Dear Colleagues,
I'm posting this note on behalf of Jörg Balsiger,
who was unable to post this himself because of a
technical glitch with the gep-ed list. Please
reply directly to Jörg or Miriam at the email addresses they provide below.
Yours,
Mike Maniates
occasional gep-ed troubleshooter
-------
We're planning to propose a panel on comparative
regional environmental governance for ISA 2010
and are looking for people who might like to participate.
The panel proposal, which is part of a larger
effort to organize a workshop on the topic, is
roughly the following: "As climate change
negotiators prepare for Copenhagen to decide on
the outlines of a future global climate change
regime, there is growing recognition that actual
mitigation and adaptation will have to take place
much closer to home. In other environmental issue
areas as well, the transaction costs of global
regimes, as well as a creeping "global convention
fatigue," are producing a shift in the locus of
impetus, implementation, and innovation to regional levels.
Compared to global approaches, regional
initiatives can benefit from enhanced
commonalities and familiarity among key actors,
and the ability to tailor actions to a specific
constituency. Yet, research in the emergent
sub-discipline of regional environmental
governance suffers from some distinct flaws.
Central among them is the almost complete absence
of comparative work. There is, for instance,
little reflection on how a 'region' is defined
across the globe, nor do the prevailing
single-case studies contribute to systematic
theory development. The proposed panel will
address these shortcomings through an explicit
emphasis on the comparative study of some of the
central analytical elements: the nature of
regions, the interplay between the regional and
other levels of governance, and the specifically
regional nature of actors and interactions between them."
If you're interested, please write to me (joerg.balsi...@env.ethz.ch)
or Miriam Prys (miriam.p...@ir.gess.ethz.ch)
Best regards,
Jörg Balsiger, Institute for Environmental Decisions, Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology Zurich Miriam Prys, Center for Comparative and
International Studies, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
