ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines a range of efforts to meet the challenge and to explore new options for governing human-environment relations that may prove effective under the conditions prevailing in a human-dominated world. It provides a toolkit with which to tackle specific issues of environmental governance rather than simply provide answers to questions ranging from how to harvest fish sustainably to how to avoid the problem of climate change. Governance systems are arrangements that social groups develop, either spontaneously or through deliberate actions, to perform the function of governance in a variety of settings. Environmental governance is a proper subset of the larger domain of governance. This subset includes those cases of steering the actions of humans, both individually and collectively, that involve uses of natural resources or impacts on ecosystems.
