Latest updates
The Earth System Governance Project brings together social scientists to advance knowledge at the interface between governance and global environmental change.
The Earth System Governance Project is pleased to announce the release of the Nijmegen Agenda, a…
We are delighted to announce that Prof. Frank Biermann, founder and inaugural chair of the Earth…
We are pleased to announce the release of the Earth System Governance Project 2023 Annual Report, which…
We are pleased to announce that submissions are now open for the Transformations Community/Earth System Governance…
What is The Nijmegen Agenda? The Nijmegen Agenda is a commitment to catalyzing transformative collaboration. It…
The 2024 Beskydy Workshop on the theme of “Nature-Based Governance: Coevolutionary and transformative perspectives on the…
Dear Network of the Earth System Governance Project, As the year draws to a close, we…
Science-policy interfaces for transformative change? Insights from our innovative session at the Earth System Governance conference…
The Earth System Governance journal is looking for reviewers! The Earth System Governance (ESG) journal is…
From the 22-27th October 2023, the Radboud Conference on Earth System Governance took place in Nijmegen,…
Introduction The Earth System Governance Research Alliance invites expressions of interest from universities and other research…
Do you wish to engage further in education on earth system governance or share resources with…
The Earth System Governance journal, established in 2018 as an open-access platform for research on governance…
At the mid-way point of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) implementation, the SDG Progress Report by the…
Authors: Yixian Sun, Nicki Schantz, Edoardo Eichberg, Taimiya Khalid and Michael Bloofield
Joyeeta Gupta, professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the University of Amsterdam…
The Oran R. Young Prize will be awarded for the tenth time at the 2023 Radboud Conference…
This call for papers seeks contributions exploring the relevance of the 'Planetary Health' concept within the…
Yves Zinngrebe, Ioannis Agapakis, Elsa Tsioumani, Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, Joanna Smallwood, Johannes Förster, Ulrike Tröger, Ina Lehmann,…
We would like to inform you of the recently initiated South-South Initiative of the Earth System Governance…
Devon Cantwell-Chavez, Jose Manuel Leal, Anne Bach Nielsen, and Marielle Papin About a year…
Please find below announcements of opportunities for scholars, some of which fall under Future Earth. As the…
The CALL FOR INPUTS for this year’s 10 New Insights in Climate Science is now open. This is an…
On January the 16th, 2023, the organizing team of the 2023 Radboud Conference on Earth System…
The Earth System Governance Journal is a flagship publication of the Earth System Governance Project. It…
The Call for Papers is now available for the 2023 Radboud Conference on Earth System Governance!…
A manifesto for ocean social science that emerged from an online workshop conducted at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical marine Research (ZMT) on Oct 4th 2022.
Egypt is hosting this year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh. The slogan of this year’s conference is ‘Together for Implementation’. However, by merely implementing existing pledges under the Paris Agreement, governments would certainly spell the death of the goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
Amid the changing autumn leaves, scholars from across the world met up in Toronto for the Earth System Governance Conference 2022, which took place from the 20th to the 24th of October. The world continues to rapidly change, as different challenges and crises arise and are dealt with on different governance levels. The challenge for this research community is to create knowledge on how to ensure that throughout all these changes, the sustainability transition continues to advance in a just way.
The global biodiversity and climate crises require urgent transformations towards sustainability. Doubting the ability of democracies to swiftly implement effective measures to address global environmental problems, some look to authoritarian measures in the hope these might be better suited to the task
How to govern just transitions while addressing climate change, reducing poverty and inequality, and implementing national agreements like the 2030 Agenda, all while adapting to the current geopolitical situation, is a conundrum that social sciences might just be able to help with.
After the September 1st registration deadline, the conference program team set to create the schedule for…
The Centre for Development Studies (CDS) and the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at Bath…
We are so looking forward to the ESG conference in 6 weeks in Toronto, Canada. If…
Can progress be made towards Sustainable Development Goals in the Netherlands when they are largely absent…
Registration for the 2022 Toronto Conference on Earth System Governance will close today for those looking…
We are delighted to announce that Tzeporah Berman will give the keynote address at the Opening Plenary at the 2022 Toronto Conference on Earth System Governance.
The Oran R. Young Prize will be awarded for the best paper authored by early-career scholars…
The Preliminary Book of Abstracts is now available to read online. This version comes in advance…
The future of trade is green, and the future of trade is African. But with the global economy increasingly shaped by geopolitical and climate imperatives, how can the continent best advance its development goals?
Human, animal and environmental health constitutes a critically important issue in relation to earth system governance,…
Two years into the decisive decade for humanity’s future on Earth, fundamental changes are needed if we are to shift onto a sustainable and resilient path, argue the authors of the study in Nature Sustainability.
Climate change can trigger a large influx of refugees, as expected. But according to Ingrid Boas…
Join the upcoming meeting organised for scholars interested in the linkages between technology, nature and biodiversity…
Please find updated information about registration, the venue and programme throughout the website!
Linda Westman, Rachel Macrorie & Marielle Papin write about 'Compound Urban Crises' and how interdisciplinary discussion…
We are delighted to invite you to the 2022 Toronto Conference on Earth System Governance, to…
We wish to inform you of an extended submission deadline for the 2022 Toronto Conference on…
The journal has been accepted for inclusion in Scopus and by Clarivate Web of Science. To celebrate, Elsevier is inviting submissions to the ESG Journal which will be exempt from a publishing fee, until the 30th of June 2022.
The climate crisis is fraught by unequal power dynamics, and dominant research practices can often reproduce these power relations. Here are five ways that individual researchers can aim to shift those power dynamics and adopt a decolonial approach to research.
