Achieving worldwide sustainable development remains the biggest challenge of the 21st century. Despite near-global consensus on the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, unresolved and politically contentious trade-offs between the goals have undermined implementation. Climate change exacerbates these challenges for social-ecological systems. The situation is particularly vexing for policymakers, who often have incomplete system knowledge about specific threats, but still bear responsibility for managing trade-offs between competing resource uses and avoiding dangerous thresholds, injustice, or other irreversible impacts. Despite burgeoning research on sustainability and resource governance, scholars have not yet systematically investigated how trade-offs are managed in practice, what governance practices are correlated with effective (or ineffective) management of complex trade-offs transcending multiple levels, scales, sectors, and time and how this knowledge can be deployed to break the political logjams that threaten to undermine global sustainability and climate goals. There is thus a critical need for rigorous, scholarly investigation of how complex multi-level trade-offs are managed in multi-actor, multi-interest governance systems. The overall objective is to fill existing methodological gaps to enable generalizable analysis of how governance systems address trade-off situations. The projects aims also to get new insights about governance arrangements for effective response to trade-off situations through studying three exemplary case studies of US and European UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
