Addressing Environmental Issues of the Future

This chapter examines how environmental issues of the future can be addressed learning from the evolution of environmental policy in the last three decades. After briefly reviewing the earlier chapters, we also provide an overview of the changed understandings of policy formulation in the literature. In particular, we examine the analysis of the interaction between economic systems and ecosystems as also the effect of interactions between multiple institutions, new and old. It is to be noted that the presence of several categories of stakeholders with unequal access to information and wealth further complicates matters. The inescapable understanding that we get from the analysis of social-ecological systems is that there is no one panacea that a policymaker, located in a remote echelon, can dispense. Panaceas often lead to significant problems. The way ahead is in adaptive learning with different kinds of change being factored in.