Global Sustainability Governance Workshop 2026: Towards Transnational Planning in the Age of Ecological Crisis

Debates about socio-ecological transformations increasingly pivot around the notion of ‘planning’. Especially in light of growing evidence that economic growth intensifies ecological pressures and may ultimately not be reconcilable with biospheric integrity, contemporary planners have to wrestle with new and often more complex challenges. In this context, indicative and sectoral forms of planning have received renewed attention as potential levers for transformative change (whereas socialist-style centralised planning has remained on the margins of debate). Yet much of this thinking, including in recent academic work, has focused on the local and the national level, even as the ecological crisis unfolds across borders.

The second annual ‘Global Sustainability Governance’ workshop thus invites participants to explore facets of the following three overarching questions:

1) How do planners at the state or substate level factor in transnational dynamics, such as trade flows, resource dependencies or financial linkages?

2) How do states interact in the context of planning, and how is planning among states facilitated by actors such as international organisations (IOs)?

3) How do IOs and other transnational actors engage with questions of planning?

This two-day workshop is designed to foster dialogue between scholars from relevant fields of research across the social sciences and environmental humanities, such as ecological economics, environmental history, human geography, International Relations, organisation studies, political ecology, political economy, public administration, public policy or sociology. The workshop embraces a pluralist stance in welcoming original contributions that address these questions in interesting ways, regardless of theoretical and methodological choices. Contributions with a certain empirical ambition, however enacted, are preferred over purely theoretical pieces.