Department of Environmental Politics.  Climate Change Conference in Paris 2015. Final plenary session. Photo: Nick Reimer/klimaretter.info

Department of Environmental Politics


Tackling environmental problems is fraught with uncertainty and social conflict, and requires transformative change across multiple sectors. Environmental policy faces new challenges because such sustainability transformations require both structural and individual-level changes that go far beyond the realm of environmental ministries. Sustainability transformations require greater engagement and cooperation across different sectors and levels – both governmental and non-governmental actors; they also require new ways of understanding and communicating complexity and knowledge. Our research aims at enhancing society's transformations towards a more sustainable world.

We understand sustainability transformations as social and political processes, which we analyse from three distinct but interlinked research topics – each reflected in a working group.The working group 'Sustainability Narratives' is committed to identifying narratives of sustainability transformations and examining whether and how these narratives promote sustainability. A central focus of our working group 'Transformative Governance and Science-Policy-Society Interfaces' is to better understand knowledge needs of policy makers and how they acquire and exchange knowledge through different science-policy-society interfaces and to co-design processes. Our research in the working group 'Behaviour and Policy Instruments' addresses how policy instruments can support transformations to a sustainable future and to achieve multi-dimensional sustainability objectives for people and nature.

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