1. Introduction Progress in addressing many of the world's pressing problems, from poverty, climate change, public health, energy transitions, and biodiversity loss to stable economies and food security depends on effective scientifically-informed input into processes of governance (Biermann et al., 2012; Reid et al., 2010; UNEP, 2012). Yet, while these problems are global, solutions must be enacted locally through national or sub-national governance processes and structures. Understanding the connections and relationships between science and governance in the context of global environmental change looms large as we grow increasingly aware of the challenges ahead. Indeed, in 2012 the United Nations Environment Program released results of a foresight study which sought to identify 21 most important upcoming issues for the 21st century. Of the top five, four were concerned directly with gover-nance, human capabilities, science-policy relations, and social capacities for transformation (UNEP, 2012). All of these issues indicate the need for healthy, robust relationships between science and governance worldwide in order to address the many challenges of sustainability. The impetus for this study was the simple observation that the wide diversity of governance capacities around the world would likely affect how nations use (or do not use) research in addressing complex, science-dependent global environmental change issues. It is self-evident that relationships between research and governance would be different in Australia from those in Angola; but beyond obvious explanations for this, such as large differences in national income, there is surprisingly little analysis of what those differences may be, and how (H. Berry). ECOLEC-05043; No of Pages 7 they may affect capacities to anticipate and respond to global environmental change. As a policy science (Shi, 2004), ecological economics sits in this rela-tional space between the ecological and earth system sciences and the governance structures and processes through which decisions are made and actions are taken (Biermann and Gupta, 2011). Nadeau has recently characterized ecological economics as a field that is founded on the fundamental goal of establishing " …scientifically viable and equitable economic programs and public policies needed to effectively deal with the environmental crisis. " (Nadeau, 2015:106). To date, understanding these relationships between science and governance has most often been approached on a case-by-case basis (Daedlow). Institutional economics has been influential in helping to establish new or emerging modes of environmental governance (Paavola and Adger, 2005) that facilitate more productive relations between science and decision-making, including adaptive governance, networked governance, and transition management (for a recent overview , see Evans, 2012). Yet despite the breadth of scholarship in the general area, quantitative empirical analysis has been rare. While these studies are valuable and have established many of the challenges (and some successes) in facilitating productive connections between science and governance, we contend that they need to be situated within a broader, macro-level understanding of science-governance relations beyond the domains of environmental management , ecological economics, or sustainability. The application and uptake of environmental, social and policy sciences within countries are necessarily shaped by each nation's own stance toward the value and politics of science in governance and decision-making (Jasanoff, 2010), as well as their capacities to govern effectively. To contribute to this broader understanding, we sought to evaluate whether there are empirically discernible relationships between science and governance at the macro (global) scale; and, most importantly from the perspective of governing global environmental processes, how these relations might differ across countries, and how any diversity may be understood. To address these questions, we drew on publicly available country-level statistics to investigate two hypotheses: first, that governance performance and research and development (R&D) are related independently of national income levels. It is widely