The Earth System Governance Tokyo Conference, organized by the United Nations University Institute (UNU-IAS), the International Environmental Governance Architecture Research Group and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, is part of a series of conferences of the Earth System Governance Project, which is the largest social science research network on governance and global environmental change. IDDRI is among the organizing partners of the conference.

Laurence Tubiana, François Gemenne and Reiko Hasegawa participated in several different workshops and sessions.

  • 29 January: Speech by Laurence Tubiana in the framework of the semi-plenary session 1 “Post-2015 Global Development Goals”
  • 30 January: Laurence Tubiana chaired the semi-plenary session organized by IDDRI: “The scale issue in the global international environment governance”
  • 31 January: Speech by Laurence Tubiana in the framework of the plenary session “Nuclear safety and post-disaster governance”
  • 31 January: Speech by François Gemenne, in the framework of the parallel session “Nuclear Governance 1” on “How democracies deal with disasters: a comparison between the 3.11 disaster in Japan and the Katrina disaster in the US”
  • 31 January: Speech by Reiko Hasegawa, in the framework of the session “Nuclear Governance 2” on “Two different evacuations from Fukushima nuclear accident”

Presentation of the conference:

The Earth System Governance Project was launched in 2009 to address problems of environmental governance. In this project, 'earth system governance' is defined as the interrelated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making mechanisms and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change and earth system transformation, within the normative context of sustainable development. The Earth System Governance Project’s Science Plan is organized around five analytical problems.

  • Architecture relates to the emergence, design and effectiveness of governance arrangements.
  • Agency addresses questions of who governs the earth system and how.
  • Adaptiveness research explores the ability of governance systems to change in the face of new knowledge and challenges as well as to enhance adaptiveness of social-ecological systems in the face of major disturbances.
  • Accountability refers to the democratic quality of environmental governance arrangements.
  • Finally, allocation and access deal with justice, equity, and fairness. These analytical problems are united by the cross-cutting themes of power, knowledge, norms and scale.

The Earth System Governance Tokyo Conference will address these five analytical problems with a focus on complex architectures, multiple agents.