Call for abstracts for Climate-Biodiversity Frontiers Panel - 2026 Earth System Governance

[Fransen, A. (Anouk)]

Dear all,

 

We are submitting a panel on climate-biodiversity governance for the Earth System Governance conference in Bath 2026 (8 – 10 September), details are listed below.

If you are interested, please reach out to us, Benedikte Raft (b...@ifs.ku.dk) and Anouk Fransen (a.fr...@uu.nl) by the 12^th of January 2026.

 

All the best,

 

Benedikte and Anouk

 

 

The Frontiers of Climate and Biodiversity Governance

Unprecedented heatwaves, floods, and accelerating ecosystem degradation underscore a growing scientific consensus: climate change and biodiversity loss are deeply intertwined and cannot be governed in isolation. This panel explores emerging approaches to climate–biodiversity governance by taking the notion of the frontier not as a rigid conceptual lens but as an entry point for rethinking the entanglements of climate, biodiversity, and justice.

 

Frontiers have long evoked territorial and conceptual boundaries, historically shaped by colonial imaginaries of conquest, expansion, and control. Yet, drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship, we approach frontiers as not fixed lines but fluid, contested spaces where boundaries, actors, and values are continually produced and contested. Thinking of governance in terms of frontiers foregrounds how institutions, actors, institutions, and ecologies are rendered governable (or excluded), and how boundaries between climate and biodiversity are actively (re)made.

By approaching climate–biodiversity governance as an evolving frontier, this panel opens space for examining the challenges, tensions, and possibilities emerging in efforts to align these twinning challenges.

 

This panel seek to explore the following questions:

• Where and how is climate–biodiversity governance emerging, and what consequences does it generate?
• What tensions arise when climate action is prioritized over biodiversity protection – or when biodiversity is prioritized over climate action?
• How are climate and biodiversity being framed (e.g. as interconnected risks, opportunities, governance targets) and enacted through tools and techniques (e.g. Nature Tech)?
• Who is considered to be a legitimate actor to govern these twin challenges, and who is deemed illegitimate? Who gains and who loses as new governance arrangements take shape?
• How are issues of justice articulated, contested, and transformed in these evolving frontiers?

This panel directly engages with the theme of Architecture and Agency by interrogating how authority, knowledge, and justice are configured across the shifting frontiers of climate and biodiversity governance. If interested, please send abstracts of up to 300 words to Benedikte Raft (b...@ifs.ku.dk) and Anouk Fransen (a.fr...@uu.nl) by the 12^th of January 2026. The panel organisers will then submit the full set of abstracts by the 15^th of January 2026.