Ladies and gentlemen,

we're happy to invite you to another edition of the Berlin Sustainability Talk. On October 8th, 4 – 6 p.m., Prof. Elke Schüßler will give a presentation entitled "Moving Deckchairs Around the Titanic? Analyzing the Organizational Dynamics of UN Climate Conferences between 1995 and 2012". The event will be held at the conference room (room 3.1c) of the Environmental Policy Research Centre (FFU), Ihnestraße 22, 14195 Berlin.

You can find Prof. Schüßler’s website at http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/institute/management/schuessler/index.html 

Recent research in the field of organization studies has described United Nations (UN) conferences as "field-configuring events" that can act as catalysts of change, especially as organizations and governments struggle to develop global solutions to complex problems. In an effort to understand the conditions that allow such change to occur, we study the series of annual COPs between 1995 and 2012 and uncover variations in event structures, processes and outcomes that explain why climate conferences have not led to effective solutions to combat human-induced global warming. Our results in particular highlight that growing field complexity and issue multiplication compromise the change potential of a field-configuring event series in favor of field maintenance. In the field of climate policy, this means that more and more actors find COP participation useful for their purposes, but their activity is increasingly disconnected from the issue of mitigating climate change.

The Berlin Sustainability Talk is a monthly brown bag seminar at the Environmental Policy Research Centre (ffu). It provides a forum for discussion and exchange about ongoing research projects and recent trends in environmental policy research with scholars of other institutes, business representatives, politics, and public administrations as well as the interested public. A registration for the event is not required.