Summer Academy 2011 Climate change and fragile states: Rethinking adaptationAbout the AcademyThe Summer Academy aims to bring PhD students together with senior United Nations University and Munich Re Foundation scientists, academic professors, and other international experts to facilitate the mutual exchange of research and scholarship on climate change and social vulnerability. The 2011 programme will invite a group of outstanding students from graduate programmes around the world to participate in establishing guiding principles for adaptation in fragile states.
The Academy is designed around an interactive forum style of workshops, seminars, debates, case studies and group work as well as keynote presentations. The findings from the Academy’s sessions will be documented in a coherent report that may be useful to both academics and policymakers. Academy students will also be able to utilise the findings and publish work to advance their own research and professional work. The Academy will take place from 18 to 22 July 2011 at the historic Hohenkammer Castle (Schloss Hohenkammer) in the countryside outside Munich, Germany. The sessions will be chaired by Prof. Mohamed Hamza, field expert and former professor at Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), and co-chaired by Prof. Susan Cutter, University of South Carolina, and Prof. Michelle Leighton, University of San Francisco. The 2011 topic
Climate change and climate variability impacts are mediated through a number of complex and interacting factors and conditions (weak governance, lack of capacity to adapt, poverty, inequality, legacy of past conflicts, political instability, ethnic fault lines, etc.). Regardless of the actual cause (variability vs. change) and where both exacerbate existing vulnerabilities, communities have to adapt one way or another. In fragile or unstable states, such an impact could have a potentially stronger effect on peace and stability if adaptation is not handled in a sensitive way and inclusive of civil society.
Fragile states are barely capable of performing key state functions and displaying only very limited governance capacities. The extreme case of the fragile state is the collapsed or failed state – one that is represented as a discrete geographical entity. States in post-conflict crisis situations or in precarious positions economically, environmentally and politically may lack the capacity to respond adequately to environmental shocks. This could tip the balance towards greater vulnerability to climate change impact. However, a direct link between climate change and violent conflict that appears in the media and some political discourses has no substantiated empirical evidence.
The goal of the Summer Academy 2011 is to establish guiding principles for adaptation in fragile states. The aim is not so much to establish linkages between impact and fragility, but to seek a forward-looking approach to “what can be done”, given the complexity of fragile situations. This is not an attempt to come up with yet another universal blueprint that ignores the complexity of both state fragility and climate change processes. Contextualisation is key to adapting guiding principles to concrete plans and action. The Academy will facilitate and engage participants in a dialogue to explore the present knowledge base of climate change, security and state fragility issues, identifying critical gaps in adaptation thinking. ApplicationsWe invite qualified PhD students who have an interdisciplinary focus and are working on research or dissertations related to climate-change adaptation in the context of fragile states to apply for the 2011 Summer Academy. Most participants are expected to be graduate or post-graduate students. PhD students would be ideally in their second or third year of research. However, a few places will be reserved for practitioners who wish to take a step back from their operational work to engage with young researchers on this strategic issue.
Applications are required to be submitted via e-mail:
summeracademy@ehs.unu.edu no later than 15 January 2011.
To apply for the 2011 Summer Academy, please read the information brochure in the download section on the right and visit http://www.ehs.unu.edu/article/read/summer-academy |