Earth System Governance is a global research alliance and the first global social science network on governance and global environmental change. The Earth System Governance (ESG) network was launched in 2009 and has since grown considerably. Its annual conferences regularly bring together hundreds of researchers from around the world. The wider ESG community is united around questions of governance in the Anthropocene: who exercises authority, how and why? The ESG research agenda is as vast as its network. Beyond the professors and senior researchers, ESG relies on a global network of research centres.
In March 2020, the Scientific Committee of the Earth System Governance project approved the creation of the latest and seventeenth centre in the Global Alliance of Earth System Governance Research Centres in Paris. The Paris Research Centre is jointly led by Sciences Po, represented by Carola Klöck, and IDDRI, represented by Sébastien Treyer.
The Paris Research Centre will make environmental research more visible within Sciences Po, and will strengthen collaborations and exchanges between the different units and departments, such as between CERI and IDDRI, but also between the Paris Research Centre and other centres and researchers of the ESG project. France has not yet been very active in the Earth System Governance project, and we hope that by creating a research centre, we will be able to strengthen the presence of French research in the network, as well as communicate and promote the network's activities in France. The next Earth System Governance conference, to be held in Bratislava in September 2020, will be an excellent opportunity to discuss future cooperation and exchange.
The creation of the Paris Research Centre is part of a set of initiatives and efforts to place the environment at the heart of the university, including - but not limited to - the Interdisciplinary Environmental Research Workshop (AIRE), created in 2018 to bring together Sciences Po researchers working on the environment in the different institutes and departments; the new Centre des Politiques de la Terre (CPT), a virtual research laboratory that seeks to develop new approaches to studying socio-environmental phenomena, of which Sciences Po is a partner; or the CERI's research group on the environment and international relations, which has been organising a series of seminars since 2013.