10th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference
Power landscapes – histories and future
14-16 June 2011 at Aula Magna, Stockholm University

Current trends are contradictory. We are getting nearer a worldwide unanimity concerning the urge to act upon climate change although we seem to be light years away from taking the actions needed. During the last decades we have seen an explosion of experiments in participation, especially in the area of environmental decision-making, at the same time as globalization has rendered the power over decisions obscure, remote and inaccessible. Around the world, pressures from climate change, globalization and changing use of natural resources increasingly affect both the physical and socio-economic and political landscapes.
This conference will explore the influence of historic pathways and new trends on how a diversity of actors respond to those changes and mobilize in order to better govern their own futures. We see, for instance, that traditional and local knowledge impose alternative views on appropriate action and that the inclusion of notions of human rights and environmental citizenship – including those of indigenous populations - pose new questions to the traditional formulation of environmental policy. What are the popular understandings of global warming/environmental change scenarios that arise in responses to the above challenges? Also, we note that experiments in participatory approaches bring new tensions of interest to the fore and that much new energy for action emanates notably from more informed ways of understanding the social-ecological relationships. In particular, we want to emphasize the role of power – how the social and economic construction of landscapes in a wider sense may in fact guide – or even determine – the outcomes. This includes shifts in how we understand the role of the social sciences – a topic that is worth making explicit at the 10th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference.
The conference will invite theoretical as well as empirical papers, using comparative as well as in-depth case studies on those topics suggested in the specific workshop themes outlined below from a range of different disciplines within the social sciences and humanities – such as human geography, sociology, political science, law, history, anthropology, economics, philosophy, pedagogics, economic history, media and communication – in order to share ideas and experiences from research.

www.stockholmresilience.su.se/ness2011





List of Workshops for NESS 2011



Global climate governance – emerging trends after Copenhagen
Workshop leaders: Åsa Persson, Stockholm Environment Institute and Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, asa.persson@sei.se andEva Lövbrand, Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research, Linköping University, eva.lovbrand@liu.se
The build-up to the COP15 meeting of the UNFCCC in Copenhagen in 2009 was characterized by a major entrepreneurial effort by an array of state and non-state actors. Despite the bleak prospects for a legally binding agreement, proposals for new governance arrangements for the post-2012 era flourished. Some proposals were derived from scholarly work on international regime effectiveness, whereas others were based strictly on the politically and economically feasible. Some were limited to the current UNFCCC framework, whereas others envisioned governance arrangements beyond the international regime, including, for example, action at the municipal level, regional agreements, private standards and partnerships. With the failure in Copenhagen, the UN process now finds itself at a crossroads where leadership and direction for future cooperation on climate change are yet to emerge. At the same time, climate governance beyond the regime is thriving and new non-state initiatives are steadily gaining speed.
This workshop invites contributions on emerging trends in global climate governance. By taking stock of what happened before and during Copenhagen, papers are invited that aim to outline plausible directions for both mitigation and adaptation efforts, as well as sub-elements thereof, based on both empirical observations and theory. Contributions from all social scientific disciplines and theoretical perspectives are invited.

Governing the Baltic Sea Region
Workshop leaders: Björn Hassler, Dept of Life Sciences, Södertörn University, bjorn.hassler@sh.se and Åsa Casula Vifell, School of Gender, Culture and History, Södertörn University, asa.vifell@sh.se and Simo Laakkonen, Department of Economic and Social History, University of Helsinki, simo.laakkonen@helsinki.fi
Environmental governance in the Baltic Sea region is becoming increasingly complex and diversified. Although historically characterized by top-down national governing structures and limited amounts of collaboration between governments, we now face a plethora of public and non-public actors at different levels all influencing governance patterns. Diverse regulatory approaches now meet at the international level. And even more importantly; influence over agenda-setting, construction of environmental risks and what to do about them are no longer an exclusive concern of governments and other public agencies. This raises important questions on how new power relations affect values such as representation and democratic accountability.
We invite contributions focused on environmental governance and new power structures in the Baltic Sea region, targeting wider governance aspects or delimited problem areas. Papers may be empirically or theoretically oriented, taking departure from constructivist, rationalist or other epistemological perspectives and using qualitative or quantitative methods. We particularly encourage papers with a historical approach.

