Aarti Gupta

Aarti Gupta
Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Department of Sociology and Governance

PhD Yale University, Environmental Studies

About

102
Publications
62,292
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
4,928
Citations
Introduction
I am a professor of Global Environmental Governance at the Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University. I coordinate the research theme ‘Governing Climate Futures’ here, lead the TRANSGOV project on transformative effects of climate transparency, and co-lead the REIMAGINE project on climate anticipation in the global South. I am a member of the ESG project's Steering Committee, and co-editor of Cambridge Elements in Earth System Governance.
Additional affiliations
October 2006 - present
Wageningen University & Research
Position
  • Associate Professor of Global Environmental Governance
September 2001 - August 2002
Columbia University
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (102)
Article
This article analyzes the interplay between transparency and accountability in multilateral climate politics. The 2015 Paris Agreement calls for a “pledge-and-review” approach to collective climate action with an “enhanced transparency framework” as a key pillar of the Agreement. By making visible who is doing what, transparency is widely assumed t...
Article
Analyses of climate engineering (CE) governance have accelerated in the last decade. A key claim is that CE remains a largely ungoverned space, with shared norms, institutional arrangements, and formal rules to regulate CE not yet present. In contrast, here it is argued that de facto governance of CE is underway, discernible in an ordering of this...
Article
Full-text available
This article identifies diverse rationales to call for anticipatory governance of solar geoengineering, in light of a climate crisis. In focusing on governance rationales, we step back from proliferating debates in the literature on ‘how, when, whom, and where’ to govern, to address the important prior question of why govern solar geoengineering in...
Article
Full-text available
In times of accelerating earth system transformations and their potentially disruptive societal consequences, imagining and governing the future is now a core challenge for sustainability research and practice. Much social science and sustainability science scholarship increasingly engages with the future. There is, however, a lack of scrutiny of h...
Article
Full-text available
Securing accountability of states for their climate actions is a continuing challenge within multilateral climate politics. This article analyses how novel, face-to-face, account-giving processes for developing countries, referred to as ‘Facilitative Sharing of Views’, are functioning within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, some scientists have called for research into and potential development of 'solar geoengineering' technologies as an option to counter global warming. Solar geo-engineering refers to a set of speculative techniques to reflect some incoming sunlight back into space, for example, by continuously spraying reflective sulphur aerosols i...
Article
In order to address the pressing challenge of climate change, countries are now submitting long-term climate strategies to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. These strategies include within them potential future use of ‘negative emissions technologies’ (NETs). NETs are interventions that remove carbon from t...
Presentation
This presentation summarizes the findings of a project that investigated how the different actors involved in the Milieudefensie vs. Royal Dutch Shell court case used climate science to make their arguments. It explains how this case can be understood as a form of 'anticipatory climate litigation', and how science plays a different role here than i...
Article
A recent article in this journal (Jackson 2021 Jackson, M. 2021. On decolonizing the Anthropocene: Disobedience via plural constitutions. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (3):698–708. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1779645.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) validly emphasized that debates about the An...
Article
Full-text available
Environmental justice issues have been incrementally but consistently covered within this journal in the last two decades. This article reviews theoretical and empirical approaches to justice in INEA scholarship in order to identify trends and draw lessons for the interpretation and implementation of the 2030 Agenda and for living within environmen...
Article
Full-text available
Anticipation methods and tools are increasingly used to try to imagine and govern transformations towards more sustainable futures across different policy domains and sectors. But there is a lack of research into the steering effects of anticipation on present-day governance choices, especially in the face of urgently needed sustainability transfor...
Article
Full-text available
Digital technologies play an increasingly important role in addressing environmental challenges, such as climate change and resource depletion. Yet, the characteristics and implications of digitalized environmental governance are still under-conceptualized. In this perspective, we distinguish three dimensions of governance: (1) seeing and knowing,...
Article
Full-text available
Solar geoengineering is gaining prominence in climate change debates as an issue worth studying; for some it is even a potential future policy option. We argue here against this increasing normalization of solar geoengineering as a speculative part of the climate policy portfolio. We contend, in particular, that solar geoengineering at planetary sc...
Article
Full-text available
Elaborate transparency systems are now at the core of the 2015 Paris Agreement, with the assumption that this will enhance accountability, trust, and greater climate policy ambition. Much attention is now being devoted to increasing the capacity of developing countries to comply with climate transparency requirements. Contrary to viewing capacity b...
Article
Full-text available
Using Indonesia's energy sector as case study, we explore the effects of the domestic measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) system as a manifestation of national level climate transparency. We examine the ways in which MRV facilitates state actors' reflexive capacity to recognize, reflect on, and respond to the demand for mitigation-related...
