A number of previous studies have found compelling evidence for a regulatory expansion in the environmental area that has been ongoing since the beginning of the 1970’s in most industrialized countries.

The Design of International Institutions: Legitimacy, Effectiveness, and Distribution in Global Governance. Why have international institutions over the past decades increasingly opened up to transnational actors, such as NGOs, social movements, and multinational corporations?

Human impacts on global ecosystems are now threatening the very foundations of human welfare and it is generally recognized that mitigating the ecological crisis will require a fundamental reorganization of the social, political, and economic world. In other words, we are facing a Great Green Transformation.

The overarching aim of the project is to further knowledge about the role of the welfare state for climate policy attitudes. Are people more willing to accept decarbonization policies if they are compensated by a generous welfare state?

Many policies currently being enacted to slow climate change and environmental degradation will have distributive - and thereby political - implications.

This project analyzes how distributional effects of de-carbonizing policies are moderated by redistributive social policies, and how this in turn affects the support of incumbent governments. The project generates new knowledge on how countries can develop socially sustainable de-carbonizing policies.

Theories of natural resource management and conservation, such as adaptive management and adaptive co-management, are based on strong but mostly untested assumptions about the importance of engaging local stakeholders in conservation and management efforts.