Institutional Foundations for Local Self-Governance of Biodiversity

Abstract

"This paper is mainly about institutions. What institutions are most appropriate for maintaining and governing the resilience of our life-supporting ecosystems, and how do they relate to the most crucial elements of resilience: the magnitude and ordering of biodiversity. But in doing so, we also encounter problems which are not only connected to institutional design, efficiency and legitimacy of procedures or decisions. These are fundamental problems of how societies 'think' about our relationships to Nature, about the 'Social Construction of Nature'. And it is even more fundamental problems related to man's contemporary relationship to the evolutionary process itself, which by same authors is seen as now 'hominisized' to the extent that it is 'cephalized' with humans as 'heads of evolution'."