Recent publications
We are pleased to announce the release of the Earth System Governance Project 2023 Annual Report, which highlights a year of…
We are delighted to present the twenty-second volume of Earth System Governance, the open-access journal for all those interested in…
We are delighted to present the twenty-first volume of Earth System Governance, the open-access journal for all those interested in…
We are delighted to present the twentieth volume of Earth System Governance, the open-access journal for all those interested in…
This Element develops a new Strategic Capabilities Framework for studying and steering complex socio-ecological systems. It is driven by the…
The mushrooming of trade agreements and their interlinkages with environmental governance calls for new research on the trade and environment…
Human societies increasingly interact with processes on a geological or even cosmic timescale. Despite this recognition, we still lack a…
Stimulus spending to address the economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to either facilitate the…
We are delighted to present the nineteenth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
Governments and companies have committed to achieving global biodiversity targets, including those defined by the Global Biodiversity Framework of the…
We are delighted to present the eighteenth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present the seventeenth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
Curious to know about the various parts of the Earth System Governance Project, and what has been achieved in 2022?…
What global shifts in markets and power mean for the politics and governance of sustainability. In recent years, major shifts…
We are delighted to present the sixteenth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present the fifteenth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present the fourteenth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
Just transition prompts us to explore a number of important dimensions of Earth System Governance research, including sustainability transformations, inequality,…
There is a complex interaction between pollution, climate change, the environment and people. This complex interplay of actions and impacts…
Global environmental negotiations have become central sites for studying the interaction between politics, power, and environmental degradation. This book challenges…
With the rapid destabilization, escalation and convergence of various environmental crises, global environmental politics is facing extreme turbulence. Tracing the…
Maintaining peace and conserving biodiversity hinge on an international system of cooperation codified in institutions, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…
The last few years have witnessed a flurry of activity in global governance and international lawseeking to address the protection…
Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the…
Billions of dollars are annually transferred to poor nations to help them adapt to the effects of climate change. This…
For many years, suggestions to 'geoengineer' the climate occupied a marginal role in climate change science and politics. Today, visions…
Connections between resources and migration operate as a complex adaptive system rather than being premised in linear, causal mechanisms. The…
The world today confronts unprecedented needs for governance having profound implications for human well-being that are difficult - perhaps impossible…
Carbon markets – both emission trading systems and baseline and credit systems – are an increasingly common policy instrument being…
In this Element, the authors develop an account of the role of behaviour change that is more political and social…
New technologies present significant opportunities to manage natural resources better and safeguard the environment. For instance, artificial intelligence (AI) is…
We are delighted to present the fifth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested in…
Five years of climate action and summitry have taught us valuable lessons. Orchestrators of climate action can positively influence performance by setting minimum requirements for credibility and robustness among the initiatives they engage.
Edited by Ingrid J. Visseren-Hamakers, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Marcel T. J. Kok, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
The Earth System Governance Project seeks to mobilise and advance scholarship at the interface between global environmental change and governance. Discover how by learning more about the project in this summary of 2021!
Tim Rayner, Sebastian Oberthür and Lukas Hermwille coordinated this special issue. The authors derived six major findings from the contributions…
The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development will take place between 2021 and 2030. It offers a…
Attending to the 'Cry of the Earth' requires a critical appraisal of how we conceive our relationship with the environment,…
The crises that cities face—such as climate change, pandemics, economic downturn, and racism—are tightly interlinked and cannot be addressed in…
Based on an interdisciplinary investigation of future visions, scenarios, and case-studies of low carbon innovation taking place across economic domains,…
The bioeconomy has been portrayed as a transformational change to replace fossil-based fuels and other goods such as plastics. It…
Bioeconomy has become fundamental for a post-fossil-resources society, in line with climate change mitigation ambitions. Although it does not have…
Brazil has continuously been in the international spotlight, first as an emerging economy improving social inclusion and sustainable development, then…
An investigation of the role of learning and its impact on policy change, as exemplified in European Union climate policy…
The Earth System Governance Project is the largest scholarly body in the world devoted to articulating governance of the Earth’s…
In light of growing pressure on forests benefit sharing is increasingly gaining attention as a governance approach to facilitating more…
Sustainable floating city development has recently gained increasing popularity as a serious solution to climate change threats and land scarcity…
This note provides an analysis of the judgment of the District Court of The Hague, Netherlands, in the case initiated…
This study argues that scholars and policy-makers need to understand environmental activists better to bridge the gap between growing activism…
This book provides an accessible overview of how efforts to combat climate change and social inequalities should be tackled simultaneously…
Negotiating parties to an environmental agreement can manage uncertainty by including flexibility clauses, such as escape and withdrawal clauses. This…
A widespread failure to recognize the social and political-economic causes of climate-related crises is an erasure of history that hides…
The concept of planetary justice has received increasing attention within the field of earth systems governance. Although a significant epistemic…
Highlights • Climate engineering presents a novel challenge for global environmental governance • Institutional and discursive structures co-shape global environmental…
A comprehensive study of the growth, potential, and limits of transnational eco-certification in China and the implications for other emerging…
Many forest-related problems are considered relevant today. One might think of deforestation, illegal logging and biodiversity loss. Yet, many governance…
Urban transitions and transformations research fosters a dialogue between sustainability transitions theory an inter- and transdisciplinary research on urban change…
Conspicuous interdisciplinary effort has been spent on addressing the consequences of climate change in a forward-looking way. The concept of…
The recent literature on intermediaries in urban sustainability transitions has studied their role as a translator between innovative niches and…
The elusive search for sustainable high seas fisheries: What role for an oceans governance approach?
The legal regime for the management of high seas fisheries has evolved extensively in the past decades, through the development…
There is a growing body of scholarship on the enabling conditions for energy transitions in various energy contexts globally. Transition…
Sustainable development requires that the climate system be stabilised between 1.5°C and 2°C of average global warming. This necessitates a…
The book features several Earth System Governance Scholars and is specifically intended to provide useful input to the COP26 process…
Institutions have a central role in climate change governance. But while there is a flourishing literature on institutions' formal rules,…
Cities worldwide face climate change and other complex challenges and strive to become more resilient to the shocks and stresses…
Emergency frames are mobilized in contemporary sustainability debates, both in response to specific events and strategically. The strategic deployment of…
As climate movements are growing around the world, so too is a postapocalyptic form of environmentalism. While apocalyptic environmentalism warns…
Deliberative democracy is well-suited to the challenges of governing in the Anthropocene. But deliberative democratic practices are only suited to…
In this timely book, leading scholar Oran Young reflects on the future of the global order. Developing new lenses through…
Gene Drive Organisms (GDOs) are a proposed biotechnological intervention that might generate significant benefits for the conservation and sustainable use…
If the Anthropocene is a rupture in planetary history, what does it mean for international environmental law? When the Earth…
