Governing Global Challenges

Governing Global Challenges is a research group that explores the governance of global challenges – from migration and food security to pandemics and climate change – as a matter of policy coordination between local, national and international, public and private actors.

Rearview shot of a crowd protesting outside a public building. — Photo: Colourbox

Affiliation

About the research group

Pressing challenges – including climate change, cybersecurity, gender equality, fake news, migration, or pandemics – confront communities and policymakers across the globe. These pressing global challenges provoke – and require – rapid societal and political attention and solutions, and as the causes and effects transcend national borders, policy action need to coordinate local, national and international, as well as public and private, interventions.

Our research group addresses such complex, global wicked problems at the intersections of public policy, organization, law and politics, and political mobilization theory.

The aim of the Global Politics: Emerging Trends and Debates seminar series is to expose interested faculty, postdocs, PhD students, BA and MA students to innovative and rigorous research. The seminar series presents rigorous scholarly research in a way that is accessible for students and faculty from multiple disciplines. The seminar series will cover a wide range of topics related to global politics, including but not limited to, international relations, global governance, peace and security, democracy, political economy, free speech, and human rights. The seminar series will be held on a regular basis throughout the academic year and will be open to all members of the academic community. The seminar series will provide an opportunity for scholars and students to engage with cutting-edge research in global politics, and to develop new ideas and collaborations. The seminar aims to contribute to the intellectual vibrancy of the Department of Government, and to the broader academic community in Bergen.

Questions guiding our research

- What are the global regimes for governing global challenges such as migration, climate change etc., how have they emerged over time, and why have they developed their specific organizational and policy foci?

- How are the Sustainable Development Goals implemented in specific organisations and places and how can we explain variation over space, time, and policy domains?

- How do local institutions, practices and political struggles interact with the global governance of any one challenge?

- How do governance regimes interact and constrain one another, for example with regard to climate change and climate migration or cybersecurity and conflict?

- How does violence in civil wars affect women’s empowerment and gender relations?

-How can academic institutions in the global south secure that its knowledge grows out of its own culture and contributes to its own development needs?

Projects

Autocratization Dynamics: Innovations in Research-Embedded Learning

Autocratization Dynamics aims to position UiB-CMI LawTransform as a global leader in law and politics research and education. Partnering with top institutions worldwide, the project will explore the effects of autocratization and develop innovative, student-driven courses. The goal is to educate students as critical knowledge producers and to leverage LawTransform's expertise in interdisciplinary and international collaboration.

Read more about the project here.

WarEffects

In this project led by Carlo Koos, they explore how, and under what conditions violence in civil wars affects women's empowerment in particular and gender relations more broadly at the subnational and individual level. Empirically, we will combine survey experiments, archival data, GIS, and qualitative field research in Colombia, DR Congo, and Sri Lanka. Our goal is to significantly advance knowledge at the intersection of peace and conflict research, gender studies, and development economics. Read more about the project here.

Decolonizing Epistemologies: Disciplines and the University in Relation to the Society and the World (NORDHED II)

This project led by Lise Rakner, is a collaboration between UiB's Department of Government and Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Uganda. It aims to build the intellectual and infrastructural capacity of MISR's interdisciplinary MPhil/PhD program and launch a research agenda on decolonizing epistemologies. The NORHED II project continues a long-term cooperation, focusing on transforming higher education and exploring the relationship between locality and universality.

Breaking BAD (Concluded)

African countries are clamping down on democracy, adopting legal restrictions on key civil and political rights that form the basis of democratic rule, including freedoms of association, speech, and information; the ability to choose political leaders; rule of law with recourse to independent courts; and rights and freedoms related to reproduction and family life, gender equality, sexual orientation and gender identity. Domestically, the restrictions privilege some social groups at the expense of other groups, increasing social and economic inequalities and contributing to social unrest and outward migration. Internationally, the African democratic backlash challenges global actors who have pressured developing countries to politically liberalize in the post-Cold War period. Yet, we have insufficient understanding of why this democratic backlash is happening, what the implications are, and which responses are effective under different conditions.

The point of departure of the project is that the backlash is not uniform in terms of what elements of democracy is under pressure, where it is under pressure, how it is under pressure and when this pressure matters. We therefore adopt a disaggregated approach to democracy and a multi method approach.