The Resilience of the Earth System is increasingly threatened by human activity. Recent literature on the Anthropocene has made it abundantly clear that crossing planetary boundaries will lead to catastrophic change. While sustainability is widely recognized as a political principle to address these challenges, the design and implementation of concrete sustainable policies have become more difficult. Sustainability governance refers to the social mechanisms by which societies adapt their institutions and regulatory systems to the major challenges of sustainable development (climate change, loss of biodiversity, poverty, food insecurity, resource scarcity, etc.). In current sustainability governance architectures, government regulations at national and local levels co-exist and interact with international agreements and voluntary standards. However, the development of effective sustainability governance instruments proceeds by no means linearly but is rather characterized by recurring governance failures and political setbacks. The seminar is concerned with the issue of how the exercise of political authority in the Anthropocene should be organized to prevent imminent ecological and social collapse. The seminar will be organized as a research seminar, in which different student groups will conduct their own research projects over the course of the semester.
- Lehrende/r: Thomas Dietz