Constructing stakeholders: organising, categorising, and mobilising the legitimate participants
Workshop leaders: Linda Soneryd, SCORE, Stockholm University, Linda.Soneryd@score.su.se and Rita Samiolo, Dept of Accounting, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, r.samiolo@lse.ac.uk|
Environmental decision making has been experimenting with new forms of public participation more than any other political area. Experiments in dialogue with concerned publics have led to debates over invited and uninvited publics, ways to try to identify all the relevant stakeholders, how to balance the various strengths of participating stakeholders and sometimes to exclude ‘stakeholders’ (people and organisations with pre-defined interests) in order to engage the ‘real public’ (assumed to have no such pre-defined interests). It is often assumed that stakeholders’ ability to participate or influence decisions is related to their economic strength and access to other power resources. But there are also subtler forms of power embedded in the way participation is organised, and more specifically in the categories established for stakeholder engagement. This workshop will focus on how participation in environmental decision-making is organised, how its legitimate subjects are defined and constructed, how actor categorizations are made and with what consequences, and the ways in which different participation technologies are implicated in the production of different forms of political subjectivity.

Individuals, collectives, politics and knowledge in dealing with environmental and resource issues
Workshop leaders: Cecilia Lundholm, Dep of Education and Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, cecilia.lundholm@ped.su.se and Adrienne Sörbom, SCORE, Stockholm University, adrienne.sorbom@score.su.se
This workshop focuses on the many ways the individual and collective, the private and the political is being researched in various fields. We also address the role of public, and scientific understanding of individual/society/nature and these relationships in order to better our understanding of how society works, and how society can respond to and meet environmental challenges such as climate change. As the conference invitation text states, these are indeed contradictory times forcing us to look at the many dimensions, and scales, of the individual, collective and politics.
We invite contributions that address these topics from various perspectives and disciplines such as sociology, political science, psychology, education and economics. Especially we welcome empirical papers that help us go beyond the rhetoric, and simple myths, of ’the importance of knowledge’, ’knowledge leads to changed behaviour’ or ’individualism equals de-collectivism’.

The Environmental State: Environmental Politics, Policy and Natural Resource Management in a Comparative Perspective.
Workshop leader: Dr. Andreas Duit, Dept. of Political Science/Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, andreas.duit@statsvet.su.se and one more to be added
Environmental protection is now considered a core area of state involvement and responsibility in most developed and many developing countries. In reaction to this widening set of responsibilities for the environment states have built up a considerable administrative, institutional and legislative capacity, devoted substantial proportions of public spending towards environmental protection and restoration, and increased the proportion of tax revenues stemming from environmentally related activities. Taken together, these developments makes it warranted to speak of an emerging environmental state.
Just as the welfare state took on gradually increasing responsibilities for mitigating social and human costs of the market economy, we have for about two decades been witnessing a similar development within the environmental realm. States are gradually accepting increasing responsibilities for addressing environmental problems, and are developing more encompassing environmental policy portfolios in order to mitigate the effects of the market’s environmental externalities. Despite its key role in addressing accelerating processes of environmental degradation, the emergence of the environmental state has gone largely unnoticed by the research community. Through an explicit ambition to “bring the state back in”, and by rediscovering a comparative perspective on environmental politics, the workshop hopes to initiate a research agenda on the environmental state that might, in the long term, parallel the achievements of established research programs into the state, such as welfare state regimes, varieties of capitalism, and democratization. The workshop invites papers that are empirical, theoretical, or normative, but will give preference to works that adopt a comparative perspective on issues of environmental politics, environmental policy, and natural resource management.

Barriers to Sustainable Consumption
Workshop leaders: Unni Kjærnes , National Institute for Consumer Research, Oslo, unni.kjarnes@sifo.no and Henric Barkman, Political Science, Stockholm University, henric.barkman@statsvet.su.se There is a general agreement among scholars and policymakers that private consumption practices must change in order to achieve a sustainable development as well as a wide-spread support among citizens of the Nordic countries for such changes. Sustainable solutions and products have been developed by engineers to tackle natural scientists’ assessments and forecasts about the impacts of consumption on environmental degradation. But although we have seen increased sales of “ethical” and ecological labeled products in some areas of consumption, many un-sustainable consumption patterns persist. For example, while the consumption of meat is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas-emissions, consumption levels are expected to double until year 2050. In spite of similar public discourses, the extent and directions of change vary considerably between countries and across different areas of consumption. Moreover, some efforts to redefine products have resulted in a rebound effect with increased overall levels of consumption. We invite scholars from all social science disciplines to critically reflect on the inertia of transforming consumption practices to become more sustainable, considering issues such as trust in public authorities and expertise, tendencies of individualized responsibilities, and a blurring of the divide of the public and private sphere. Quantitative as well as qualitative studies are welcome, as are both empirical and theoretical approaches. We would like to draw paper-givers attention to the following themes especially, without limiting the workshop to them:

