Research project Environmental Governance Post-Corona (EPOC)
The COVID-19 pandemic is not only a global health crisis. It is expected to lead to lasting changes in all policy areas of global cooperation and transnational governance – including health, mobility, trade, industry, finance, and sustainability.
We are in a formative moment which I call the Coronavirus Crisis (CVC). Such moments of shock and dislocation make deep structural changes possible. Which one of the possible pathways will be taken, and whether these changes will push the global political agenda towards a more sustainable and just world order remains to be seen.
This project maps, explores, and contributes to the making of some of the critical decisions around the future of global cooperation in sustaintability governance. More specifically, I will study how future imaginaries are changing, and how new fantasmatic orders are emerging regarding global sustainability cooperation and world politics.
The theoretical framing is post-structuralist discourse theory, and the empirical focus is the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) of the United Nations (UN), and its efforts to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The data will be analysed together with societal stakeholders to explore how recovery, improvement, and social transformation are (re)imagines; and what kind of a global sustainability cooperation is emerging in the post-corona global society.