Studies that focus on different urban governance structures, especially unitary states and semi-authoritarian regimes, are still lacking in the urban…
Various transformative and curative measures have been undertaken as part of the disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation programme…
There has been an upsurge in studies of flood risk governance (FRG): steering and decision-making by public and private actors…
Evidence shows that current adaptation planning approaches are not always successful in generating actionable knowledge to guide implementation on the…
A key challenge for effective, ongoing urban climate adaptation is to adapt institutions within urban governance. While an extensive foundation…
While innovative approaches to urban transformations are increasingly proposed, scholars often overlook challenges faced by endogenous actors (e.g. urban planners)…
Ecosystems play a potentially important role in sustainably reducing the risk of disaster events worldwide. Yet, to date, there are…
This book engages the reader in exploring the relationships between digital social innovation initiatives and the city. It delivers a…
Climate services, and research on climate services, have mutually developed over the past 20 years, with quality assessment a central…
Rapid and transformational actions are ever more urgently needed to achieve a just, resilient, and ecologically sustainable global society, as…
Our vision is to understand, imagine, and help realise just and sustainable futures by stimulating a pluralistic, vibrant and relevant…
The effort to address climate change cuts across a wide range of non-environmental actors and policy areas, including international economic…
The European Union (EU) has a hugely important effect on the way in which environmental policies are framed, designed and…
Measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic have indefinitely postponed in-person formal international negotiations for a new legally binding instrument under…
The governance of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) lacks a legal framework that would ensure the conservation…
Initiated in 2002, the International Environmental Agreements Data Base (IEADB) catalogs the texts, memberships, and design features of over 3,000…
International institutions are prevalent in world politics. More than a thousand multilateral treaties are in place just to protect the…
Global governance consists of elementary regimes that form regime complexes, which in turn give rise to what we call superclusters…
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are calling for developing and developed nations to strive to end inequality, promote universal access…
This forum piece discusses why multilateral spaces are key ‘sites’ for studying struggles over environmental knowledge and how Collaborative Event…
Over one hundred governments are currently negotiating a new legally binding instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of marine…
International scientific collaboration is vital for supporting global and regional measures to protect marine biodiversity in and beyond national jurisdiction…
Aim: Despite the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce climate change vulnerability…
Even though the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change introduced the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) framework as a novel…
The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific…
This article investigates the presence of domestic-international linkages in the Lithuanian mass media discourse on climate change. We apply the…
This paper examines the Global Climate Action Agenda (GCAA) and discusses options to improve sub‐ and non‐state involvement in post‐2020…
Transparency is increasingly central to multilateral climate governance. In this article, we undertake one of the first systematic assessments of…
The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate…
Earth's climate is in crisis. Climate governance has failed. This book diagnoses climate governance as if it were a sick…
Renewable energy (RE) is critical for curbing global greenhouse gas emissions to achieve 2 to 4 degrees of global warming…
This book presents a social science perspective on drought and water scarcity in the UK. It puts forward a narrative…
The São Paulo Macro Metropolis (SPMM) is one of the richest and most inequitable regions of the Global South and…
Highlights • Cities and urban areas face a strong adaptation imperative. • Collaborative approaches are vital for meeting urban adaptation…
A Seed Commons approach can help to highlight the common struggle of diverse seed initiatives in the Global North and…
The concept of Earth system science denotes a shift in the scientific discourse from disciplinary accounts of isolated components of…
There is increasing urgency for large-scale deployment of carbon-removal approaches to help avoid passing critical climatic thresholds. Given the severe…
At 50, the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar, 1971) has a mixed legacy. To survive and stay relevant in the Anthropocene,…
Institutions are failing in many areas of contemporary politics, not least of which concerns climate change. However, remedying such problems…
What is the future of ‘environmental’ policy in times of earth system transformations and the recognition of the ‘Anthropocene’ as…
Within post-structuralist discourse theory, there has been an ongoing interest in fantasy and the fantasmatic logic. We propose a new…
First developed in Earth system science, the idea of planetary boundaries has gradually spilled over into social science research in…
International institutions such as treaties and organizations shape, and are shaped by, the large web-like architecture of global governance. Yet…
To resolve arguments over what funding actually flows from developed to developing nations, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate…
A political ecology perspective on resource extraction and human security in Kenya, Bolivia and Peru
This paper analyzes how the governance of non-renewable natural resources affects different dimensions of human security in local sites of…
We are delighted to present the fifth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested in…
We are delighted to present the fifth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested in…
We are delighted to present the tenth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present the ninth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present the eighth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present the seventh volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present the sixth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present the fifth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
Multi-stakeholder partnerships have become an increasingly common form of global governance. Partnerships, usually between international organizations (IOs) or state agencies…
Who belongs to communities of justice in the Anthropocene? While Western and non-Western traditions alike have typically afforded legal recognition…
We are delighted to present the fourth volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
Global governance now provides people with recourse for harm through International Grievance Mechanisms, such as the Independent Accountability Mechanisms of…
Science and technological innovation wield unfathomable power in the shaping of social life and the environment. Yet, the democratic control…
As climate movements are growing around the world, so too is a postapocalyptic form of environmentalism. While apocalyptic environmentalism warns…
Traditional marine governance can create inferior results. Management decisions customarily reflect fluctuating political priorities and formidable special-interest influence. Governments face…
The effects of globalization on governance are complex and uncertain. As markets integrate, governments have become increasingly hesitant to enforce…
This volume examines environmental law and governance in the Pacific, focusing on the emerging challenges this region faces. The Pacific…
Indonesia: Human rights, persons with disabilities, and the politics of disaster displacement in post-eruption Mt. Sinabung. in Matthew Scott and…
This paper contributes to the study of climate change and environmental justice with a particular focus on a Global South…
The paper presents a discussion on the water crisis that occurred between 2013 and 2015 in the Metropolitan Region of…
Access to water has been recognized as an international human right at least since 2010, when both the United Nations…
Policy feedback research faces a potential pivot point owing to recent theoretical and substantive advances. Concerted attention now spans new…
Calls to advance the democratization of sustainable development negotiations have recently proliferated. However, the participatory schemes set up by international…
Societies at large still grapple to categorize digital space as a phenomenon. At the same time, scientists and developers are…
When addressing complex societal problems, public regulation is increasingly complemented by private regulation. Extant literature has provided valuable insights into…
Private regulatory programs, such as certification schemes, seek to control market access by providing greater certainty about products' credence attributes,…
Transnational private sustainability governance, such as eco‐certification, does not operate in a regulatory or jurisdictional vacuum. A public authority may…
Bioenergy is a building block of the ongoing transformation toward renewables-based energy systems. Bioenergy supply chains are regionally embedded and…
