We congratulate Rakhyun E. Kim for winning the Oran R. Young Prize for his paper on The Emergent Network Structure of the Multilateral Environmental Agreement System as the best early-career paper of the 2013 Tokyo Conference.
The Oran R. Young Prize awarded by the Earth System Governance Project seeks to reward and encourage cutting-edge research on earth system governance by early-career scholars who could become the next generation of leading scholars in the field of environmental governance research – a field shaped and significantly influenced by the pioneering work of Prof. Oran R. Young. Read more about the Prize here.
The Prize Committee received 20 paper submissions for consideration, most of them of very high academic quality and of strong relevance to earth system governance. Runner-up to the winning paper is a paper on Pathways for Adaptive and Integrated Disaster Resilience by Riyanti Djalante (Macquarie University and CSIRO Australia), with her co-authors Cameron Holley (University of New South Wales), Frank Thomalla (Macquarie University), and Michelle Carnegie (Australian Catholic University).
Rakhyun E. Kim is a PhD Scholar at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University. He is a research fellow with the Earth System Governance Project, an associate fellow with the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law, a member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law, and a researcher at the ANU Climate Change Institute.
His prize-winning paper unveils the emergent complex network structure of the multilateral environmental agreement (MEA) system and reveals that MEAs have self-organized into an interlocking system with a complex network structure in the absence of an authority. Therefore, any reform options for global environmental governance should pay attention to the emergent polycentric order and complexity and what these features imply for the function of the MEA system. The paper is available for download here (pdf).
For winning the 2013 Oran R. Young Prize, Rakhyun E. Kim will receive a presentation plaque and a book-voucher from The MIT Press worth 250 US dollar.
