NON-COST Event: Lund Conference on Earth System Governance - Towards a Just and Legitimate Earth System Governance: Addressing Inequalities

Date: 18-20 April 2012

Place: Lund, Sweden

The 2012 Lund Conference will be organised in four thematic streams:

1. TOWARDS JUST, FAIR AND EQUITABLE EARTH SYSTEM GOVERNANCE

Justice and fairness are key components of a legitimate governance system. Conflicts on these issues abound, for example when it comes to international and national burden-sharing, the historical responsibility for past emissions, or the access to, and ownership of, resources and knowledge. The principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”, reiterated in many global environmental agreements, is one compromise reached in international negotiations, yet its very meaning in concrete cases remains often unresolved. A major challenge is the gross inequality in access to material and immaterial resources as well as the unequal distribution of vulnerability and adaptive capacity between groups and sectors of society and between nation-states.

2. TOWARDS LEGITIMATE, DEMOCRATIC AND ACCOUNTABLE EARTH SYSTEM GOVERNANCE:

This stream deals with questions of accountability, legitimacy, and the democratic quality of earth system governance. The representation of UN major groups and multi-stakeholder approaches has become increasingly common practice and signifies efforts to shape more legitimate governance. Papers under this conference stream may also address questions of accountability, like the emergence and effects of rules and procedures that identify who takes part in decision-making, who holds whom responsible for what action, and what the consequences are when standards are breached, or on how to decrease the ‘democratic deficit’.  A precondition for holding actors responsible and accountable is here transparency, access to information, and the availability of monitoring mechanisms. The transparency and accountability of various public, private, and hybrid governance mechanisms have increasingly been brought to the fore.

3. LINKING THE 5 “A” OF EARTH SYSTEM GOVERNANCE:

This stream investigates the interconnections among the five analytical problems identified in the Earth System Governance Project’s Science and Implementation Plan.

4. TRANSFORMING THE INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

This stream is concerned with providing policy-relevant information and analysis on the reform, or transformation, of the institutional framework for sustainable development. The 2012 Lund Conference will be held just two months before the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio+20”). For this reason, the Lund Conference will provide ample opportunities for dialogue with the policy-making community on key issues of justice and legitimacy. The two overarching themes of the Rio+20 Conference - green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication; and institutional framework for sustainable development – strongly relate to the analytical themes of accountability and legitimacy of multilateral institutions as well as allocation and access in the intersection of multilateral environmental diplomacy and the global economic system. This conference stream will hence critically assess how issues of justice and democratic legitimacy have been incorporated in earth system governance in the forty years since the 1972 Stockholm Conference.

More information on the speakers and the programme can be found here.