• - The role and power of knowledge and information for changing consumer practices.
• - Consumers and the making of sustainable markets; a matter of individual choice, practical opportunities or struggles over power?
• - Processes of change in consumption practices over time.
• - Societal norms underpinning or counteracting sustainable consumption.
• - Individualized responsibilities; mobilizing or moralizing?
• - Connections between collective mobilization, consumer activism and mundane everyday life
• - The role of public policy on the national level and the EU-level aiming to support or regulate sustainable consumerism.

Sustainable procurement
Workshop leaders: Mikael Boström, Södertörn University Mikael.Bostrom@sh.se and one more to be added In the research on 'sustainable consumption' more attention has to be paid on the role of organizations' consumption. The design and use of procurement policies among public and private organizations are likely to matter tremendously in the work towards social, environmental, and economic sustainability. The challenges are enormous, however. Supply chains from raw material to consumption are often extremely complex, involving a great number of production steps, actors, and countries. How can public or private organizations learn about hidden social and environmental risks in different parts of these chains and develop pro-active procurement approaches to handle them? What internal (e.g. leadership, culture, CSR-commitment, business traditions, communication networks, codes of conduct) and external (e.g. legislation, labelling, media alarm, stakeholder pressures and consultations, relation to suppliers) factors affect their incentives, capacities, and opportunities to do so? How do conditions differ between public vs. private and small vs. large organizations and between different sectors?

Popular Culture and Environmental Politics
Workshop leaders: Sanna Inthorn, Media Studies, University of East Anglia, S.Inthorn@uea.ac.uk and Michele Micheletti, Dept of Political Science, Stockholm University, Michele.micheletti@statsvet.su.se
From J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, to James Cameron’s Avatar, environmental politics has been a recurring theme in popular culture for decades. We can find examples in novels, plays, movies, comics, music, and television. The concept of the political in these cultural texts is wide, encompassing both the relationships of power between humans and the natural world, but also the governance of this relationship through institutions of the state. The cultural texts do so in a serious and factual manner, but also in playful and humorous ways. Some observers and actors may see in this a dangerous simplification of what is one of the most pressing political concerns today. Others may celebrate it for its potential to reach cynical and politically disengaged citizens. Yet regardless of assessment, this development comes at a time when the traditional venues for the creation and transmission of political knowledge are in crisis and when changes in the ways in which we conduct a variety of relations in both the public and private sphere are pushing politics and popular culture closer together. Citizenship is increasingly narrated, created, and performed in venues other than the traditional political ones. Popular culture plays a crucial role here.
This panel invites scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines to critically reflect on the role of popular culture in environmental politics. We welcome papers which explore specific cultural texts, genres and narrative modes, but also papers on audiences as well as activist, government, and industry practice. This includes, but is not limited, to the following themes:
The representation of the human/nature relationship in specific genres, such as science-fiction, comedy, or documentary.
The role of popular culture for civic participation, including the use of popular culture by environmental activists, but also the representation of the environmental responsibility of citizens in popular culture.
The institutional forces shaping representations of the environment in popular culture, such as codes of practice, technology, and funding.
The social, cultural, textual, and psychological conditions through which audiences engage with, and attach meaning to representations of the environment in popular culture.
The role of humour as compared to factual knowledge and scientific expertise for environmental politics.
A goal of the panel is to produce a publication on the role of popular culture in environmental politics.



Poverty and landscape change - historical and current trajectories
Workshop leaders: Atakilte Beyene, Researcher, Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, atakilte.beyene@sei.se and Lowe Börjeson, Assistant Professor, Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, lowe@humangeo.su.se
A significant part of the global population is poor and at the same time directly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods. Poverty is evidently a pressing social and environmental issue. This panel will address the multifaceted and complex interrelationships between poverty and landscape changes at different levels of scale. Focus will be on poverty in relation to decision-making, investments made by land managers, human settlement patterns vis a vis landscape changes; and on poverty as a driver of landscape change in different settings and at different scales. Papers discussing the role of poverty in institutional and power dynamics, knowledge generation, and development polices in the fields of landscape management are also welcome. Different types of case studies, including historical trajectories, various spatial contexts and comparative studies as well as conceptual or theoretical papers primarily dealing with different aspects of poverty and landscape change are of interest for this panel.


