14th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference: Social Science in Our time
In a time when the world faces an increasing number of global challenges – at the same time as scientific facts are questioned – environmental social science is more important than ever. The 14th Nordic Environmental Social Science (NESS) Conference is hosted by the Division of Social Sciences at Luleå University of Technology 10-12 June 2019, with a welcome reception on Sunday the 9th.
NESS 2019 focuses on new directions in Nordic environmental social science research and particularly emphasise the importance of social science for managing current challenges on the international and national as well as the local governance agenda. From a multi-disciplinary social science perspective, we focus on the interconnectedness of the global challenges of today and the available solutions on all institutional levels. Whereas other disciplines offer technical solutions to certain environmental challenges, environmental social science is key for these solutions to be adopted in societies. Social science is also crucial in order to understand why conflicts occur – and how they can be overcome. Social science perspectives are thus invaluable for managing current sustainability challenges such as (but not restricted to) climate change, food, water, energy, natural resource extraction and the development towards a new bio economy.
The NESS 2019 workshops cover various aspects of today’s environmental social science in a broad sense and we thus welcome both theoretical/conceptual papers and empirically focused papers as well as policy relevant papers, focusing on all levels from the international to the local level. The hosting Social Science Division at LTU specialises in close collaborations regarding environmental social science within law, history, political science and economics. We welcome 250 Nordic and international researchers to NESS 2019 to emphasise the important role of environmental social science in our time.