The Lund Conference on Earth System Governance was held 9-11 October 2017 in Lund, Sweden. The conference was hosted by Lund University and jointly organised by the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), Department of Political Science and the Earth System Governance Project. The conference coincided with celebrations of the 350th Anniversary of Lund University which added extra festivity to the event.
Conference Streams
The 2017 Lund Conference on Earth System Governance addressed the overarching theme of ‘Allocation and Access in a Warming and Increasingly Unequal World’. This theme acknowledges the multiple crises faced across the world and the uneven distribution of their impacts. A recent report from Oxfam suggests that the richest 1% of the world’s population now has as much wealth as the rest of the other 99% combined. Similarly, climate change and the challenges of mitigation and adaptation are driving further inequalities across the world. In addition, climate change implies an unprecedented intergenerational dimension because of the long lags between emissions, on the one hand, and climate change impacts on the other. However, inequality is far more complex than simply wealth distribution and climate change impacts. Earth system governance must address the entire spectrum of environmental, social and political inequalities.
This leads to the fundamental questions of ‘who gets what, when, where and how’. Different disciplines refer to this challenge differently: lawyers speak of equity, economists of distribution, resource analysts of access, political scientists of fairness, and sociologists of social justice. In earth system governance research, we refer to this as the analytical problems of ‘allocation and access’. In this line of inquiry, we are particularly interested in outcomes, pathways and reallocation in governance. Given the clear impetus for a drastic change in earth system governance in the coming decades and the key challenges faced by many countries politically, socially and environmentally, matters of allocation and access will continue to be crucial questions in the coming decades.
The conference theme ‘Allocation and Access in a Warming and Increasingly Unequal World’ was addressed in five thematic streams:
- Environmental justice in earth system governance
- Conceptual understandings and progress
- Science and activism
- Theory and methodology
- Earth system governance in turbulent times
Hosts
- Lund University
Co-hosts & Sponsors
- Munk School of Global Affairs
- University of Toronto
- German Development Institute
Chairs
- Vasna Ramasar
For more information about the conference, please contact ipo@earthsystemgovernance.org.