Landscape dynamics and sustainable resource use: On theories, concepts and methodological tools for integrative studies of human society and nature
Workshop leaders: Annika Dahlberg, Dept of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, annika.dahlberg@natgeo.su.se and Marie Stenseke, Dept of Geography, University of Gothenburg, Marie.Stenseke@geography.gu.se
Natural resource use and conservation are hotly debated issues in relation to social development, environmental justice, landscape transformation and the role of different driving forces. Theories, concepts and methods to explore and explain the integrated relationships between the human sphere and the non human have evolved in various disciplines. Although sharing some common ground, e.g. a belief in the complexity of the dynamic processes involved, they also diverge, e.g. on the role of systems, values, power, scale, history and potential to generalise. In this session we aim to compare and critically examine different exploratory frameworks with holistic ambitions, identify strengths and shortcomings and initiate a discussion on if and how different scientific perspectives, e.g. political ecology, resilience theory, geographical landscape approach and others, can be used in creative ways that enrich understanding. Can aspects from different perspectives be combined? Do they compete in ways that increase confusion and uncertainty? Are some better suited for certain studies than others?
We invite theoretical and/or empirical contributions from all fields and epistemological perspectives.

Making the city: planning and managing the urban landscape
Workshop leaders: Åsa Boholm, School of Public Administration, University of Gothenburg, asa.boholm@cefos.gu.se and Philip Malmgren, Dept. of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. philip.malmgren@socant.su.se
Urbanization is on the rise. Today about 75% of the population in the industrialized world lives in cities. As the largest consumers of resources, the role of cities in any sustainable future is therefore an unavoidable question. There are numerous suggestions for how cities can be made more sustainable, yet many questions remain unanswered or even unasked.
This panel aims at discussing planning, governing and administration of urban landscapes. Who gets to create the sustainable city? Is the city and the urban citizen, as understood by politicians, scientists, planners, administrators, architects and others, compatible with the city life advocated by different social movements? How do urban dwellers themselves imagine the future of their cities? How do transnational, or ‘transcity’ dialogues shape and/or challenge different understandings of what a city is, what it can be or should be?
We invite scholars from a wide range of disciplines to present papers that explore issues of policies, powers and histories of urban planning and management.

The Power of Power: fossil, nuclear, and renewable energy in the social and political terrain
Workshop leaders: Marcus Carson, Stockholm Environment Institute and Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Marcus.Carson@sociology.su.se and Beppe Karlsson, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University Bengt.Karlsson@socant.su.se 
Given that energy is arguably the lifeblood of modern capitalist economies, it is hardly a surprise that enterprises dealing in the extraction, transport, and production of energy resources enjoy a very privileged power position indeed. That position provides unique leverage to facilitate the process of modernization toward more sustainable forms of energy production – or to obstruct and delay that transformation. Even if oil, coal and gas are likely continue to play a central role in the near term, it seems obvious that other more environmental sustainable sources of energy will supersede them in the longer run. Energy systems based on fossil fuel have for numerous reasons lost much of their social and political attraction and relevance. Wind and solar are making important inroads globally, yet thus far remain on the margins. Hydro-power appears on the verge of being reborn as a sustainable form of energy after long being considered environmentally damaging. And perhaps most striking, nuclear energy has made a remarkable come-back during the past decade under the banner of “clean” energy. Moreover, while the use of fossil fuels has been conducive to highly centralized systems of production and distribution, the new forms are by nature broadly distributed.  Each of these developments contributes to a shifting landscape in the social and political dimensions of energy. What remains to be seen is how well and how fast new enterprises will successfully challenge entrenched energy giants, to what extent established actors will embrace new technologies to stay in the game, and how these actors will pursue their chosen strategies.  
This workshop invites both theoretical and empirical contributions that critically explore the shifting social and political consequences of nuclear, hydro, solar, wind industry as well as the fossil-based energy sector. We are especially interested in papers that examine the  strategies of these industries to project themselves as green, seeking therefore to capture the “sustainable” slot, and the ways in which energy sources earlier seen as “problem” industries are now effectively portraying themselves as contributing to sustainability. Contributions from all social scientific disciplines and theoretical perspectives are invited.