Global Climate Governance 2020

Project Context

The summer schools of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) provide the foundation's scholarship holders with the opportunity to come together for a one week seminar, deepening their understanding of a specific topic in a creative working environment and in highly interdisciplinary working groups. This year's summer school, held in Koppelsberg from 29 August to 3 September, was organized under the general theme “thinking into the future.” GPPi led one seminar on the future of global climate governance, called Global Climate Governance 2020.

Addressing climate change represents one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. However, the failure of the Copenhagen climate negotiations illustrates the enormous difficulties that hinder decisive and internationally coordinated action. The issue of climate change in its complexity and cross-cutting nature, carrying fundamental and at times contradictory implications for a broad spectrum of different policy areas, defies an easy solution.

Based on a methodological framework developed for the GPPi project Global Governance 2020 – Designing the future of international institutions, participants in Koppelsberg used a structured approach to analyze the intricacies of climate challenge, to develop a deeper understanding of the different trends that will determine the future of international climate politics and to draw implications for the political actions needed today to put us on a path towards significant global CO2 reductions.

Project Objectives

The project aimed to provide a methodological framework to help the summer school participants in structuring the complexity of the climate change problem and to learn about the factors, factor interdependencies and dynamics that shape international climate governance today and in the future.

The seminar's ultimate goal was to enable the participants to sketch out different development paths into the future and draw political implications for today's climate policy making. Participants included graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines, from mathematics and economics to forestry and political science. The participants sketched out different development paths of global climate governance. Some scenarios led to a total breakdown of global climate politics, others to a hard-fought but ultimately successful move towards significant global CO2 reductions. Based on these scenarios, the participants formulated a list of policy recommendations that could help to move the process of climate governance further along the path towards a desirable outcome. The presentation of the scenarios to the six other working groups of the summer school, including a musical interpretation of the course of events as narrated in the scenarios, represented one of the highlights of the seminar.