2016 Berlin Conference on Global Environmental Change: Transformative Global Climate Governance “après Paris”
From 23. – 24. May, more than 200 guests from around the world attended the 12th Berlin Conference on Global Environmental Change with this years topic Transformative Global Climate Governance “après Paris”, which was organized by the Environmental Policy Research Centre (FFU) in cooperation with the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE).
News from May 26, 2016
This year’s Berlin Conference invited scholars and practitioners to discuss questions arising from the new and universal global climate agreement adopted at the UN climate change conference in Paris on 12 December 2015. In the light of the continuity and change that Paris will bring, the discussions and knowledge exchange evolved around international climate policy and politics in the larger context of global governance and the challenges of a transformation towards sustainable development in a turbulent world. The participants had the opportunity to put the Paris outcomes in perspective, following five overarching and interrelated themes: transformation, global justice, coherence, multilevel capacity and framing.
The conference provided room for interdisciplinary transformation research that builds on institutionalist scholarship, social and cultural sciences, policy analysis, political philosophy as well as political economy approaches to climate governance. Contributions included, but were not limited to a plenary keynote speech by Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University,on Climate change politics after Paris as a two-level game: Implications of pledge and review for social science research. Leena Shrivastava of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi explored the question whether the Paris Agreement was “fair and ambitious” enough to prove transformative. Dirk Messner of the DIE, for instance, hold a plenary session on Global cooperation and transformative governance after the Paris Agreement and Frank Geels of the University of Manchester examined the question whether the Paris agreement was sufficient in the context of global climate governance and socio-technical transformation.
The 2016 Berlin Conference was the 12th conference in the well established series of Berlin Conferences on Global Environmental Change taking place in Berlin.
More information regarding the conference and its program can be found here.
A storify published by the DIE can be accessed here.