Seminar Global Environmental Change and Multi Scale Governance

Global Environmental Change - the combined effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, land use change, urbanisation, resource pressure etc. - represents major challenges for political steering. This led to the introduction of concepts like Multi-Level Governance, which encompasses multi actor constellations at different levels of decision making (international, national, local). Over the last couple of years, however, it became more or less obviously that existing institutions are not able to address these challenges properly. In the preparation of the upcoming -Rio+20--conference, scheduled for June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro to appraise the success or failure of 20 years of international efforts to achieve sustainable development, the reform of the international governance architecture is one overarching topic. This seminar in winter term will first analyse the challenges of global environmental change and the achievements of multi-level governance strategies so far. It will also introduce the term Multi-Scale Governance, to emphasize that one important challenge is to address place specific environmental problems while dealing with complex interlinkages between societal and biophysical processes at different scales. It is intended, to proceed in summer term with a second seminar about the -Rio+20--conference itself. To lower the requirements for participation, seminar papers (Hausarbeiten) can also be written in German. FB 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften Uni Kassel WiSe 2011/12 Politikwissenschaften FB 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften Prof. Dr. Görg Christoph