https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/DOPP5694?type=COREThe purpose of this course is to critically engage with the theories, concepts and empirics of Global Environmental Governance. Global environmental change is one of the great challenges humankind is facing. Humans now influence all biological and physical systems of the planet. The entire earth system now operates well outside the normal state exhibited over the past 500,000 years, and that human activity is generating change that extends well beyond natural variability - in some cases, alarmingly so - and at rates that continue to accelerate. The central question from a social science perspective is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their surrounding environment in the new planetary epoch of the Anthropocene. In other words, how to develop effective and equitable governance solutions for today's polycrisis.Governance refers to the observation that many public functions increasingly seem to be assumed and carried out by actors other than the governments and the nation-state. In particular, the course further investigates three profound transformation in global environmental governance over the last two decades:(1) the increasing diversity of agency (i.e. the observation that authority to govern is vested not only in governments and public actors but in a host of non-state actors, including for-profit organizations as well);(2) the institutionalization of novel governance mechanisms and instruments beyond international agreements (e.g. private certification schemes in global forest politics);(3) the increased fragmentation of global environmental governance into a number of functionally interlinked but increasingly conflictive policy domains (e.g. the potential overlap between climate change and biodiversity governance).For each type of empirical transformation discussed above, a selection of important examples will be analyzed. Students are encouraged to make their own contributions in the form of a group presentation that critically discusses a concrete empirical example of global environmental governance related to key analytical concepts.