Home
Bergen Summer Research School
Course | BSRS 2020

Global climate governance regime

This course explores the role of the global climate governance regime in devising ways to mitigate climate change and to adapt to already inevitable impacts. To better understand of the complexity of multilevel climate governance, the course will use a case study, the Amazon, an ecosystem of global importance.

Main content

Course leaders
Siri Gloppen, Professor of Comparative Politics, UiB, and Director of the CMI-UiB Centre on Law & Social Transformation.
Danielle Hanna Rached, Assistant Professor of Law, Fundacao Getulio Vargas Law School in Rio de Janeiro.

Lecturers (provisional)
Catalina Vallejo Piedraíta (PhD), Center on Law and Social Transformation.
Camila Gianella Malca (PhD), Researcher, Chr. Michelsen Institute. Global fellow, Centre on Law and Social Transformation. Assistant Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

This course explores the role of the global climate governance regime (GCGR) in devising ways to mitigate climate change and adapt to impacts that are already inevitable.

The GCGR is the global system of norms and regulations applicable to climate change. It has emerged from the recognition that addressing climate change requires complex interaction between actors and institutions at multiple levels, and alignment of public, private, international, national, subnational and local regulations.

The course aims to provide students with the tools to critically analyze complex, multi-level climate governance. Governance here refers to ways to regulate, order, govern, or manage a geographical region, or an issue (climate change). To understand how the GCGR functions, and plays out differently across contexts, we focus on the Amazon. The case study helps in bringing an understanding of how countries from the Amazonian basin are dealing with this specific multi layered governance context.

Learning outcomes

  • Be familiar with the international climate change regime and its development
  • Know the obligations and responsibilities under the current global climate change regime
  • Understand the concepts of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’, ‘the precautionary principle’ and the ideas of ‘climate justice’ and ‘vernacularization’
  • Have acquired tools to critically analyze complex, multi-scalar climate governance, and how local understandings, norms and power relations affect the implementation of the global regime
  • Have gained insights into the challenges related to climate change governance and forest management in the Amazon, including contemporary political dynamics

Credits
Participation at the BSRS is credited under the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). Participants submitting an essay, in a form of a publishable manuscript of 10-20 pages, after the end of the summer school will receive 10 ECTS. Deadline for submission will be decided by your course leader.

It is also possible to participate without producing an essay. This will give you 4 ECTS. In order to receive credits, we expect full participation in the course-specific modules, plenary events and roundtables.

Siri Gloppen is professor of Comparative Politics at UiB and Director of the CMI-UiB Centre on Law & Social Transformation. Gloppen has broad expertise in researching dynamics and effects of legal regimes across contexts, and the strategic use of law and legal institutions – including “Climate Change Lawfare” (Social Inquiry 2012). She also investigates symbolic and idealtional effects of law (Climate Talk: Rights, Poverty & Justice, with Dugard & St.Clair, Juta 2013)

Danielle Hanna Rached is an assistant professor of law at Fundacao Getulio Vargas Law School in Rio de Janeiro, where she teaches transnational law and related subjects. She has written about the legitimacy of international institutions, in a context of their growing intrusiveness, analysing whether and how an international institution can be morally respectable, politically effective and legally consistent. Rached received her graduate degrees from University of Edinburgh (LL.M. (’07) and PhD (’13)).