SustainableRIOPROJECT SUMMARY The premise of this European Commission Research project are the indisputable elements of crisis in global governance, testifying to the difficulty in governing globalization by means of concerted standards and rules. Disappointing achievements in multilateral negotiations on climate change, biodiversity or trade liberalization underscore the paradox of our time: “the collective issues we must grapple with are of growing extensiveness and intensity and, yet, the means for addressing these are weak and incomplete” (Held, 2007: 240). Our overall objective is to disentangle the components of this paradox and to derive conceptual insights for the definition of sustainable development (EU) policies in a globalised world. Our first specific objective is to identify and clarify the conceptual challenges raised by sustainable development in a globalised world from a policy making perspective. We focus on Our second specific objective is to identify and document the reasons why decision makers do not manage to create an appropriate structure of rules, policy and measures to make national economies switch to effective sustainable production and consumption patterns. Our third specific objective is to make the case for the operational character of the conceptual insights developed under the first specific objective of the project. We will make the case for sustainable development as an internal and coherence tool for EU policies. Further, on the basis of our analysis of the margins for change surveyed under the second specific objective, we intend to explore ways for sustainable development to craft a new social contract in democratic societies, and for EU citizens in particular. As a test case, we will use the governance of climate change and the bottom billion as interlinked issues. These “ultimate test cases for collective action” (according to a recent statement by Nick Stern), will be used as an application case study throughout the project. Our fourth specific objective is to tackle the institutional implications of our conceptual and policy-oriented analysis on sustainable development global governance. This will be done through a high level conference convened at the end of the project. The project’s main outputs are fourfold, each relating to a specific objective:
Table 1. SustainableRIO main objectives and outputs
PROJECT SPECIFICATION European Commission FP7 call : ENV.2008.4.2.3.1: Rethinking globalisation in the light of sustainable development Duration: 3 years (0ct 2009-Sept 2012) Partners: Institut du développement durable et des relations internationales (Iddri, coordinator) Contact: Tancrède Voituriez (Iddri) |
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