Climate-related Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) have gained prominence. Scholars have discussed their effects, including their capacity to generate novelties. Yet,…
Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) are increasing in size, scope and number on the global arena. They reflect a tendency for…
'Climate Change and Human Mobility’ in Shahabuddin, M (ed), Bangladesh and International Law. This book is the first-ever comprehensive analysis…
This book examines whether a global consensus is emerging on climate change and human mobility and presents evidence of a…
In August 2019, an oil spill incident washed the coast in Brazil affecting some of the country’s most visited and…
The concept of urban resilience, particularly through a systems framework, has advanced tremendously over the past decade. Relatedly, collaborative and…
Given the available scientific understanding regarding the environmental impacts of everyday behaviors, individuals should be both concerned and motivated to…
Land use change is a pressing concern for the livelihoods of people in tropical developing countries. Changes in land use…
Following the landmark Paris agreement, policy makers are under pressure to adopt policies that rapidly deliver deep, society-wide decarbonisation. Deep…
In 2009, a group of 29 scholars argued that we can identify a set of “planetary boundaries” that humanity must…
We are in the middle of a planetary crisis that urgently requires stronger modes of earth system governance. At the…
An interdisciplinary analysis of human interactions with mercury through history that sheds light on efforts to promote and achieve sustainability…
There is a significant deficit of ‘ecological integrity’ in contemporary climate change governance, defined as explicit recognition of the mismatch…
Bringing a unique perspective to the burgeoning ethical and legal issues surrounding the presence of artificial intelligence in our daily…
Climate change is dramatically shifting the way cities interpret and live with their local climate. This paper analyses how climate…
Urban resilience has become a popular notion among urban policymakers and scientists, as a way to deal with the many…
Visualizations are influential in the interaction between environmental science and policy. Research on framing in environmental visualizations (visual framing) is…
The conventional view of transparency is that it is a critical tool to combat corruption and ensure the democratic accountability…
Transparency in environmental governance is no longer an uncontroversial answer to problems of accountability and effectiveness. How to design effective…
Recent debates about the concept of planetary boundaries recall longstanding concerns about whether ecological limits are compatible with ecological democracy…
Concepts of ecological and environmental democracy seek to reconcile two normative ideals: ensuring environmental sustainability while safeguarding democracy. These ideals…
Climate change might be considered as the greatest threat to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Africa…
This study develops options for the German government to improve international soil governance in the short, medium and long term…
The publication of our article “Introducing the dilemma of societal alignment for inclusive and responsible research and innovation” (Ribeiro et…
This book presents an overview of the field of environmental law and policies within the European Union, from theoretical foundations…
In light of growing urgency in tackling the global environmental crisis, there is a need for new visions and strategies…
Africa might not achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) because climate change will exacerbate poverty and inequality in the region…
This article investigates the stringency of EU climate and energy governance along the soft-hard continuum as a key determinant of…
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the changes to European Union (EU) climate and energy law brought about by…
Five years after adoption of the 2030 Agenda, there is a general lack of progress in reaching its Sustainable Development…
Combating climate change and transitioning to fossil-free energy are two central and interdependent challenges facing humanity today. Governing the nexus…
The complexity of human-environment interactions in coastal areas represent management challenges, especially in the beach environment, important for its ecosystem…
Spaces for civil society participation within intergovernmental negotiations on sustainability have multiplied since the 1992 Earth Summit. Such participatory spaces…
'The catastrophic conditions of the 2019/2020 fire season in Australia made global headlines. The ocean conditions for marine biodiversity are…
Geoengineering technologies are by definition only effective at scale, and so international policy development of some sort will be unavoidable…
In the Anthropocene, legal thinking is challenged to re-envision the ‘human' position vis-à-vis the ‘natural' ‘environment'. To map this challenge,…
Cities are playing an ever more important role in the mitigation and adaption to climate change. This book examines the…
We are delighted to present the third volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been heralded as a landmark achievement and a major opportunity for transformative and inclusive…
This Special Issue on 'Access and Allocation in Earth System Governance', edited by Prof. Joyeeta Gupta and Dr. Louis Lebel,…
Environmental Justice: Key Issues is the first textbook to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview of environmental justice, one of…
This paper critically explores the construction and diffusion of the socio-technical imaginary of crowdsourcing for public governance in Europe via…
This paper investigates the emergence of informal planning practices and their relationship with the new geometries of power and responsibility…
Studies on stability and change in modes of environmental governance often remain implicit regarding the conceptualisation, nature and causes of…
Environmental rights are a category of human rights necessarily central to both democracy and effective earth system governance (any environmental-ecological-sustainable…
Global institutions are afflicted by severe democratic deficits, while many of the major problems facing the world remain intractable. Against…
This book provides a comprehensive understanding of environmental regionalism at the international level, analyzing the concept and identifying recurring patterns…
The uncertainty language framework used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is designed to encourage the consistent characterization…
Sustainable Development Goal 7 and the Paris Agreement reiterate the importance of a worldwide uptake of renewable energy. However, the…
This article discusses how the dictatorial government of General Emilio Garrastazu Médici used symbolic elements as the basis for the…
In this article Lead Faculty member Prof. Heike Schroeder discusses the following in the Introduction: 'Almost 15 years have passed…
As climate change impacts become increasingly apparent, adaptation becomes increasingly urgent. Accordingly, adaptation to climate change has shifted towards the…
In this article, Senior Research Fellow Dr. Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer, discusses [...]! 'For reasons I have elsewhere explained, I…
The Report includes information about: the vibrant and successful 2019 Oaxaca Conference on Earth System Governance, the first in its kind…
Can private standards bring about more sustainable production practices? This question is of interest to conscientious consumers, academics studying the…
This book introduces the idea of anthroponomy – the organization of humankind to support autonomous life – as a response…
Achieving food security worldwide raises a number of issues with regard to the distribution of global resources. On the one…
In the context of Brazil's rising energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we develop a forward-looking analysis of the domestic renewable…
The rapid development of digital technologies such as blockchain and distributed ledger-based systems holds transformative potential for the financial sector…
Wildness was once integral to our ancestor’s lives as they struggled to survive in an unpredictable environment. Today, most of…
The main research objective is to determine the impact of Europeanisation on the nature protection system in the countries of…
What is the impact of sustainability certification on food security in developing countries? This article explores the issue through a…
There is a need for enterprises to incorporate information on the environment into decision making and to take action on…
With the growth of data, data-intensive approaches for sustainability are becoming widespread and have been endorsed by various stakeholders. To…
Cities face increasing risks due to climate change, and many cities are actively working towards increasing their climate resilience. Climate…
Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when…
This article provides an analysis of the Dutch Supreme Court judgment in the Mothers of Srebrenica case, placing it in…
Jure Vidmar (Ed.). European Populism and Human Rights (International Studies in Human Rights, Volume 130) 72–91. This volume focuses on…
Persistent ecological and socio-economic impacts from the expansion of industrial monocultures in the tropics have raised land use sustainability to…
Despite a renaissance of policy design thinking in public policy literature and a renewed interest in agency in the policy…
This article approaches the theme of climate change adaptation in Brazil and the need for interaction between an agenda of…