Article
Full-text available
This article interrogates the assumed promises and perils of climate cryptogovernance or deployment of cryptographic technology (i.e., blockchain) within climate governance. We distill how climate cryptogovernance is being discussed by influential climate policy actors, and the implications for reinforcing or challenging how climate governance cur...
Article
Full-text available
Transparency is increasingly central to multilateral climate governance. In this article, we undertake one of the first systematic assessments of the nature and extent of compliance with transparency requirements under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Extensive resources are now being devoted to setting up nationa...
Article
Full-text available
We are in the middle of a planetary crisis that urgently requires stronger modes of earth system governance. At the same time, calls for justice are becoming increasingly pronounced in sustainability research: there can be no effective planetary stewardship without planetary justice. Rapid planetary-scale processes have reinforced and further creat...
Article
Full-text available
Transparency in environmental governance is no longer an uncontroversial answer to problems of accountability and effectiveness. How to design effective transparency systems and in what policy contexts they are effective remain contested issues. This special section, consisting of this introduction and four research articles, interrogates complex a...
Chapter
Full-text available
In stating that climate change is not the most important challenge facing us today, I argue that only by addressing the more fundamental ‘inequality crisis’ of our times do we have even a hope of effectively addressing the climate crisis. In addition, in a context of persisting inequalities, characterizing climate change as the most urgent challeng...
Article
Full-text available
p>The social sciences have engaged since the late 1980s in international collaborative programmes to study questions of sustainability and global change. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the largest long-standing social-science network in this field: the Earth System Governance Project. Originating as a core project of the former Interna...
Article
Full-text available
Solar radiation management (SRM) technologies would reflect a small amount of incoming solar radiation back into space before the radiation can warm the planet. Although SRM may emerge as a useful component of a global response to climate change, there is also good reason for caution. In June 2017, the Academic Working Group on Climate Engineering...
Chapter
Equity has remained a deeply contested concept in multilateral climate politics ever since the Brundtland Commission report, with academic debate and geopolitical conflict alike focusing on how to conceptualize the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ (CBDR-RC) of industrialized and developing countr...
Article
Full-text available
The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the potential of climate finance to support developing country efforts to shift away from unsustainable land use patterns in the context of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. We pursue two research objectives here. Through a meta-analysis of 40 developing country Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), we provide, first, a co...
Chapter
An examination of whether accountability mechanisms in global environmental governance that focus on monitoring and enforcement necessarily lead to better governance and better environmental outcomes. The rapid development of global environmental governance has been accompanied by questions of accountability. Efforts to address what has been called...
Article
Full-text available
The need to tackle international drivers of deforestation has long been acknowledged; but remains little addressed via policy measures. In the European Union (EU), a new policy debate is emerging around the concept of “embodied deforestation”, which targets EU Agricultural commodity imports as drivers of deforestation. The notion views deforestatio...
Article
Full-text available
The European Union (EU) stands at a crossroads regarding its biofuel policies. For more than a decade, the EU sought to create a market for and govern sustainable biofuels for the transport sector, even as debates over sustainability escalated. It did so by devising novel hybrid (public and private) governance arrangements. We took stock of the nat...
Article
The Paris Agreement's aspirational 1.5 degree temperature target has given further impetus to efforts to imagine (and seek to govern) transformative and uncertain climate futures. This brings to the fore multiple challenges in the search for anticipatory governance and the role herein for climate foresight. Foresight entails processes to envision c...
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines how notions of equity are being evoked by expert advocates of more research into solar geoengineering. We trace how specific understandings of equity figure centrally—although not always explicitly—in these expert visions. We find that understandings of equity in such “vanguard visions” are narrowly conceived as epistemic challe...
Article
Subsurface Arsenic Removal (SAR) is a technique used for in-situ removal of naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater. This new technology was deployed recently on an experimental basis in two sites in rural Bangladesh, to address the pressing problem of rural drinking water supplies contaminated by arsenic. This article assesses whether and to wh...
Article
This article explores diverse emerging conceptualisations of “landscape” approaches to ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ and related activities (REDD +) that are discernible in a growing body of academic literature and policy practice. Landscape approaches to REDD + are assumed to be better able to tackle direct and ind...
Article
Full-text available
This article analyzes the contested politics of including (and accounting for) land-based mitigation in a post-2020 climate agreement. Emissions from land have been only partially included to date within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol. The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015 and “applicable to...
Article
Full-text available
This paper analyzes potential synergies between two recent sustainable development initiatives, namely the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), a climate mitigation mechanism negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The paper...
Chapter
The chapter focuses on the inclusion of “governance goals” in global goal-setting mechanisms, especially the Sustainable Development Goals, and is centred on a question; can better governance, in itself, be a subject for global goal setting? We focus in this chapter on three core qualities of governance, which are good governance, effective governa...
