LIST OF PANELS

The polycrisis (climate change; pandemic; energy; violence; loss of biodiversity; etc) reaches its flashpoint in the planet’s urban systems. Those urban systems are concentrations of people, goods and services, with significant spatial, social and trade footprints. Not only are we an urban planet (with more than half of Earth’s people now living in cities), but these environments also require new and complex forms of interconnected policy and planning. Most ’local’ governments, however, lack the capability, understanding and locus of control to anticipate, prepare for, and shape such policy complexity. This is not a new phenomenon. Advocates of urban action (such as UN Habitat; United Cities and Local Governments, and a wide range of ‘Theme Cities’ such as Healthy Cities) have recognised the challenge and are ready to rise to the occasion.

In particular the COVID-19 pandemic has made this realisation more acute than ever. Talk of preparedness, resilience and even ‘building back better’ has increased. Visionary statements and dreams of better futures are proliferating. However, the complexity (science) rhetoric seems to stand in the way of clear-cut analyses of the roles and opportunities for governments, civil society and the corporate sector. Exacerbating this conceptual fog is the severe techno-anthropocentric bias in the various discourses. Indeed, since the dawn of the city (some 15000 years ago), humanity has made a deliberate effort to ‘plan away’ nature and superstition from its environs. Nature has been sanitised and regulated into parks and reserves, and earth cosmologies (common among the Indigenous peoples of the world) alongside them. This ‘othering’ of ecosystems happens at our peril. Systems ecologists have demonstrated that environments with high biodiversity parameters (such as many of the Earth’s tropical zones) create more – zoonotic – pathogens. But the complex diversity of the system also affects and reduces the viability of those pathogens. On the other hand, less biodiverse systems such as cities, have lost that capability to instantly control pathogenicity.

The health of urban ecosystems directly connects with the health of all city life (including people) – and should be a top priority of those very anthropocentric institutions that make up the crusts and shells of the planet’s cities. But just as we planned away nature from urban infrastructure, humans are generally left clueless as to governance arrangements and structures for urban health at the interface of ecosystems and humans.

Part of the riddle, of course, is a continued conceptual confusion around ‘governance’. At its simplest and most straightforward, this notion of ‘how we do things around here’ deals with the art and science of social and political governing/government. In recent developments in the health field, in particular in global health, there is a strong recognition of notions of multi-level network governance driving change as well as permanence. But these ideas have not (yet) landed in most local (municipal) ecosystems health ideas.

This panel, therefore, will invite scholars and practitioners to reflect – in practice and in theory – on forms of governance that relate to urban ecosystems health around the world.

We seek papers inspired by and conceptualised as political and administrative science reflections on the governance of complex urban environments with a particular focus on the interface between systems ecology and people - and their health and wellbeing. We aim for global representation and invite work from the Global South and from researchers that identify outside 'the mainstream' (whatever that is).

We specifically invite (groups of) authors that are not our 'usual suspects' when it comes to governance studies. Ecologists and biologists that seek to understand the social and political, formal and informal, rules that sustain and destroy our urban worlds. But also (teams of) students of international relations, city and global diplomacy, who have applied coherent and systematic conceptual and theoretical frameworks from their 'home disciplines' to transnational and transdisciplinary problems of habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, and climate change at planetary as well as local levels. Beyond this - we hope to be able to be a platform for more engaged (and perhaps exotic) forms of ecosystem and human health governance that we could classify as cosmological, spiritual, or 'Weltanschauung'. This, then, specifically includes accounts of, and reflections on First Nations/Indigenous governance systems of Country, 'On the Land', Mother Earth and the biosphere.

Paper submissions may well make reference to dimensions of the polycrisis as outlined above, and its specific Treaties (e.g., Convention on Biological Diversity; the Sustainable Development Goals; The Paris Agreement on Climate Change and UNFCCC; the Montreal Protocol; etc.). However, this call for papers is specifically targeting descriptions and assessments of urban and local governance parameters and environments. Governance and policy learning; governance and community action; governance and political advocacy are all most welcome dimensions for papers.

Ultimately - if quality and quantity of submissions and presentations allow for this - the Chairs of the panel(s) aim for the publication of this collection as a book or journal issue.