IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 24

salient, credible, and legitimate
information - that is ethically
derived - to steer development,
planning, and business deci-
sions towards a sustainable and
equitable world?
■■ What are the social and envi-
ronmental outcomes of existing
digital nudging of consumers? Is
digital nudging a powerful lever
for shifting production and con-
sumption behaviors and norms
at a global scale?
■■ How can vulnerable societies
leverage precision services to
develop customized climate miti-
gation and adaptation solutions?

Innovation Needs
Develop analytic and legal sys-
tems and institutions that cred-
ibly use new data streams from
satellite imagery, digital sensors,
and crowdsourcing to quantify
and expose the cost of environ-
mental and social externalities.
■■ Improve the ability to track
and monitor carbon and other
environmental goods and ser-
vices using big data and re-
-
mote sensors.
■■ Develop new business models
that ethically and legally lever-
age individual and social data
to steer society towards sustain-
able consumption patterns, while
strengthening human agency.
■■ Develop new models that sup-
port co-developed, knowledgeintensive precision services for
vulnerable populations current-
ly disconnected from the digi-
tal world.
■■

Governance Systems
Current governance systems - the
structures, processes, rules, and tra-
ditions that determine how people
make decisions, share power, and
ensure accountability - have so
far failed to steer the world towards
climate stability and equity [35].

24

Historically, the dominant focus of
climate governance has been on
establishing a single global agree-
ment, defined through the United
Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), that
would be state-centric and topdown. However, many are recog-
nizing that top-down steering must
be combined with bottom-up selforganization to drive the deep soci-
etal transformations needed to keep
global temperature rise well below
two degrees [2], [36], [37].
Combining bottom-up and topdown approaches will require rede-
signing the top-down approaches
while bottom-up approaches are
strengthened and expanded. Digital
innovations are already empower-
ing bottom-up governance and are
reshaping the global environmental
governance landscape to be more
distributed [38], though this also
brings challenges and can lead
to fragmented governance archi-
tecture with uncertain outcomes
[39]. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom
reflected positively on a shift to what
she called a polycentric governance
structure that could address these
challenges [40]. Polycentric systems
have multiple centers of author-
ity at various scales as opposed to
a monocentric top-down system.
Each unit within a polycentric sys-
tem exercises considerable indepen-
dence to make their own norms and
rules. Ostrom's research, spanning
diverse cultures, showed that, under
the right conditions, polycentric gov-
ernance systems can overcome the
challenge of collective action char-
acterized by Hardin's "Tragedy of
the Commons" [41].
Although the digital age has dis-
rupted the rules and power struc-
tures of traditional governance
systems, the outcomes have not
always led to a net benefit to soci-
ety. This is in part because the digi-
tal revolution expanded so rapidly
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

that governance systems have been
unable to keep pace with both the
risks and opportunities. Climate
governance strategies illustrate this
lag, as most are still based on mod-
els designed for the analogue world
of the twentieth century. We urgently
need a new tool box of strategies for
climate governance that leverages
the four key digital disruptors to bet-
ter access the increased availability
and use of data, advances in AI, and
new means for involving the capac-
ity and expertise of a wider diversity
of people in decision making. Below
we describe three digitally empow-
ered levers that could help impor-
tant components of a new climate
governance toolbox.

Informational Governance
Increased access to data from satel-
lite imagery and other remote sen-
sors, as well as to data on individual
and social behavior, is rapidly shift-
ing how information is used and by
whom in environmental governance
regimes. These trends are giving
rise to "informational governance,"
which explores the use of informa-
tion and information technologies
to foster innovations in governance
mechanisms and institutions, as
well as changes to the roles differ-
ent institutions play in governance
[42], [43].
Informational governance appears
to be disrupting the power struc-
tures of some traditional climate
governance systems, but it is too
early to know how these will influ-
ence sustainability outcomes over
the longer term [43]-[45]. For exam-
ple, digital measurement, report-
ing, and verification (digital MRV) of
GHG emissions has shown promise
for improving the accuracy of trans-
parency programs, potentially lead-
ing to greater accountability and
ultimately stronger sustainability out-
comes [46]. However, transparency
alone does not assure improved
∕

JUNE 2020
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020
