Insights from the 2024 Earth System Governance Forum
The 2024 Earth System Governance (ESG) Forum brought together global experts to address pressing challenges in climate, biodiversity, and social inequalities in an era of polycrisis.
Professor Susan Park, a key contributor from the Sydney Environment Institute, delivered a powerful keynote on how global powers often fail to align political and economic goals with ecological realities.
“Great Powers have the responsibility to lead but don’t feel obligated to, leaving transformative change to smaller powers and activists,” Prof Park said.
Prof Park also hosted the Critical Minerals in the Polycrisis’ plenary, examining the environmental and geopolitical tensions around critical minerals mining for renewable energy, and the risks of deep-seabed mining.
You can listen to the keynote here.
David Schlosberg, Director of the Sydney Environment Institute, said, “The ESG Forum is always one of the most dynamic and thought-provoking academic gatherings of the year. While the shift to a virtual format meant missing the in-person connection with colleagues from around the world, it also reinforced ESG’s commitment to reducing the carbon footprint of global academic conferences. This year, it was a privilege for SEI to host a hub of activity, showcasing key discussions on critical minerals, ecological democracy, and planetary justice.”
SEI had two visiting researchers contribute to the Forum, Dr Julia Tschersich (Utrecht University) and Dr Stefan Pederson (University of Sussex).
Dr Tschersich’s focus was on reimagining democracy to address environmental governance challenges. At the Roundtable on Democratic Experimentation, co-hosted by SEI, the main discussion revolved around how democracy can be envisioned differently beyond elections and representation. Her reflections on alternative democratic practices, such as multispecies assemblies in Spain and anarchist governance in Copenhagen, underscored how democratic innovation can support governance in times of crisis.
Dr Pedersen chaired the Planetary Justice Taskforce meeting and noted how the forum created space for essential discussions on environmental justice and inequalities.
“Attending from Sydney highlighted the unique value of in-person conferences for real-time collaboration,” Dr Pedersen said, recognising the necessity of virtual participation to reduce carbon emissions.
To explore these and other rich discussions from the ESG Forum 2024, the full recordings are now available here.
Continue reading below for individual reflections from SEI representatives.
ESG is always one of my favourite academic events of the year – always with an engaging and impactful academic program and conference. For this year’s virtual ESG, it was a pleasure for SEI to host a node of activity, including key events on critical minerals, ecological democracy, and planetary justice. While I missed meeting up with governance colleagues from around the globe, doing the conference virtually again this year illustrates ESG’s attention to the real carbon impact of global academic conferences.
It was a great honour to be chosen as this year’s ESG Forum keynote speaker. It was an opportunity to think through how states construct global environmental governance in ways that do not fundamentally accept their dependence on natural systems, and therefore they are unable to reconcile their economic and political objectives with mitigating the passing of ecological boundaries. I examined how Great Powers have the responsibility to lead but do not feel obligated to do so, and that middle powers like Australia choose instead to further climate and ecological breakdown. This leaves transformative change to small powers, activists and environmental defenders.
We hosted the critical minerals in the polycrisis plenary which drew together expertise on how critical minerals mining for the renewable energy transition contributes to the polycrisis in terms of tensions between the US and China, increasing environmental and human harms, and is not well governed through it may not challenge existing environmental norms even as there is a drive for deep seabed mining.
The Forum was a fantastic way to participate in the largest social science network on global environmental governance in the world – and no C02 from flying!
How can democracy be envisioned differently beyond elections and representation, and how might democratic experimentation help to re-envision Earth System Governance in an Era of Polycrises, as the aptly titled ESG Forum 2024 called for?
The Roundtable of Democratic Experimentation and Sustainability Transformation, co-hosted by the Working Group on Democracy and the Sydney Environment Institute, showcased a diversity of new imaginaries and lived practices of democracy from around the world.
From a multispecies assembly in an agri-food collective in Spain, deliberative constitution-making in Chile, to the anarchist, consensus-oriented, self-governing neighborhood of Freetown Christiania in the city of Copenhagen – the Roundtable illustrated that democracy can take on many different meanings, forms of engagement, and might even enhance inclusion beyond human actors. It embarked on a reflection of what experimentation itself might entail: from Living Labs in the Netherlands explicitly created to provide semi-protected spaces for developing resilient crop mixes, to more open-ended, regenerative, or even disruptive experimentation.
The example of the disaster response networks in New South Wales underlined how communities are taking matters into their own hands to fill gaps left in state responses, bringing together the vast knowledge of various actors. The Roundtable illustrated the tensions and entanglements of grassroots democracy with dominant capitalist economies, the power struggles involved and the many ambiguities with attempts at institutionalisation.
Yet, even outside of state structures, democratic experimentation reaches beyond the local or regional: Extinction Rebellion is an example of a global network experimenting with new forms of translocal coordination while aiming to challenge dominant political systems.
‘It was fascinating to see the diversity of democratic imaginaries and practices emerging in very different contexts – moving us beyond narratives of ‘There is no alternative’.
The Roundtable was a great way to bring together, learn from and contrast these experiences – a first step towards more comparative research that is needed to understand if and when such democratic experimentation can indeed contribute to Sustainability Transformation.’
My ESG Forum participation started with learning more about the nuances separating ‘One Health’ from ‘Planetary Health’ – which I found very useful because these mirrored some of the debates on what distinguishes ‘planetary justice’ from other approaches, since it turns out the former had some colonial baggage while the second was a more critical approach.
My main contribution to this ESG Forum was to chair the Planetary Justice Taskforce’s annual meeting, which as usually was open to all attendees. I first had a brief presentation on our upcoming Special Issue on Planetary Justice for Environmental Politics which current and previous SEI members also contributed to and on the ongoing Exploring Planetary Justice webinar series hosted by the Earth System Governance Project in collaboration with Colorado State University’s Center for Environmental Justice.
We then had a really interesting talk about where the webinar series could move next with the Indigenous Sami populations’ experiences with extractivism and green energy expansion in the Arctic being one possible focal point, before Chukwumerije Okereke joined and suggested an exciting new direction for the taskforce addressing the topic’s relevance in relation to solar radiation management (SRM). Cristinia Yumie Aoki Inoue, who also headed a contribution to the SI, said that more attention should be given to the urban poor and the climate and other injustices this significant segment of the global population are increasingly subjected to.
Attending the Earth System Governance Project’s Forum on 'Re-imagining Earth System Governance in an Era of Polycrisis' from the Sydney Environment Institute has been a wonderful experience, presentations on ‘Polycrisis in the Critical Minerals Supply,’ attending some of the Working Group on Democracy’s events, and an exclusive chance to see Kyle Whyte present on his work on environmental justice for the US government were all highly interesting things to witness and be be part of.
While attending the Forum from Sydney – and seeing how much is going on at times more convenient for e.g. those located in Europe – nonetheless highlighted that the traditional physical conferences of the ESG are unique in that they can facilitate cooperation and knowledge exchange between people from across the planet who otherwise live and spend their daily lives in largely incompatible time-zones for synchronous work.
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