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21 September 2010
GPPi organizes seminar on global climate governance at German National Academic Foundation summer school
GPPi researchers Björn Conrad and Thorsten Benner led a one-week seminar called the Global Climate Governance 2020 at the summer school of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) from 29 August to 3 September in Koppelsberg, Germany. The participants – 20 of the foundation's scholarship holders from a range of academic disciplines and backgrounds – used scenario-building methods to analyze the future of global climate politics.
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. Consequently, the Koppelsberg seminar aimed to provide a methodological framework to help the participants in gaining a deeper understanding of the factors, factor interdependencies and dynamics that shape international climate governance. Participants included graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines, from mathematics and economics to forestry and political science.
Using scenario-building methods, 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.
The Koppelsberg seminar was based on the larger GPPi project Global Governance 2020 – Designing the Future of International Institutions (GG2020), which brings together young thinkers from China, the US and Germany to contemplate the future of global governance (www.gg2020.net).
For more information, please contact Thorsten Benner