Agricultural commodity production in the Global South is accompanied by a range of social and environmental problems ranging from pollution…
Ensuring sustainability of earth systems is intrinsically dependent on the incorporation of equity and fairness in the regimes and institutions…
Redesigning food production and consumption is key to limiting global warming, soil erosion and biodiversity loss. Yet, transforming the food…
In this article, we link NGO-supplied drinking water infrastructure projects with collective action development approaches. Although governing local, shared drinking…
Rather than committing exclusively to one drinking water option, households in Bangladesh often use a portfolio of sources that, in…
This paper investigates the perspectives of a set of actors devoted to development in the Pacific on climate change, migration,…
At a time of significant concern about the sustainability of the global economy, businesses are eager to display responsible corporate…
Large scale research programmes and networks are an increasingly prominent feature of global change and sustainability research. They aim to…
In this review, we take stock of the last decade of research on climate change governance in urban areas since…
hat is a robust theoretical alternative to nationalism? For many seasoned cosmopolitan thinkers the answer is internationalism, which is generally…
This article makes the case for an 18th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on animal health, welfare and rights. We have…
Global Environmental Politics provides a comprehensive introduction to the key concepts, theories, methods, and debates in environmental politics. The authors'…
How the environmental provisions in US preferential trade agreements affect both the environmental policies of trading partners and the effectiveness…
Private sector actors both enable and inhibit sustainability-oriented policies at multiple scales. Yet, research on business sustainability predominantly emphasizes large…
In this paper, we attempt to contribute to understanding the concept of ‘planetary justice.’ Rather than advancing a specific philosophical…
The study of planetary justice is an emerging research field that explores questions of justice on a planetary scale, particularly…
This article sets out the case for an international treaty to phase out the mining and burning of coal—a Coal…
Solar geoengineering appears capable of reducing climate change and the associated risks. In part because it would be global in…
Changes in political, social and environmental arenas increase challenges for complex policy processes. However, areas of public policy are dominated…
In this paper we develop a conceptual framework to empirically analyse conceptualizations of ‘justice’ in the context of profound transformations…
From the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke to the United Nations Charter, the sovereign state has formed the…
The current commitments under the Paris Agreement are not enough to achieve the 1,5 °C target. Even if states comply with…
It is widely accepted that the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends on effective governance arrangements. However,…
Taking point of departure in the ambitious framework for ‘safe and just operating spaces’ for social-ecological systems, this paper explores…
We are delighted to present here the second volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
We are delighted to present here the second volume of Earth System Governance, the new open-access journal for all those interested…
The modern era is facing unprecedented governance challenges in striving to achieve long-term sustainability goals and to limit human impacts…
Contemporary Climate Change Debates is an innovative new textbook which tackles some of the difficult questions raised by climate change. For…
Since their emergence in the 1970s, human rights relating to environmental protection have spread all over the world and continue…
Recent assessments of the international community’s ability to hold the increase of global average temperature to well below 2°C, while…
Coral reefs are highly vulnerable to the impacts of rising marine temperatures and marine heatwaves. Mitigating dangerous climate change is…
More information about this article here
In Van der Heijden, Jeroen, Harriet Bulkeley, and Chiara Certomà (Eds.). Urban Climate Politics. Agency and Empowerment. Earth System Governance…
Since 2017, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute has, together with academic partners, been conducting a regional thematic study on displacement in…
The Anthropocene as a new planetary epoch has brought to the foreground the deep-time interconnections of human agency with the…
How will the Paris Agreement drive countries to address climate change? One expectation of the Agreement is that transparency will…
By opening a new dialogue between scholars of public policy and those of public administration, Climate Policy in Denmark, Germany,…
A double intergenerational conundrum abounds in sustainability science as young generations of researchers have relatively little influence on current strategic…
The Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance provides a state-of-the-art review of core debates and contributions that offer a more normative, critical,…
In Climate Change at Sea: Interactions, Impacts and Governance, edited by P.G. Harris. More information about the article available here
In Climate Change at Sea: Interactions, Impacts and Governance, edited by P.G. Harris. More information about the article available here
Climate Change and Ocean Governance brings together authors from political science and cognate disciplines to examine the political and policy…
As the effects of climate change grow more severe, millions of people in the United States and around the world…
This contribution explores how climate-vulnerable states can effectively use the law to force action in order to address loss and…
The last decade has witnessed an increasing focus on the relationship between climate change and human rights. Several international human…
his paper analyses the conditions set by international and European water law to assure “meaningful” public participation in transboundary water management. At…
Equity across Generations in International and Domestic Water Law in Cottier, Thomas, Shaheeza Lalani and Clarence Siziba (Eds.), Intergenerational Equity:…
Ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water for all by 2030 is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in…
The right to a remedy is central to a human rights approach to climate change. However, a range of obstacles…
Managed retreat—the purposeful, coordinated movement of people and assets out of harm's way—is a controversial and often overlooked adaptation tool…
The successful implementation of the Paris Agreement requires substantial energy policy change on the national level. In national energy policy-making,…
In A Research Agenda for Climate Justice, edited by P.G. Harris. More details about the book and the article are available…
In A Research Agenda for Climate Justice, edited by P.G. Harris. More information about the book and the article available here
From 2013 to 2015, Brazil faced a severe water crisis that led 1,485 out of its 5,561 municipalities to declare…
Despite the prominence of exogenous factors in theories of policy change, the precise mechanisms that link such factors to policy…
This article conducts a population-level analysis of transnational private governance organizations (TPGOs) that develop standards for sustainable commodity production in…
Transnational private governance schemes, like other global rule-making arenas, are confronted with the challenges of North-South imbalances. Through their standards…
While scholars have researched transnational private governance for over two decades, we still know little about some of the specific…
Few studies have examined transnational actors involved in global adaptation governance, despite their growing influence. This paper focuses on 100…
In Davies, Thomas (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of NGOs and International Relations. More details about the book and the article are…
The aim of this article is to assess the efficacy of the Paris Agreement to generate policies and incentivize actions…
To what extent are decisions regarding Chinese investment in Africa motivated by environmental factors? A considerable body of work has…
Motivation Should the process of forcibly evicting people from customary land be classified as a ‘disaster'? Some international organizations and…
Climate justice is now an established area of scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries. However, despite the work of governments, activists…
Even in countries with high capacity to adapt to climate change, when future-oriented adaptation narratives are neither explicit nor common,…
The European Union (EU) has sought to establish itself as a global environmental leader but was hit by the combined…
In search for sustainability of the oceans, the concept of resilience arises as a necessary perspective from which to analyse…
Global environmental challenges are increasingly complex and interdependent and the sentiment that sustainability requires new approaches to integrating science and…
In an increasingly interconnected world, leakage—broadly understood as unintended displacement of impacts caused by an environmental policy intervention—has become a…
Over the past three decades, policy integration has become a key objective for guiding and harmonizing policies for sustainable development…
The international community has come together to pursue certain fundamental, common goals over the coming period to 2030 to make…
