The Earth Systems Governance Project announces the Norms of Global Governance Initiative (NGGI). The NGGI is a new research activity within the existing framework of the Earth System Governance Project. The Initiative involves research on the norms of environmental governance, employing dispute scenarios in the form of hypothetical legal cases that call upon citizen juries (panels of approximately 10-15 individuals) to deliberate and decide among the competing demands of parties who cast their arguments in highly concrete terms. The purpose of the NGGI is to identify and model the normative discourses that are fundamental to earth system governance, to map areas of consensus and disagreement through scenario-based empirical research, and to aggregate the findings in a form that will allow for further progressive development of global environmental norms.
On 20 May 2011, representatives of the Earth System Governance Research Centres and other interested researchers met at the 2011 Colorado Conference on Earth System Governance with the initiators of this initiative, Walter F. Baber (California State University, Long Beach) and Robert V. Bartlett (University of Vermont). Outcome of this meeting has been the commitment of the Earth System Governance Research Centres in Amsterdam, Chiang Mai, Lund, and Oldenburg, as well as colleagues from Idaho State University, to collaborate in the NGGI and organize citizen juries at their universities. Other Research Centres will likely join this international collaboration. First results of the NGGI and reflections on the Citizen Juries will be presented at the Lund Conference on Earth System Governance.
All interested researchers and research institutions are invited to contact the International Project Office to explore how they can contribute to NGGI and for more background information. A description of the initiative as well as preliminary findings from pilot studies is available in:
Baber, Walter F., and Robert V. Bartlett. 2011. Juristic Democracy: Using Specific Deliberative Judgments to Identify or Form Global Norms. Paper presented at the Colorado Conference on Earth System Governance, 18 May 2011, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. [download pdf]
