28 AUGUST 2024, 14:00-17:30

Earth System Governance SDG Taskforce Meeting – The Earth System Governance Taskforce on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) invites all participants to the GLOBALGOALS2024 Conference to join the Taskforce’s meeting on 28 August in the afternoon to brainstorm future research directions on the SDGs and collaboration opportunities. The meeting will be facilitated by the Taskforce co-convenors Frank Biermann, Thomas Hickmann, Carole-Anne Sénit, and Yixian Sun. The pre-conference event will take place at Janskerkhof 3, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Please note that capacity is limited to 35 people and that places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Dan Banik is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Oslo SDG Initiative at the Centre for Development and the Environment, and Affiliate Professor at Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway. He is also Academic Director of the Democracy Hub at Circle U. European University Alliance and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. His books include Political Transition, Poverty, and Inclusive Development in Malawi: The Democratic Dividend; Poverty and Elusive Development; and Starvation and India’s Democracy. Banik was a Visiting Professor and Consulting Scholar at Stanford University (2010-2017) and a Visiting Professor at China Agricultural University (2012-2017). He is the host of the In Pursuit of Development podcast with listeners in 160 countries.

Marianne Beisheim is Senior Associate at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin, Germany. Her focus is on sustainable development governance, in particular the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda at the UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. She is a member of the UN-Political Advisory Board of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Leadership Council of SDSN Germany, and the Research Council of the UN Association Germany. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations at Freie Universität Berlin, where she led a German Research Council-funded research project on multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development.

Steven Bernstein is Distinguished Professor of Global Environmental and Sustainability Governance and Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab at University of Toronto, Canada. His research spans the areas of global governance and institutions, global environmental politics, international political economy, and policy studies. His publications include several authored or edited books and over 85 scholarly articles and book chapters. His current research projects investigate coherence and incoherence in global sustainability governance, transformative policies and initiatives to achieve decarbonization, and change at the intersection of International Relations and Global Environmental Politics theory and research. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Copenhagen.

Frank Biermann is the co-chair of the GlobalGoals2024 conference. He is a Professor of Global Sustainability Governance at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, where he directs the GlobalGoals Project, a €2.5 million research programme on the Sustainable Development Goals, funded by an European Research Council Advanced Grant. Previously, he was the founding chair of the Earth System Governance Project, a global research network. Biermann has authored or edited 20 books and published over 200 articles and book chapters on global governance and sustainability. He edits the Earth System Governance journal and two book series with MIT Press and Cambridge University Press. Biermann has received numerous awards, including the 2021 Distinguished Scholar Award in Environmental Studies of the International Studies Association.

Emily Boyd is Professor in Sustainability Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She is a leading social scientist with a specialist focus on environment and climate change. Her unique focus has been on the interdisciplinary nexus of poverty, livelihoods and resilience in relation to global environmental change, focusing on issues pertaining to cities, sustainable land use, water and deforestation in Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia and Europe. Her work has been published across the social and sustainability sciences with notable publications on resilience, adaptation and the politics and practice of community participation in the new carbon economy.

Pamela Chasek is a Professor of Political Science at Manhattan University, United States, and the co-founder and executive editor of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a reporting service on UN environment and development negotiations. She has written about and followed UN environment and sustainable development negotiations for over 32 years. Chasek is the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Transforming Multilateral Diplomacy: The Inside Story of the Sustainable Development Goals, Earth Negotiations, and Global Environmental Politics. She has served as a consultant to the UNCCD, the UN Environment Management Group, UNEP, UNDP, UN Forum on Forests, and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Ines Dombrowsky heads the Research Programme ‘Environmental Governance’ at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). She is also a Honorary Professor at Leuphana University, Germany. Her research is grounded in institutional economics and political sciences and focuses on coordination and cooperation in environmental governance across levels, sectors, actor types and scales. She has widely published on water governance issues cross scales. She has prior work experience with the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ (2001-2010), the World Bank (1997-2001) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) (1995-1997). She holds a PhD in Economics and an MSc in Environmental Engineering.

Boniface Dulani is an Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of Politics and Government at the University of Malawi and Director of Surveys for the Afrobarometer, the pan-African network of researchers who conduct surveys on governance, economy, livelihoods and other topics. He is also a co-founder of the Institute of Public Opinion and Research, Malawi’s leading firm in survey research. Dulani holds a PhD in Comparative Politics with minors in International Relations from Michigan State University. As Afrobarometer’s Director of Surveys, Dulani leads a team of researchers from more than 40 countries across Africa to collect data that reflects the views of citizens across the continent. These data are then passed on to policy-makers and other decision makers so that the voices of ordinary citizens are reflected in key policy decisions.

