Adopting an adaptive governance paradigm to advance climate law and policy in the MENA region

Supranational legal and policy frameworks on climate change and other sustainability issues for too long have been oriented towards a global governance paradigm developed in the early 1990s. Moreover, they have been informed and influenced by a neoliberal globalization discourse which gave rise to many of today's sustainability issues and the climate change phenomenon in the first place. Also, the bypassing of regional level legislation, policy frameworks, and socio-culturally appropriate design and instrumentation in favor of a "globalist" process of fragmented institutionalism, have contributed to a vacuum that has impeded regions such as the Middle East and Northern Africa to intensely and effectively address climate change and ensuing region-specific sustainability challenges. This chapter proposes a recalibration of legal and policy efforts at the MENA regional level, by adopting an adaptive governance paradigm that builds on local knowledge and participatory approaches.