2016 Berlin Conference on Global Environmental Change: Transformative Global Climate Governance “après Paris”

The conference is organized by the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) and the Environmental Policy Research Centre (FFU), Freie Universität Berlin.

In December 2015, governments convene in Paris to deliver a new global agreement on international climate policy.  This conference invites scholars and practitioners to refocus their quest for answers in the light of the continuity and change that Paris will bring. It also aims to discuss international climate policy and, indeed, politics in the larger context of global governance and the challenges of a transformation towards sustainable development in a turbulent world. In the course of two days, participants will have the opportunity to put the Paris outcomes in perspective with a view to five overarching and interrelated themes:   Transformation - pursuit of strategies to realize sustainable development globally, by going beyond „greening“ business as usual and by a corresponding redistribution of relevant resources;   Global Justice - provision of fairness and equity across temporal and spatial dimensions, particularly regarding greenhouse gas emissions, natural resources and finance;  Coherence - understanding and managing trade-offs between climate policy, sustainable development, economic policies, transformative dynamics and the accompanying institutional complexities;  Multilevel Capacity - harnessing global, transnational, regional, national and subnational capacities and contributions to avoid unmanageable global warming (i.e. mitigation) as well as responses to unavoidable climate change impacts (i.e. adaptation; loss & damage);  Framing - identifying risks and opportunities for linking frameworks, discourses and institutions of climate governance with other global issues such as security, migration, trade, food security or land use.

The conference provides a space for the timely discussion of 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. It seeks to facilitate exchange and to enhance transformative literacy. For more information, see the conference homepage www.berlinconference.org/2016.