to address particular challenges to devise legitimate and effective governance for a green future. In so doing, it draws on a couple of cases that demonstrate obstacles to sustainable politics and governance following from the prevailing discourses of (un)sustainability, economic feasibility and national interest short-termism. In response to these issues, the chapter highlights possible roads to sustainable politics and governance which draw on the idea of rights to a green future and which seem to require institutional changes, motivational changes and a shift in sustainability discourses in order to address--among many other issues--the differences between affluent and poor countries more adequately.
