LIST OF PANELS

 =Development pathways, or the way in which countries or regions develop, drive not only outcomes such as economic growth and employment, but also outcomes related to sustainability and climate change. The IPCC Working Group III Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) argues that strengthening the capability of societies’ to mitigate emissions in an accelerated manner, as well as, achieving sustainable development would require the shifting of development pathways towards sustainability (SDPS). This argument take sharp significance in the case of low-income or middle-come countries, where developmental aspirations play the more important role in driving policy decisions relative to sustainability considerations.
 
Existing literature demonstrates that multiple channels – such as the nature of economic activity or the economic structure, spatial patterns of development, degree of inequality, and population growth – have important direct and indirect implications for GHG emissions. Furthermore, literature also suggests that integrating mitigation considerations require non-marginal shifts in countries’ developmental pathways; shifts which address interlinkages across sectors, classes, and the economy. However, there is limited empirical research on how policy levers and governance strategies can be used to exploit synergies between developmental aspects such as employment, education, mobility, housing and mitigation or sustainability outcomes in different contexts.
 
Finally, analytical approaches also need improvements. Models often only account for development as an exogenous input, which does not enable the exploration of interlinkages between development and sustainability considerations; when developmental factors are considered endogenously, they are usually done in a limited manner. Models and scenarios often also overlook important social scientific considerations such distributional consequences, power differentials, and aspirations of affected stakeholders, at the risk of recommending strategies which may reproduce existing injustices. There is also a need to better incorporate issues related to uncertainty, innovation, inertia and irreversibility within broad development contexts.
 
Accordingly, some of the key research questions that this panel seeks to address are the following. What enabling conditions related to governance make shifting development pathways possible? What lessons, applicable in other contexts, can be extracted from successful examples of SDPS? Which enablers are context-specific, and which are more broadly applicable? What analytical approaches can be used to analyse shifting of development pathways towards sustainability and mitigation through policy levers?

The papers could make empirical contributions based on original data collection, or make contributions related to improved or novel analytical approaches; in either case, the contributions should indicate how they enrich our understanding of the interplay between development and mitigation, and the role of policy processes or levers in shifting developmental pathways towards mitigation. 

Empirical contributions would include analysis based on primary data collection which identify and link policy processes or policy levers to developmental and mitigation- or sustainability-related outcomes. Contributions which take a holistic view of development are encouraged.  

In terms of improved analytical approaches, we invite contributions which have the potential to address some of the methodological shortcomings -- for example, better representations of institutions and other relevant social scientific characteristics, uncertainty, inertia, feedbacks, cross-sectoral linkages --  mentioned in the description above.