Article
Developing and institutionalizing cross-sectoral approaches to sustainable land use remains a crucial, yet politically contested, objective in global sustainability governance. There is a widely acknowledged need for more integrated approaches to sustainable land use that reconcile multiple landscape functions, sectors and stakeholders. However, th...
Article
Arsenic contamination of shallow hand pump tube well drinking water in Bangladesh has created opportunities for radical innovations to emerge. One such innovation is the household Sono filter, designed to remove arsenic from water supplies. Applying a strategic niche management approach, and based on interviews, focus groups and a workshop, this ar...
Article
Full-text available
From its advent in 2005 within global climate change negotiations, reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and other forest‐related activities (so‐called REDD +) has been experimented with in developing country contexts for over a decade now, with a wide array of expectations coming to be associated with it. Three consecutive conceptualization...
Article
This paper explains why and how deep tube well as a safe drinking water technology has become dominant in mitigating the arsenic crisis in rural Bangladesh. We do so by applying insights from the Multi-Level Perspective on transitions in explaining changes in the safe socio-technical drinking water regime in rural Bangladesh. Data about seven dimen...
Article
Full-text available
This article analyzes the increasing institutional and organizational complexity and fragmentation surrounding the international financing mechanism REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries and related forest activities), now being negotiated within the UNFCCC. We focus, in particular, on criticall...
Article
Transparency is increasingly evoked within public and private climate governance arrangements as a key means to enhance accountability and improve environmental outcomes. We review assumed links between transparency, accountability and environmental sustainability here, by identifying four rationales underpinning uptake of transparency in governanc...
Article
p>This article analyzes the contested politics of including (and accounting for) land-based mitigation in a post-2020 climate agreement. Emissions from land have been only partially included to date within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol. The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015 and “applicable...
Article
From its advent in 2005 within global climate change negotiations, reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and other forest-related activities (so-called REDD+) has been experimented with in developing country contexts for over a decade now, with a wide array of expectations coming to be associated with it. Three consecutive conceptualizations...
Chapter
Full-text available
Transparency, as information disclosure, is becoming a widely accepted norm and set of practices in global climate governance. Disclosure of climate-related information is mainly seen as a way to monitor and/or reward various actors’ climate mitigation actions, thereby contributing, at least in principle, to the accountability both of private discl...
Article
Contamination of shallow tube well drinking water by naturally occurring arsenic is a severe societal and human health challenge in Bangladesh. Multiple technological interventions seeking to ameliorate the problem face hurdles in securing social acceptance, i.e. the willingness of users to receive and use a technology. While most papers focus on e...
Article
Globalization is changing the nature and practices of global governance, including those relating to governance of large-scale environmental change. A complex array of actors and institutions now frames and seeks to manage environmental problems in diverse ways, resulting in intersecting spheres of public and private authority that shape governance...
Article
In this introductory chapter, Aarti Gupta and Michael Mason lay out the rationale for the in-depth examination of transparency-based global environmental governance arrangements undertaken in this volume. The chapter outlines how “governance by disclosure”, that is, targeted disclosure of information intended to steer behavioral change and achieve...
Book
Transparency—openness, secured through greater availability of information—is increasingly seen as part of the solution to a complex array of economic, political, and ethical problems in an interconnected world. The “transparency turn” in global environmental governance in particular is seen in a range of international agreements, voluntary disclos...
Chapter
This chapter examines the changing procedural quality of global environmental governance. Specifically, it focuses on increasing expectations for openness in decision-making and disclosure of information as an antidote to deficiencies in global environmental governance. The chapter analyzes the promises and pitfalls of institutionalizing transparen...
Chapter
A critical assessment of whether transparency is a broadly transformative force in global environmental governance or plays a more limited role. Transparency—openness, secured through greater availability of information—is increasingly seen as part of the solution to a complex array of economic, political, and ethical problems in an interconnected...
Chapter
This chapter focuses on the politics of measuring, reporting and verification systems (MRV) underpinning the REDD+ mechanism now being negotiated within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, and the role of conservation, sustainable man...
Article
Full-text available
Highlights: 1. Governance must be a crucial part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, there are also different ways of integrating key aspects of governance into the SDGs. Much of the discussions for the SDGs has revolved around either having a stand-alone governance goal or integrating governance into other goals on specific issue...
Article
This article argues that institutional interactions that cut across the domains of trade and environment are embedded in overarching norms that shape their evolution and impact. In making this argument, it analyzes three cases of such interactions within the climate change and biosafety regime complexes: those relating to trade-related climate poli...
