Research Group on Climate, Environment and Change (REGROUP)

Our teaching in 2022:

• ASTK18396U 50 Years of Global Environmental Governance

  2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the first global UN conference on the environment. This course will use this anniversary to reflect on the institutions, issues, actors, and practices of global environmental governance have evolved over the past half-century. In addition, we will explore the potential of current environmental governance systems to accelerate the social, economic, political, and ecological transformations for a sustainable low-carbon future. 
  Course coordinator: Michele Merrill Betsill, e-mail: m.betsill@ifs.ku.dk

• ASTK18384U Democratic participation in times of the Anthropocene

  This course engages with the emergence of the new geological epoch ‘The Anthropocene’. The geological epoch defines a time where human activity has become a force of nature that radically and irrevocably changes the earth. Rising sea levels, loss of biodiversity and other irreversible tipping points illustrate this – but it also underscores the connectedness of humans and non-humans / culture and nature. In the course we will investigate how democracies can face the predicament posed by the Anthropocene, especially how and whether the political norm of democratic participation can or should be expanded to non-humans. The purpose of the course is to translate abstract political theory into practice, thus institutionalizing the normative commitments in the Anthropocene.
  Course coordinator: Ingrid Helene Brandt Jensen, e-mail: ihbj@ifs.ku.dk 

• ASTK18395U Transnationalism in Global Climate Politics
  According to the UN, 18,279 sub-national and non-state actors were involved in 27,174 actions in 2020 to address climate change and advance the goals of the Paris Agreement. Today, such 'transnational' actors and forms of governance are central to global climate change politics. This course examines these developments through the lens of broader debates about transnationalism in world politics. We will explore how and under what conditions sub-national and non-state actors such as cities, corporations, NGOs, and scientific networks have become central to global efforts to address climate change. We will consider the diverse forms of transnational governance led by these actors and the relationship of these initiatives to multilateral treaties and other state-based forms of climate change regulation. We will review efforts to assess whether transnationalism contributes to a more effective global response to climate change and reflect on the normative issues raised as transnational actors and forms of governance become more deeply embedded in global climate politics. 
  
  Course coordinator: Michele Merrill Betsill, e-mail: m.betsill@ifs.ku.dk

• ASTK18391U The Politics of International Trade: The Green Transition
  How does the globalization of the economy affect the global environment? This question has long been at the center of the climate and sustainability debate. This course focuses on the role of trade, both the globalization of free trade, the recent slowbalisation of global trade and production, and the rise of geo-economic and protectionist tensions in the liberal trading order. There remains no consensus on whether free trade promotes green transitions, neither politically nor theoretically. For instance, green liberals remain convinced that greener globalization is possible, and indeed, happening at the moment, whereas critics neoliberally structured globalization as the root cause of the environmental degradation of the planet, and a barrier to a sustainable future 
  Course coordinator: Jens Ladefoged Mortensen, e-mail: jlm@ifs.ku.dk