Tailoring benefit-sharing for sustainability of global environmental commons

Collaboration on various - from local to global - levels is both the defining necessity and the main challenge of global environmental commons. Global environmental commons such as atmosphere, climate, biodiversity, forests, shared land and water resources, are common pool resources sustainable management of which often requires collaboration beyond boundaries of any single nation as well as on multiple governance levels within individual states. The recent decades have seen rapid growth of collaborative arrangements that aim to protect environmental commons. However, there is an increasing concern that the current stress mounted on environmental commons offsets the effects of existing efforts. Examples include increased frequency and intensity of recorded natural disasters, depletion and pollution of freshwater resources, degradation of agricultural land resources and deforestation, extinction of species and more, all of which often affect already disadvantaged groups of population most, raising the questions of equitability and justice. The purpose of this project is to facilitate understanding of benefit sharing as a governance approach that can improve equitability and sustainability in environmental governance. This is done through broader historical-institutional, regime and discourse analyses, as well as more actor-oriented observational and experimental social research methods. Cases from various cultural and political contexts are studied to explore and develop wider theoretical foundations of the approach.