Table 1 Glossary of terminology.
Commons | A non-state, non-private shared resource, plus a defined community that devises protocols, norms and values to manage it (eg. Earth’s atmosphere)33,42 |
Environmental stewardship | Actions taken by individuals, groups, or networks of actors to protect, care for, or responsibly use the environment in pursuit of environmental and/or social outcomes in diverse social and ecological contexts63 |
Landscape pressures | Fundamental system conditions typically exhibiting gradual changes (e.g., demographics, resource depletion, climate change, technological innovation, urbanization, etc.) that synergistically and incrementally lead to shifts in the state of the environment and impacts on valued parts of ecosystems or on society |
Generative ownership | Categories of private ownership which generate beneficial outcomes for common good117 |
Legal regime | A legal framework comprising principles and rules governing human activities or processes (eg. UNCLOS) |
Meta-governance | Governance of governance among interacting groups69 |
Niche innovations | Novel approaches through which sectors or stakeholder communities interact with or produce goods from a social-ecological system in response to landscape pressures (eg. emergence of local renewable energy systems as an alternative to fossil fuels) |
Regime (also socio-technical regime) | A tightly knit combination of regulations, key operators that produce products or services, consumers who depend on those products/services, the revenues that governments/agencies/regulators extract in the form of levies/taxes etc, the financial institutions who provide debt/equity, plus a substantial infrastructure operated by people who have been trained over decades to understand and operate the system in certain ways (eg. fossil fuel-based energy system)118 |
Reflexive governance | When the foundations of governance (the concepts, practices and institutions by which societal development is overseen) are questioned, and more relevant and effective alternatives are reinvented to reshape those foundations |
Polycentric governance | A system of decision making in which multiple governing bodies interact to make and enforce rules within a specific policy arena or location |
Volitional governance | Voluntary commitments aimed to deliver outcome-oriented activities84 eg. Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, the Voluntary National Review process set up under the United Nations SDG review mechanism70, and voluntary commitments under the Our Ocean Conference series (Registry of Voluntary Commitments UN Our Ocean Conference). |
