Community-based governance and global sustainability

The scale of collective action required for global sustainability is feasible only to the extent that efforts at this level can build on the trust, reciprocity and cooperation already established at lower levels. Such a bottom-up process of building capacities for global sustainability is one of community-based environmental governance, at least where this governance is rightly understood as a nested multilevel system of groups, organisations and governments interacting in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. The Australian experiment with community engagement in landcare and regionalised natural resources governance is reviewed to inform ongoing attempts to grow the societal capacities required to overcome the collective-action challenges of delivering sustainability at the global level.