The Norms of Global Governance Initiative (NGGI) is a 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 global environmental 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.
The NGGI is developed and coordinated by Lead Faculty members Walter F. Baber (California State University, Long Beach) and Robert V. Bartlett (University of Vermont).
The Earth System Governance Research Centres in Amsterdam, Chiang Mai, Lund, and Oldenburg, as well as colleagues from Idaho State University will collaborate in the NGGI and organize citizen juries at their universities. Other Research Centres will likely join this international collaboration. Background information about the NGGI 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]
Following Citizen Juries have been held:
July 2011 – One Citizen Jury with students of the Sustainability Economics and Management MA Programme at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany.
August 2011 – Two Citizen Juries with participants of the ReSET Summer School “Governance of Global Environmental Change: Towards a Multidisciplinary Discussion in Tertiary Environmental Education“, Pskov, Russia.
October 2011 – One Citizen Jury at Kingston University, United Kingdom.
December 2011 – Three Citizen Juries with the students of Lund University International Master’s Programme in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science, Lund, Sweden.
December 2012 – Three Citizen Juries with the students of Lund University International Master’s Programme in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science, Lund, Sweden.
February 2013 – One Citizen Jury with the students of the MSc programme Political Science at the VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands.