Forschung

CLICCS Project B2 - Dynamics of Climate Governance: Norms, Contestation, and Policies

Project Synopsis

The next few years of climate governance-in-the-making are critical: observing them closely allows us to identify and assess key drivers of long-term social trends towards or away from decarbonization, which form – individually and through their interaction at different governance scales – the backdrop of possible and plausible scenarios of future climate governance.

The Paris agreement departs from the Kyoto Protocol’s state-centered, top-down approach. It attempts to overcome the fragmentation of current climate governance through an architecture that relies on the global guiding norm of “keeping warming below 2°C”, and enables a universal and voluntary bottom-up process based on the cyclical submission and review of freely determined climate policy proposals by states – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – and other public and private entities.

The effectiveness of this process will crucially depend on the practice of the upcoming global review-resubmission cycles of the Paris agreement (2018-20 and 2023-25) and the local implementation of NDCs.

The project addresses both. It will focus on the following key drivers:

• The (in)capacity of the UNFCCC to align the expectations and preferences of heterogeneous actors.
• The effects of regional norm conflicts and contestations on energy security and climate justice.
• The social and political dynamics of policy-instruments that shape NDC formulation and implementation.
  Assessing these drivers and their interplay across scales will enable us to identify plausible dynamics of climate governance which will be a necessary prerequisite for separating plausible from possible climate futures.

The project is co-directed by Prof. Dr. Grischa Perino and Prof. Antje Wiener PhD. You can find more information on the project here. 

 

Doing Theory – From Where and What For? A Backpackers’ Guide to Knowledge Production

Research Objectives:

Our research question is: what can individual experience and reflection teach us about how to critically engage with epistemic knowledge communities in our academic research? Using the concept of academics as ‘knowledge entrepreneurs’ (Bleiker and Brigg 2010) and the idea of pre-academic knowledge (by exploring the impact of travels on those who later chose to have academic careers), we move towards understanding academic knowledge production by introducing a ‘backpackers perspective’. The project builds on research that has paved the way for including personal experience when assessing practices of knowledge production (Bleiker and Brigg 2010). We intend to facilitate engagement with the theme of global connectivity and learning through international encounters across epistemic knowledge communities (Adler and Drieschova 2021).

The project explores the ‘backpackers perspective’ by focusing on the three themes of knowledge production, networks, and sustainability. The project is supported on three planks: first, oral history of ‘travel’ (with a special focus on the gendered aspect). Secondly, acknowledging the privilege in travel, we see this as a decolonial reflection exercise on the relationship between global north travellers to less wealthy nations (Samuel 2022) and, retrospective reflection on knowledge production (encounters with culture, local economies, and relationships formed). Thirdly, learnings from travel experiences that might lend to more sustainable forms of travel today.

You can find more information on the project here and here.