GLOBIS is an international research consortium born for elaborating a theoretical foundation for reconciling globalisation, development and sustainable development.
Strengthened by the broad expertise-spectrum offered by the consortium participants, and combining a theoretical analysis with a series of case studies, GLOBIS has the ambition to go beyond the state-of-the-art understanding of the synergies and conflicts linking the three global processes.
GLOBIS is ongoing project, started in September 2009, the progresses will be available at http://www.lucsus.lu.se/globis
The Challenge:
Globalisation is often seen as a complex set of processes conflicting with the condition of sustainability. But if global sustainability challenges cannot be handled by the current system of independent nation states only, then how can globalisation be harnessed for promoting global sustainability?
Project Objectives:
The objectives are to: draw on and synthesize form from the scholarly debate in different disciplines into a theoretical foundation for reconciling the three global processes: globalisation, development and sustainable development. It is our ontological assumption that globalisation is an ongoing and in principle benign process that needs to be promoted and adjusted in relation to sustainable development. Development as an institutionalised process also needs to be carefully aligned with sustainability. Based on this comprehensive understanding we shall analyse how the global flows of financial capital, people, goods and ideas are promoted, restricted and regulated through a number of important policy areas, such as: trade, agriculture and food, energy, transport, technology and innovation, and tourism. This serves to identify the existing tensions in globalisation, recognising the trade-offs involved, and thus pointing to possible areas of reform in current policy practices and global institutions.
Methodology
The objectives will be met by critically reviewing and synthesising the debates on globalisation and sustainability. Based on such a understanding we carry out a number of thematic case studies of important policy areas, serving to unveil potential conflicts and synergies between globalisation and sustainable development. The project will engage stakeholders from different sectors of EU and beyond in dialogues on concrete policy dilemmas.
(Expected) Results
GLOBIS will primarily be important for formulation of long term strategies of sustainable development. The analysis and synthesis of the scholarly debates will result in consistent typologies of different views and perspectives on globalisation and sustainability. These typologies will be complemented by multi-criteria frameworks for practical advice to policy makers. The case studies, to a large extent based on modelling, will illustrate how globalisation may be harnessed to promote sustainability in a number of policy areas, such as energy, land use, transport and development assistance. These results will be important for policy makers at both EU and national levels. But they will also be potentially important for various nongovernmental policy processes.
The Partners
- LUCSUS – Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies
- CIRED/SMASH – Société de Mathématiques et de Sciences Humaines
- ISI – Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research