Non-state and subnational actors active in sustainability transitions have increased considerably in recent years. However, the term “non-state actors” is…
Emerging economies such as Indonesia are among the highest greenhouse gas emitters in the world and are global environmental drivers…
Since the 1980s, central governments have decentralized forestry to local governments in many countries of the Global South. More recently,…
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is one of the most advanced global climate governance arrangements and we…
Societal transformations are needed across the globe in light of pressing environmental issues. This need to transform is increasingly acknowledged in…
The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework presents a window of opportunity to increase its ambition level and for improving the effectiveness…
Negotiations have started on a new global framework for biodiversity. In 2020, in Beijing, a new international biodiversity framework will…
Non‐state and sub‐national actors (e.g. cities, regions and companies) are increasingly taking action to address biodiversity loss. They set up…
Welcome to Earth System Governance – the new open-access journal for all those interested in the study of institutions, political processes and…
In September 2018, following over a decade of informal discussions, the United Nations General Assembly launched an intergovernmental conference to…
The Earth System Governance Project as a network organization: a critical assessment after ten years
The social sciences have engaged since the late 1980s in international collaborative programmes to study questions of sustainability and global…
The 2015 Paris Agreement established a new logic for international climate governance: the pledge-and-review system. In 2009, the same idea…
Since the 1990s, a burgeoning literature has emerged on the politics and governance of urban climate. It is now evident…
Pressing sustainability challenges reinvigorate calls for scientific actors to strengthen their profile as change agents. Focusing on the urban context,…
In post-Paris climate governance, the old mantra that ‘mitigation is global; adaptation is local’ (see Burton 2011, p. 481) is…
Despite the increasing relevance of cross-border flows of goods, capital and people in shaping risks and opportunities today, we still…
Transnational climate governance has mainly been preoccupied with climate change mitigation, both in practice and as studied in academic literature…
Climate change adaptation is increasingly seen as a question that involves globally connected vulnerabilities and impacts which necessitate transboundary action…
Climate change is among the world’s most important problems, and solutions based on emission cuts or adapting to new climates…
Cities are key in climate mitigation and adaptation, and they have developed into sites of innovative urban climate governance that…
In this Perspective, we discuss whether in times of quickly proceeding global environmental change, radical global interventions like “climate engineering”…
In debates of climate action, low carbon development has been widely advocated as an opportunity arising from climate change. This…
Gene drives are genetic modifications designed for rapidly diffusing traits throughout a target population. They are currently being proposed as…
Although the relationship between public policies and disaster risk is apparent, its nature is not so evident. The dominant model,…
The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the…
What would it mean to conceptualize some environmental relationships as bundles of rights, rather than as a good as generally…
Ecological economics arose as a normative transdiscipline aiming to generate knowledge and tools to help transition the economy toward a…
This Perspective examines some of the most significant changes in the renegotiated North America Free Trade Agreement and the implications…
While the focus of earth system governance is on the human-social aspects of Earth system changes, law has played a…
This article takes stock of the evolution of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through the prism…
The idea of institutional diagnostics has sparked considerable interest over the last twenty years, especially among those seeking to assess…
Welcome to Earth System Governance – the new open-access journal for all those interested in the study of institutions, political…
Numerous recent studies project that ‘climate engineering’ technologies might need to play a major role in the future. Such technologies…
The 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development offers a unique framework for transformative pathways towards sustainability worldwide. The 2030 Agenda also…
Coined barely two decades ago, the Anthropocene has become one of the most influential and controversial terms in environmental policy…
Digitalization, genome editing and synthetic biology are presently leading to fundamental changes in the field of biotechnology. At the same…
An examination of whether accountability mechanisms in global environmental governance that focus on monitoring and enforcement necessarily lead to better…
Highlights New relationships are needed in order to co-produce knowledge to tackle global challenges. Sharing knowledge across different ontologies can…
Earth System Governance Science Plan 2018 (pdf)
It is well known that the Paris Agreement aims to keep climate change – perhaps the greatest current challenge to…
Global Environmental Governance gives the perspectives of small states on some of the most important issues of the anthropocene, from…
This exciting book series provides concise but authoritative studies of the governance of complex socio-ecological systems, written by world-leading scholars…
Floods continue to hit many countries, both less developed and industrialized, bringing human suffering and immense economic damage (see floodobservatory. colorado.edu/). Hurricane Florence…
The Earth System Governance Science and Implementation Plan sets out the agenda for the next decade of earth system governance research. It…
Land-use intensification in agrarian landscapes is seen as a key strategy to simultaneously feed humanity and use ecosystems sustainably, but…
Climate change remains a challenge that needs to be addressed at its core, particularly the rapid reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse…
Accelerating sustainable energy transitions away from carbon-based fuel sources needs to be high on the agendas of developing countries. It…
Technologies for Solar Radiation Management (SRM) could limit global warming by manipulating the Earth’s radiation balance. A major objection to…
Global change and sustainability research increasingly focusses on informing and shaping societal transformations towards more sustainable futures. Doing so, researchers…
Fossil fuel subsidies strain public budgets, and contribute to climate change and local air pollution. Despite widespread agreement among experts…
Analysis of social media using digital methods is a flourishing approach. However, the relatively easy availability of data collected via…
The large share of carbon emitted by energy-intensive industries in the extraction and processing of basic materials must be limited…
Some scientists suggest that it might be possible to reflect a portion of incoming sunlight back into space to reduce…
In countries marked by the growing uptake of non-state market driven (NSMD) governance for agricultural commodities (i.e., eco-labels and certification…
This article is premised on three specific and interrelated notions that (a) the reduction of the use of pesticides will…
Promises of North-South financial transfers play a significant role in international climate negotiations. In particular, financial assistance to help developing…
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the full Agenda 2030 in which they are embedded are aspirational and intended to…
This special issue seeks to expand our understanding of the complex interlinkages between the politics and governance of the global…
This article begins by situating forest certification within a broader set of forest governance institutions and innovations. It then examines…
Reflexivity – the capacity of an agent, structure or process to change in the light of reflection on its performance…
The Project for Advancing Climate Transparency (PACT) consortium supports the design and development of robust and effective transparency and accountability…
The Development Team of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus Knowledge-Action Network issued the Research and Engagement Plan in March 2018 to shape and guide…
There are currently no widely accepted procedures for comparing the performance of global environmental assessments (GEAs) and this may be a barrier…
The article explores key aspects of the modalities and procedures of the Committee to facilitate implementation and promote compliance under…
Climate change governance is in a state of enormous flux. New and more dynamic forms of governing are appearing around…
Report from the early career researchers workshop “Developing a Career in Earth System Governance: Opening Up Science”, held prior to…
UNGA Resolution 69/292 requires that the development of an international legally binding instrument (ILBI) for the conservation and sustainable use…
India has been central to the international climate order since the beginning of the climate change negotiations in 1992, especially…
Analyses of climate engineering (CE) governance have accelerated in the last decade. A key claim is that CE remains a…
In this article, we outline the multifaceted roles played by non‐state actors within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate…
