Telecoupling constitutes a particular class of globalized environmental issues that are neither local-cumulative, nor transboundary, nor concerning global commons, but that arise because of specific linkages between distal regions. Such telecoupled issues, e.g., associated with global commodity chains, waste flows, or migration patterns, have been receiving increasing attention from scholars of global land change science. Although governance research has mostly studied existing institutional responses to these issues, telecoupling opens up a problem-oriented perspective on issues of environmental sustainability that occur regionally, but that arise because of global linkages, and raises novel questions about how such issues are and could be governed in a global architecture. We draw insights from existing literature on globally interconnected phenomena to advance our understanding of governing telecoupling toward environmental sustainability. We first identify and discuss five particular challenges that telecoupling poses to global environmental governance: knowledge deficits, divergent interests, high transaction costs of cooperation, the weak legitimacy base of current governance arrangements, and policy incoherence and fragmentation. Second, we review conceptual literature that meaningfully address the governance of telecoupling, while utilizing differing terminologies, for example, through reference to “flows,” “chains,” or “multiscalar” issues. Building on this, we elaborate on how currently debated governance approaches respond to the identified challenges. We conclude with a brief note on where we believe the discussion on governance of telecoupling stands, and where we see directions for future research.

中文翻译：

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治理全球电话耦合以实现环境可持续性

远程耦合构成了一类特殊的全球化环境问题，这些问题既不是本地累积的，也不是跨界的，也不涉及全球公地，而是由于远端区域之间的特定联系而产生的。诸如与全球商品链，废物流或迁移模式相关的此类远程耦合问题已受到全球土地变化科学学者的越来越多的关注。尽管治理研究主要研究了对这些问题的现有机构应对措施，但远程耦合为区域性环境可持续性问题开辟了一个以问题为导向的观点，这种问题是由于全球联系而产生的，并提出了有关此类问题的现状和可能的新问题。在全球架构中管理。我们从有关全球互连现象的现有文献中得出见解，以增进我们对治理电耦合的理解，以实现环境的可持续性。我们首先确定并讨论远程耦合对全球环境治理构成的五个特殊挑战：知识不足，利益分歧，合作交易成本高，当前治理安排的合法性基础薄弱以及政策不连贯和分散。其次，我们回顾概念文献，这些文献利用不同的术语，例如通过引用“流”，“链”或“多标量”问题，有意义地解决了电信耦合的治理问题。在此基础上，我们将详细阐述当前辩论的治理方法如何应对已确定的挑战。