The 2009 Amsterdam Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change was held 2-4 December 2009. This conference, the ninth event in the series of annual European Conferences on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, was the global launch event of the Earth System Governance Project.
Conference Streams
The Earth System Governance Project seeks to analyse the interrelated and increasingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change and earth system transformation. The notion of earth system governance describes an emerging social phenomenon – expressed in hundreds of international regimes, bureaucracies, national agencies, activists groups and expert networks – that engages numerous actors, institutions and networks at local and global levels. At the same time, earth system governance is a demanding and vital subject of research in the social sciences, which was reflected in lively discussions at the 2009 Amsterdam Conference. The challenge of earth system governance raises numerous theoretical, methodological and empirical questions, many of which are elaborated upon in detail in the 2009 Science and Implementation Plan of the IHDP Earth System Governance Project.
The 2009 Amsterdam Conference was organised around the five core analytical problems identified in this science plan:
- Architectures of Earth System Governance
- Agency in Earth System Governance
- Adaptiveness of Earth System Governance
- Accountability and Legitimacy in Earth System Governance
- Allocation and Access in Earth System Governance
- Theoretical and Methodological Foundations of Earth System Governance
Hosts
The conference was hosted jointly by the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Netherlands Research School for Socio-economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment (SENSE), in co-operation with their partner institutions: the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action on Transformation of Global Environmental Governance; GLOGOV.ORG—The Global Governance Project; the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies; Living with Water; LUCSUS—Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies; the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency; the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Stockholm Resilience Centre; and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
For more information about the conference, please contact ipo@earthsystemgovernance.org.