The US has voluntarily ceded global leadership on climate action by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. China now leads…
The Paris Agreement of 2015 marks a formal shift in global climate change governance from an international legal regime that…
The Paris Agreement's aspirational 1.5 degree temperature target has given further impetus to efforts to imagine (and seek to govern)…
Editorial introduction The Paris Agreement (PA) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) aims at holding the…
Increasingly, marine renewable energy developments are viewed as an opportunity to meet climate change obligations, with the added benefit of…
This book considers the environmental policies that the EU employs outside its borders. Using a systematic and coherent approach to…
Several scholars concerned with global policy-making have recently pointed to a reconfiguration of authority in the area of climate politics…
Carbon markets are developing and expanding around the world, but how and to what extent is their design shaped by…
Numerous regimes regulating access to genetic resources and the sharing of the benefits arising out of their utilization have sprung up…
Current environmental problems are often extremely complex, uncertain, and affecting multiple actors and institutions across sectors and scales. Earth System…
The United States’ decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement (pending possible re-engagement under different terms) may have significant ramifications…
Constraining global climate change to 1.5°C is commonly understood to require urgent and deep societal transformations. Yet such transformations are…
The Horn of Africa region stands out amongst the planet's territories that are most volatile and vulnerable to armed violence…
Climate change places major transformational demands on modern societies. Transformations require the capacity to collectively envision and meaningfully debate realistic…
Over the last two decades, scholars have developed an increasingly sophisticated range of approaches to studying the complex relationship between…
Marine energies (ME), including offshore hydcrocarbons along with marine renewable energies (MRE), such as offshore wind, wave and tidal energy,…
Adaptation to a changing climate is unavoidable. Mainstreaming climate adaptation objectives into existing policies, as opposed to developing dedicated adaptation…
Concern about humanity's impact on the planet has never been greater, but what are the drivers of environmental change? This…
The Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs are an ambitious step towards sustainable development, taking a much broader view of sustainability…
Climate change is increasingly a part of the human experience. As the problem worsens, the cooperative dilemma that the issue…
This book examines cooperation on shared environmental concerns across national boundaries in the Southern Cone region of South America, specifically…
The past few years have witnessed the emergence of a plethora of transnational climate governance experiments. They have been developed…
Much of the literature in the field of international relations is currently concerned with the changing patterns of authority in…
During the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations consulted worldwide nearly ten million people for their views. Such proliferating megaconsultations are often uncritically accepted as a remedy for an assumed democratic deficit of intergovernmental institutions. We argue, however, that the potential of civil society consultations to democratize global governance is constrained by the limited…
Report of SynLink SDGs workshop - Research and Action Framework for Synergistic Scientific and Institutional Linkages between the SDG Targets, held March 5th…
In the last decade, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has moved from a strong focus on mitigation…
The effectiveness and influence of solutions oriented global environmental assessments (SOAs) rests on their legitimacy. Based on the GEA literature…
The term inclusive development has emerged in the 21st century and has been adopted in a series of scholarly and…
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations present a novel approach to global governance where goal-setting features…
Notwithstanding the territoriality of sovereign states and other claims to private property, Earth’s biosphere is a public space. Its protection…
Democracy and Climate Change explores the various ways in which democratic principles can lead governments to respond differently to climate change…
Realising the aspirations of the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) to reduce inequality, limit ecological damage, and secure resilient livelihoods is…
Over the past decades, numerous science institutions have evolved around issues of global sustainability, aiming to inform and shape societal…
Mindmade Politics takes a novel, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex and contentious dynamics of global climate politics. Manjana Milkoreit…
This article is part of Environmental Politics Special Issue: Non-State Actors in the New Landscape of International Climate Cooperation (Environmental…
This article is part of Environmental Politics Special Issue: Non-State Actors in the New Landscape of International Climate Cooperation (Environmental…
This article is part of Environmental Politics Special Issue: Non-State Actors in the New Landscape of International Climate Cooperation (Environmental…
This article is part of Environmental Politics Special Issue: Non-State Actors in the New Landscape of International Climate Cooperation (Environmental…
This article is part of Environmental Politics Special Issue: Non-State Actors in the New Landscape of International Climate Cooperation (Environmental…
This article is part of Environmental Politics Special Issue: Non-State Actors in the New Landscape of International Climate Cooperation (Environmental…
Over the past 40 years, countries throughout the world have similarly adopted human rights related to environmental governance and protection…
This book is a unique, transdisciplinary summary of the state of the art of disaster risk reduction (DRR) in Indonesia…
In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as part of the 2030 Agenda for…
Multi-institutional governance architectures are increasingly common in world politics, yet how do they evolve over time? This book develops a…
This article is part of Environmental Politics Special Issue: Non-State Actors in the New Landscape of International Climate Cooperation (Environmental…
Sustainability Science is an emerging, transdisciplinary academic field that aims to help build a sustainable global society by drawing on…
Indigenous knowledge (IK) is now recognized as being critical to the development of effective, equitable and meaningful strategies to address…
World leaders at the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in New York have re- confirmed the relevance of sustainability…
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that, as part of its mission, sustainability science can change the way planners…
The onset of the Anthropocene, an era in which human actions have become major drivers of change on a planetary…
Gold mining can be a dirty business. It creates immense amounts of toxic materials that are difficult to dispose of…
We are pleased to introduce the second special issue from Challenges in Sustainability, this time as a part of the…
Nonstate and subnational climate governance activities are proliferating. Alongside them are databases and registries that attempt to calculate their contributions…
This article discusses challenges to accountability in the context of transnational climate governance. It argues that the emergence of a…
How are nonstate actors within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held to account? In this article,…
A growing global trend of judicializing environmental policy has been received with optimism, and in the context of democracies in…
This special issue of Review of Policy Research centers on the question of accountability in environmental governance. The idea for…
This article investigates the relationship between urban gardening and planning by building upon the results of field research on gardening…
This book presents a vibrant study of the rise, decline, and transformation of environmental thinking. The author’s analysis moves from…
Early European Union (EU) gender research focused primarily on policy areas that were directly relevant to women, e.g., regarding their…
The unilateral use of technologies for counteracting global warming is regarded as a threat by decision-makers, academics and the wider…
At COP21 in Paris, governments reiterated the importance of ‘non-Party’ contributions, placing big bets that the efforts of cities, regions,…
Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations)…
Diversity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are now recognized as vital to tackling wicked problems such as those presented by a changing…
Targets are widely employed in environmental governance. In this paper, we investigate the construction of the 2 °C climate target, one…
Ecological or ecosystemic reflexivity involves the capacity of social-ecological systems to reconfigure themselves in response to reflection on their performance…
The notion of ‘transformations towards sustainability’ takes an increasingly central position in global sustainability research and policy discourse in recent…
2015 has marked a shift in stand for the world’s largest and third largest (in aggregate terms) greenhouse gas (GHG)…
Is the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change destined to succeed or doomed to fail? If all the pledges embedded…