Margarita Gómez is the Executive Director of Southern Voice, a network of 70 thinktanks from Africa, Latin America and Caribbean, and Asia. Previously, Gómez founded and led two policy-impact innovation centres, the People in Government Lab at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, United Kingdom, and the Behavioural Unit at CIDE in Mexico. She was also an advisor to Mexico’s Public Security and Defence Ministers. Gómez has more than 15 years of experience working with governments, international organizations and world-class universities, delivering context and policy-relevant research. Her research focuses on financial and gender inclusion, integrity and ethics in governments, public security, and public sector transformation. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, a Senior Research Fellow at the Public Management and Innovation Lab, and a Behavioural Advisor at the Asian Development Bank.

Thomas Hickmann is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of Lund University in Sweden. His research is concerned with the question of how societies can adequately deal with global common goods and which institutions need to be in place to overcome problems such as biodiversity loss, climate change and land degradation. Hickmann has published in prestigious academic journals including Ambio, International Studies Review and Nature Sustainability. His most recent co-edited book published with Cambridge University Press brought together 61 experts from all over the world to assess the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Anna-Katharina Hornidge is the Director of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS, former Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik, DIE) and Professor for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Bonn, Germany. The development and knowledge sociologist holds a habilitation in development research from the University of Bonn, a PhD in Sociology from the Technical University of Berlin and the National University of Singapore and a Master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Bonn, Germany. Before joining IDOS/DIE in March 2020, she was Professor of Social Sciences in the Marine Tropics at the University of Bremen and Head of Department of Social Sciences and of the research group ‘Development and Knowledge Sociology’ at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen. From 2006 to 2015 she worked as Senior Researcher for the Centre for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, where she held the position of Professor and Director in the Department of Social and Cultural Change from 2014 to 2015. 

David Obura is the chair of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a member of the Earth Commission and a Founding Director of the Kenyan coral reef research and conservation organization CORDIO East Africa. Obura has 30 years of experience researching coral reefs, their vulnerability to climate change and importance to coastal communities and economies, and highlighting these issues across local to global scales. To motivate the societal changes needed, he is pivoting to a new focus on sustainability and equity, linking challenges and solutions across scales, and working with diverse teams to identify pathways to a safe and just world for present and future generations.

Åsa Persson is Research Director and Deputy Director at the Stockholm Environment Institute, and Adjunct Professor at the Department for Thematic Studies, Environmental Change, Linköping University, Sweden. Her research focuses on the interaction between global and national policy and governance, including the implementation of the SDGs. In 2020, she was appointed by the UN Secretary-General to the Independent Group of Scientists to draft the 2023 UN Global Sustainable Development Report. She is a member of several further scientific committees, including the Swedish National Committee on Global Environmental Change (Royal Academy of Sciences), the Lead Faculty of the Earth System Governance network, the research committee of the Royal Swedish Agricultural Academy, the External Advisory Board of the York Environmental Sustainability Institute, and the editorial board of the journal Earth System Governance. Since 2023, she is Chair of the Swedish Climate Policy Council.

Prajal Pradhan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He is the recipient of a prestigious ‘Starting Grant’ of the European Research Council for the project BeyondSDGs. Pradhan was also a lead author of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land and a contributing author of the AR6 IPCC WG III Report and the AR6 IPCC WG II Report. Pradhan is an expert in food systems, climate change, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). His current research focuses on understanding the necessary conditions for long-term sustainability, including achieving SDGs, urban transformations, and climate resilience. He is also a Visiting Scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Carole-Anne Sénit is Assistant Professor of Inclusive Sustainability Governance with the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is a political scientist by training, with a career spanning both research on and practice in the civil society sector. Her research explores the integration of the Global South within global change science, global civil society, and global institutions. She is a senior research fellow of the Earth System Governance Project, co-convenor of the Project’s taskforce on the Sustainable Development Goals, and managing editor of the Earth System Governance journal.

Yixian Sun is an Associate Professor in International Development at the University of Bath, United Kingdom and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. He studies transnational governance, environmental politics and sustainable development, with a focus on emerging economies. His work explains the changing role of China in global environmental governance. He is the author of Certifying China (MIT Press, 2022) and has published over 20 articles in high-impact scientific journals including Science, Nature Sustainability, Nature Food, and Global Environmental Change. He is an associate editor of Global Environmental Politics and World Development Perspectives and a member of the Expert Peer Review Group for the UN-supported Race to Zero campaign.