LIST OF PANELS

As evidence of climate change and its devastating effects – from disastrous flooding and large-scale wildfires, to harvest failure, biodiversity breakdown and forced migration – accumulates, so do calls on scholars to rethink their roles as professionals and global citizens. Exemplary is the intense discussion of a recent initiative on the regulation listserv by Julien Etienne earlier this year. Etienne had asked regulation scholars to “drop our tools” and rethink our scholarly assumptions about a stable future, our concepts and questions, our teaching approaches, but also our interaction with regulators and society. Beyond promoting existing social movements and networks which operate in this emerging science-political sphere (e.g., Faculty for a Future, Scientist Rebellion), the discussion raised important questions for the policy studies community:

(1)    How suitable are our existing conceptual, methodological and analytical tools in policy studies to explore climate emergency, its regulation and governance, and its implications for global democracy and justice?

(2)    How can we direct research projects, programs and the discipline at large to address the global warming challenges? What are the key questions and areas of investigation that urgently need more, and more systematic attention?

(3)    How can we teach policy studies, training students to critically analyse the role of policymaking in countering existential threats to the planet and to develop effective and inclusive solutions?

(4)    How can policy scholars conceptualize and enact their future role vis-à-vis climate emergency? To what extent should this role go beyond knowledge brokerage and include civil disobedience and political activism?

Through discussing these questions from different strands within and beyond policy studies, the roundtable wants to provide a collective moment of stock-taking and reflection. Much of critical discussion and action is still taking place in separate communities and places, and have yet to become focused in broader public policy debates. Critical Policy Studies is encouraging debate on how to link fragmented academic and public debates, and to bring key insights and contributions related to the climate crisis to the center of public policy as discipline and practice.

We call for statements of interest to speak to these questions in a roundtable format. The statement should include an outline of the applicant’s answers to the above questions and/or their arguments about the future of policy studies vis-à-vis the climate emergency.

The Roundtable will take place in hybrid format. Confirmed participants include Dr. Timmons Roberts of The climate Social Science Network at Brown University.

Roundtable contributions should address (some of) the following questions:

(1)    How suitable are our existing conceptual, methodological and analytical tools in policy studies to explore climate emergency, its regulation and governance, and its implications for global democracy and justice?

(2)    How can we direct research projects, programs and the discipline at large to address the global warming challenges? What are the key questions and areas of investigation that urgently need more, and more systematic attention?

(3)    How can we teach policy studies, training students to critically analyse the role of policymaking in countering existential threats to the planet and to develop effective and inclusive solutions?

(4)    How can policy scholars conceptualize and enact their future role vis-à-vis climate emergency? To what extent should this role go beyond knowledge brokerage and include civil disobedience and political activism?

The critical policy study forum section is inviting participating scholars to submit contributions to the forum section of the journal.