Page 44 - Governing Congo Basin Forests in a Changing Climate • Olufunso Somorin

Chapter 1
interactions with other regimes from the same issue area and/or with institutions governing other issues (Young 2002; Oberthür and Gehring, 2006; Stokke et al., 2006). In this thesis, with the focus on the climate change regime, I consider adaptation and mitigation as sub-regimes within the climate regime. This is because both adaptation and mitigation have their own defined goals, actor networks, institutional mechanisms, policy architectures and instruments.
The forest-climate nexus offers an interesting policy arena to understand the place of environmental governance in managing global commons. For years, policy-makers and scientists have been grappling with the concept of forest governance and its role in delivering positive outcomes for local livelihoods, economic and social development, and environmental sustainability. In parallel, though more recently, the idea of climate governance has evolved. Climate governance refers to all purposeful mechanisms and response measures (by actors) aimed at steering social systems towards preventing, mitigating or adapting to the risks posed by climate change (Jagers and Stripple, 2003).
I will now focus on the conceptual framework adopted for this thesis which is based on the analytical elements of discursive institutionalism: actors, discourses and institutions. The conceptual framework is useful for analysing the governance processes of adaptation and REDD+ in the Congo Basin in terms of the types of actors involved, the overarching discourses on the issues and the institutional contexts in which these discourses are embedded.
1.3.3 Actors and Agency in Environmental Governance
In the environmental change literature, human agency is often highlighted as a critical factor in determining how individuals, households, and communities can respond to different types of environmental stressors (Brown and Westway, 2011). The analytical problem of agency begins with the assumption that the credibility, stability, and inclusiveness of environmental governance is affected by a wide range of actors, including national governments and their bureaucracies as well as the growing network of non-state actors, such as environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), expert networks, and corporations (Biermann et al., 2009; Bulkeley and Newell 2010; Dellas et al., 2011).
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