Exploring the Potential of Polycentric Governance to Cultivate Civic Virtue for Social-Ecological Sustainability, including by Re-enchanting Human-Nature Relationships

Abstract

Much of humanity has become alienated from Nature as an enduring consequence of transformation at the IAD framework’s metaconstitutional level of analysis to a ‘disenchanted’, anthropocentric worldview rendering her of only instrumental value to humans. The resulting loss of affinity with Nature diminished the salience of calls for her protection, leading to a contemporary shortfall in the civic virtue ultimately required for successful collective action towards social-ecological sustainability.

This paper explores the potential of polycentric governance to ameliorate this shortfall, including by strengthening the contemporary salience of social-ecological sustainability by helping to ‘re-enchant’ human relationships with Nature. A review and synthesis of literature affirms such potential, particularly in respect of the community-based forms of polycentric governance informed by traditional Indigenous knowledge systems that Fikret Berkes identified as pivotal to sacred ecology as a re-enchanted tradition of ecological science. Such community-based forms of governance are informed by a non-anthropocentric, or community-of-beings, worldview wherein both humans and non-humans exercise agency in reciprocating each other’s contributions to social-ecological sustainability.

Community-based governance for this sustainability has advantages in protecting, and engaging people with, the opportunities for Nature experience that re-enchantment depends on. Efforts to realise these advantages faces formidable structural obstacles given the continuing hold of a disenchanted worldview. Overcoming these obstacles involves modest steps, each an experiment in practising reciprocity with Nature. Lessons gained across diverse communities filter upwards through the governance system to incrementally re-establish metaconstitutional conditions favouring human-Nature affinity.