Governing Environmental Mobilities

In a globalized world, we are facing a continuous growth of movements of people, goods, materials, and information. These movements, analytically termed mobilities, actively intersect with processes of environmental change.​ We coin the term environmental mobilities to refer to the movements of human and nonhuman entities and the environmental factors and impacts associated with these.

For example, some mobilities (such as hazardous waste) are inherently harmful to the environment, while other mobilities (such as migration) are set in motion by the impacts of environmental change. Our research centers on the governance of these environmental mobilities. In particular, a mobilities lens helps to understand and capture environmental issues that move, change form, and fluctuate in their central problematique and whose governance is not (yet) highly or centrally institutionalized.

See this 2-minute video for a more detailed introduction to our new concept of environmental mobilities and their governance.

https://youtu.be/9h7GSy8paLQ

For more detail, read our position paper:

Boas, I., Kloppenburg, S., van Leeuwen, J., & Lamers, M. (2018). Environmental Mobilities: An Alternative Lens to Global Environmental Governance. Global Environmental Politics, 18(4), 107-126; it can be downloaded via https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/glep_a_00482.

Latest publications and reports

  • Special Issue: "Generating Societal Value from Improved Weather, Water & Ice Forecasts in the Polar Regions", edited by Machiel Lamers (ENP) and Daniela Liggett (University of Canterbury, New Zealand).

    In this special issue, we seek to better understand the complexities of actors, information needs, information systems andinfrastructures, funding structures, data management approaches, andapplications of weather and sea ice prediction services of various end-user groups in the polar regions. For more information, download the call for abstracts. We invite you to submit abstracts by 1 November 2018.

  • More publications can be found under Staff and PhD Project pages.