2011 Colorado Conference on Earth System Governance: ‘Crossing Boundaries and Building Bridges’

The Colorado Conference on Earth System Governance was held 17-20 May 2011 on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. The conference was jointly hosted by the Environmental Governance Working Group and the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University along with the Earth System Governance Project.

Conference Streams

One of the most significant challenges of earth system governance is the need to create new types of linkages, crossing boundaries and building bridges to connect research on social and ecological processes operating across different scales, between the social and naturalsciences, and between scholars and practitioners working in the global North and South. The Colorado Conference advanced the Earth System Governance project’s research agenda by bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines as well as practitioners to address these linkage issues.

The conference was organized around four types of linkages that cut across the “5 As” at the core of the Earth System Governance Science Plan with the expectation that these discussions would open new and fruitful areas of research and collaboration on earth system governance. The four conference streams were:

1. Linking across Scale
2. Linking the Social and Natural Sciences
3. Linking Research to Practice
4. Linking the “5 A’s”

Hosts

• Environmental Governance Working Group, Colorado State Univerity
• School of Global Environmental Sustainability, Colorado State University
• Colorado State Unviersity

Sponsors

• Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies
• The Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership
• Department of Political Science, University of Oregon

Chairs

• Michele Betsill, Co-Chair, Colorado State University, USA
• Tony Cheng, Co-Chair, Colorado State University, USA
• Pete Taylor, Co-Chair, Colorado State University, USA