Workshop Chair: Detlef Sprinz, University of Michigan
Location: San Francisco Hilton, Franciscan C
Time: Tuesday, March 25, 2008; 9:00 am – 5:30 pm
Academic as well as policy studies often conclude that transboundary and global environmental problems merit a long-term response and offer case-specific guidance for potential strategies to cope with such challenges. Surprisingly, there is little research on long-term policy problems as a class of problems. In this proposal, we wish to break ground in a series of related articles by highlighting the theoretical, methodological, and empirical challenges involved in long-term environmental problems. More generally, we aspire to advance potentially generalizable knowledge across the subfields of international studies. The journal Global Environmental Politics has agreed to dedicate its August 2009 issue to the topic of long-term environmental policy with the workshop proposer serving as guest editor.
Long-term policy problems can be generally characterized as being (i) surrounded by considerable degrees of uncertainty, (ii) will persist for at least a generation if the causes operate unabated, (iii) the option of “solving” the issue in one or two legislative periods is not politically feasible, and (iv) maximum political effort offers the chance to substantially ameliorate the welfare of most actors. Curbing transboundary air pollution, global climate change, or the preserving biodiversity over longer periods of time are good examples of the strategic challenge we face in the environmental field. While we have a range of specialized studies of specific long-term environmental problems, we do – surprisingly – not yet find research and publications on long-term environmental problems as a specific class of environmental problems. The aim of this workshop proposal and its related stream of publications is to remedy the situation by proposing a feasible set of contributions that cover theoretical, methodological, and empirical aspects of long-term environmental problems from a purposefully diverse set of perspectives. Each of the papers aims to speak to the larger class of long-term environmental problems, i.e., the contributions are overwhelmingly conceptually driven, thereby providing guidance for future research across the diverse spectrum of long-term environmental policy challenges.
Workshop Participants:
- Jon Hovi, The University of Oslo Norway
- D. Marc Kilgour, Wilfrid Laurier University Canada
- Robert Lempert, RAND
- Thomas Princen, University of Michigan
- Jürgen Scheffran, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Detlef Sprinz, University of Michigan
- Paul F. Steinberg, Harvey Mudd College
- Randall W. Stone, University of Rochester
- Arild Underdal, University of Oslo Norway
- Oran Young, UC Santa Barbara
- Elinor Ostrom, University of Indian
This workshop is sold out. Thank you for your interest.