This Special Feature on “Making the SDGs Succeed” suggests that the SDGs are an opportunity to permanently transform the nature…
The theory of deliberative democracy is here furthered in terms of three images that locate its essence in respectively a…
The way that the media reports and comments on key events in the fragmented global climate governance landscape is one…
Read a related blog-post by the authors at the ACTS blog Emerging climate change regimes, such as the mechanism for reducing…
The 2009 Copenhagen summit was a watershed moment in the history of climate change negotiations, especially from an Indian perspective…
Commercial cultivation of kiwifruit in New Zealand is concentrated in a relatively small area of the North Island. Cultivation is…
To keep the global average temperature from rising further than 2°C, emissions must peak soon and then fall steeply.This book…
Responding to climate change has become an industry. Governments, corporations, activist groups and others now devote billions of dollars to…
This article analyzes the increasing institutional and organizational complexity and fragmentation surrounding the international financing mechanism REDD+ (reducing emissions from…
Implementing the SDGs requires reliance on expert advice. The nature of the sustainability challenge requires a new form of expert…
Marine ecosystems are a rich source of biodiversity, and healthy oceans are integral to the well-being of the ecosystem. Marine…
The recent shift from the Millennium Development Goals to the much broader Sustainable Development Goals has given further impetus to…
Today, many of the world’s river and lake basins are threatened by environmental problems such as change in river flow,…
Climate change presents a large, complex and seemingly intractable set of problems that are unprecedented in their scope and severity…
As a result of the United Nations (UN) climate negotiations in Warsaw in 2013, all countries were invited to submit…
Humanity’s collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our…
Climate change is already a reality. The latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that global…
On 26 and 27 September 2011 the Institute for European Studies (IES) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) and the…
Report of the third AGEG workshop, held as part of an international collaboration of leading scholars in the sub‐field of…
The term Anthropocene denotes a new geological epoch characterized by the unprecedented impact of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems…
The ‘Anthropocene’ is now being used as a conceptual frame by different communities and in a variety of contexts to…
This Info Note summarizes the findings of a study, coordinated by the Earth System Governance Foundation, on the substantive and…
Understanding which ministries represent their countries at the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conferences of the…
After nearly a quarter century of international negotiations on climate change, we stand at a crossroads. A new set of…
This report describes, evaluates, and reflects upon the activities of the Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching (ReSET) Project “Governance…
The European Union has long portrayed itself as an international leader on climate change. In this book, the first systematic…
Over the last two decades researchers have come to understand much about the global challenges confronting human society (e.g. climate…
Highlights We observe leaders and laggards among Gulf Cooperation Council states in renewable energy adoption Variation indicators are share of…
Dominant notions of adaptation to climate change are coming under increased scrutiny for their technocratic implications and depoliticising tendencies. Considering…
Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is…
In this book, Walter Baber and Robert Bartlett explore the practical and conceptual implications of a new approach to international…
This briefing paper proposes a Global Framework for Climate Action (GFCA), a comprehensive and collaborative programme to build advantageous linkages…
Cities, and the built environment more broadly, are key in the global response to climate change. This groundbreaking book seeks…
Project Chair Professor Frank Biermann provides insights into the Earth System Governance Project’s current activities, including the broadening of its…
The 2014 Conference of the Parties (COP 12) for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will be a crucial meeting…
The global environmental change (GEC)-cities nexus has been one of START’s primary thematic focus areas for knowledge development in recent…
A revised version of this paper has been published as: Michael, K., & Vakulabharanam, V. (2015). Class and climate change…
Aligning global governance to the challenges of sustainability is one of the most urgent environmental issues to be addressed. This…
The International Workshop on Governance 'of' and 'for' Sustainable Development Goals, held 1 February 2014, in New York, USA, resulted…
This research aims to explore the barriers and opportunities to change in the form and mandate of United Nations Environment…
Frank Biermann, chair of the Earth System Governance research alliance, gave a plenary presentation in the United Nations General Assembly on…
In this special issue of the Journal of Environment and Development, we present results from the research project Globalisation Informed…
The International RBO Database provides detailed institutional design data for 121 RBOs in more than 110 internationally shared watercourses. It allows…
We humans once thought the Earth was flat. Little did we know that the oceans extended far beyond the horizon,…
A revised version of this Working Paper has been published as: Katherine Mattor, Michele Betsill, Ch’aska Huayhuaca, Heidi Huber-Stearns, Theresa…
In the last generation, the frequency and magnitude of environmental degradation has been unprecedented. Partly as a result, environmental problems…
Institutions that have been set up by riparian states to internationally govern shared water resources – international River Basin Organizations…
From 21-25 May 2013, the Global Water System Project hosted an international conference on the global dimensions of water system…
The experience of environmental governance is approached in Improving Global Environmental Governance from the unique perspective of actor configuration and embedded networks…
International law is constantly in search of legitimacy, has been relatively ineffective, and, like international environmental governance, is plagued by…
The inadequacies of the inter-state institutions and negotiating processes central to international climate policy create a pressing need for innovative…
The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, was probably the largest event…
The debate about post-2012 global climate governance has been framed largely by proponents and opponents of the policymaking process established…
The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many…
Every year, the UN climate negotiations seem to fail the test of saving the global climate in the public eye. The…
A constitutional turn is needed to bring the UN system in line with the urgent needs of planetary stewardship and…
The UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability recently recommended a Global Sustainable Development Outlook (SD-Outlook) in addition to other…
A revised version of this working paper has been published as: Mayer, Benoît. 2012 (forthcoming). Environmental Migration in the Asia-Pacific Region: Could We…
The current institutional framework for sustainable development is by far not strong enough to bring about the swift transformative progress…
Global governance, central to international rule making, is rapidly evolving; thus, there is a need for a way to evaluate…
Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian definitions of the terminology offered by participants of summer school “Governance of Global Environmental Change”, Pskov…
Despite the frequent calls for action, decisions and agreements made at successive international conferences, the levels of socio-environmental unsustainability have…
The process of designing the Green Climate Fund (GCF) will reshape the global architecture of climate change financing over the…
This paper aims to briefly illustrate some early findings of an ongoing research project on procedural democracy in earth system…
A revised version of this working paper has been published as: Eisenack, Klaus and Rebecca Stecker. 2011. A Framework for…
Climate change has disastrous impacts in the developing world and confronts countries like India with immense challenges. The dilemma of…
A revised version of this working paper has been published as: Benecke, Elisabeth. 2011. Networking for climate change: agency in…
A revised version of this working paper has been published as: Dryzek, John S. and Hayley Stevenson. 2011. Global democracy…
The selected bibliographies are compiled by Tanja Abendschein (Jacobs University and University of Bremen, Germany) in August 2008.
The book is a result of interdisciplinary research conducted under the GoverNat project. It explores evolution of environmental governance in…
Hardcopies of the Earth System Governance Brochure can be requested from the International Project Office. Download the brochure [pdf]
International bureaucracies - highly visible, far-reaching actors of global governance in areas that range from finance to the environment -…
Download the science plan in English, Japanese or Spanish [PDF] In Humans now influence all biological and physical systems of the planet…
Based on an interdisciplinary investigation of future visions, scenarios, and case-studies of low carbon innovation taking place across economic domains,…