There is growing global consensus about what hinders swift and adequate action to confront climate change. It seems that awareness, knowledge, technology and resources are not the limiting factors – politics, however, is. At present, different existing ways of collective decision-making, popular input, multilayered globalized governance and direct action are reconsidered to attune them with the challenges of climate change. But in order to understand how this major political task has emerged, we need to read into the past. The RSPH Summer School wants to do exactly this: to explore how and understand why environmental concerns have informed political thought and action – and vice versa – in modern times.

In doing so, the summer school aims to bring back politics into environmental history and studies. How do some of the core concerns of political historians (e.g. democracy, legitimacy, policy-making, governance, ideology and interest representation) tie in with environmental concerns? What can political history add to environmental historiography – and vice versa? And how might political history help bring into focus ‘the political’ when it comes to the natural environment?

The summer school will engage with these and other questions through a variety of activities (e.g. lectures by experts, discussions, workshops, assignments, excursions) along the lines of four distinct themes:

Ideas and Ideals
Actors and Agency
Institutional Change
Political Imaginaries and Green Futures

Speakers, discussants and moderators will include leading political and environmental historians and scholars, as well as actors from the field of voluntary associations, NGOs and policy-making.

Registration: please register with bureau@onderzoekschoolpolitiekegeschiedenis.nl before 31 May 2022 and mention a) your home university b) whether you are a PhD candidate, rma student or ma student registered with the OPG (Research School Political History). If not please mention the research school or (research) master program you are enrolled in.