Chapter
Full-text available
Biosafety: An Anticipatory Governance Challenge Use of the techniques of modern biotechnology in agriculture and food produc-tion has given rise to impassioned debates over the last two decades about the benefits versus the risks posed by genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and prod-ucts thereof. So-called transgenic varieties now constitute sig...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, we draw on the contributions to this issue to address the question 'Will REDD+ work?'. We do so by differentiating between how, where and when REDD+ might work. The article shows how issues of scope, scale and pace of REDD+ are related, and how interdisciplinary research can help to distill the lessons learned from REDD+ efforts cu...
Article
This article reviews critical social science analyses of carbon accounting and monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems associated with reducing emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and conservation, sustainable use and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+). REDD+ MRV systems are often portrayed as technical. In questi...
Chapter
An examination of three major trends in global governance, exemplified by developments in transnational environmental rule-setting. The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both theory and practice. This book offers a...
Chapter
An examination of three major trends in global governance, exemplified by developments in transnational environmental rule-setting. The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both theory and practice. This book offers a...
Article
The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both theory and practice. This book offers a fresh perspective by analyzing global governance in terms of three major trends, as exemplified by developments in global sustainab...
Article
Full-text available
The United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in June is an important opportunity to improve the institutional framework for sustainable development.
Article
Full-text available
The current institutional framework for sustainable development is by far not strong enough to bring about the swift transformative progress that is needed. This article contends that incrementalism—the main approach since the 1972 Stockholm Conference—will not suffice to bring about societal change at the level and speed needed to mitigate and ada...
Article
Science assessments indicate that human activities are moving several of Earth's sub-systems outside the range of natural variability typical for the previous 500,000 years (1, 2). Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change (3). This require...
Article
The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both theory and practice. This book offers a fresh perspective by analyzing global governance in terms of three major trends, as exemplified by developments in global sustainab...
Article
This article analyzes evolving institutions and practices of anticipatory risk governance in India, through the lens of two recent and highly controversial developments in governing genetically modified crops in Indian agriculture. These developments include, first, conflicts over approving (or not) the very first genetically modified food crop in...
Article
This introductory article draws on the contributions to this special issue to consider the implications of a transparency turn in global environmental and sustainability governance. Three interrelated aspects are addressed: why transparency now? How is transparency being institutionalized? And what effects does it have? In analyzing the spread of t...
Article
This article explores the prospects for transparency to be a transformative force in global biosafety governance. It analyzes whether information disclosure can further a right to know and choose, and hence facilitate oversight over transnational transfers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It examines the question of "Whose right to know wh...
Article
Although transparency is a key concept in the social sciences, it remains an understudied phenomenon in global environmental governance. This paper analyzes effectiveness of ‘governance by transparency’ or governance by information disclosure as a key innovation in global environmental and risk governance. Information disclosure is central to curre...
Article
This article analyses visions of the future articulated by proponents of ‘biotechnology for the poor’, those who claim that an embrace of transgenic technology in agriculture is critical to alleviating poverty in developing countries. Specifically, we analyse how such ‘biotechnology for the poor’ proponents represent a future with or without transg...
Article
Is globalization promoting regulatory convergence in agricultural biotechnology policies in the South? This article examines the nature and limits of regulatory convergence in the field of agri-biotechnology and investigates the effects that international forces have on biotechnology and biosafety policies in developing countries. Based on detailed...
Article
Although transparency is a key concept of our times, it remains a relatively understudied phenomenon in global environmental politics. The link between transparency and accountable, legitimate and effective governance is assumed, yet the nature and workings of this link require further scrutiny. Transparency via information disclosure is increasing...
Article
This paper analyzes how the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, a global regime governing trade in genetically modified organisms (GMOs), is influencing agricultural biotechnology policy choices in developing countries/emerging economies. Through empirical analysis of Mexico, China and South Africa, we examine whether discursive and/or institutional c...
Article
This article describes the strategies and activities of the Forest Integrity Network. One of the most important underlying causes of forest degradation is corruption and related illegal logging. The Forest Integrity Network is a timely new initiative to combat forest corruption. Its approach is to form global multi-stakeholder coalitions between th...
Article
Governing safe use of biotechnology in agriculture is a controversial new regulatory challenge facing developing countries such as India. This article identifies short- and long-term challenges to biosafety governance in India and emphasises the need for institutional mechanisms to ensure that use of biotechnology can fulfil desired societal goals....
Article
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 2001.
Article
The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety was adopted in Montreal, Canada, in the early hours of the morning of 29 January 2000, following last-minute speculation that the negotiations were in danger of collapsing again, as they had in Colombia the previous year. The protocol, negotiated under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity,1 is on...
Article
This article examines one of the first international efforts to formulate legally binding rules for ''biosafety'' or safe use of biotechnology - the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety under the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Cartagena Protocol, concluded in January 2000, mandates the ''informed consent'' of a country prior to the release of g...

Network

Cited By