Section of the Standing Group on Environmental Politics

As environmental crises intensify, addressing them through political action has become more urgent than ever. Report after report unveils the unprecedented speed at which climate change and the surpassing of diverse planetary boundaries are accelerating. Unprecedented challenges demand swift, decisive action. Yet, global attention to these issues is waning, overshadowed and undermined by geopolitical tensions, political backlash, economic stagnation, and polarisation. In many countries, environmental public policies are stagnating or going backwards, and important non-state actors, such as corporations and major philanthropists, are watering down their commitments. Skepticism of the value of international environmental governance is growing. While environmental policy backsliding is familiar, we are at the same time seeing an emergence of new ideas, technologies, and challenges that require attention from the environmental politics community. For instance, a discourse around “Abundance” is quickly taking shape, challenging us to consider ways in which certain “environmental” policies may actually be undermining environmental well-being; the race for rare earth minerals, and the local consequences that can come with it, are in full force; we may or may not be on the brink of a global plastics treaty; and the explosive popularity of general artificial intelligence is raising questions about resource use and bias in information people receive online about the environment and its governance. The list goes on. Taken together, these dynamics illustrate the continuous expansion of challenges, and the growing complexity and urgency of environmental politics, where new technologies, materials, and narratives continually reshape the terrain of policy and activism. In this evolving political context, this section aims to run ten in-person panels plus up to ten virtual panels focusing on current issues in and approaches to environmental politics and policy. The overarching aim is to draw together conceptual expertise and rigorous empirical analysis on the wide range of research fields and subjects of study under the umbrella of environmental politics. We want to facilitate both deep and broad discussions on the state and future of the discipline. Against this backdrop and following the positive experiences from past General Conferences, the idea is to have several sets of thematically related panels, which explore and discuss single issues in depth, combined with other panels that reflect the breadth of the environmental politics research underway today. With this configuration, we aim to provide a stage for discussion within and across the various research fields and subjects, in order to explore, challenge, and re-configure theories surrounding environmental problems, both new and old. In doing so, we seek to inspire conversation, discussion, and networking opportunities that can form the basis of future research and collaborations. In line with our ambitions and experiences from the past years, we will invite full panel proposals and paper proposals in November, and select and create panels after the call has closed in early 2026. The Standing Group has been continuously growing over the last years both in numbers (with more than 400 members to date) and in the diversity of themes it covers. Its sections have been vibrant and over-subscribed in the past. We aim to continue this path and expect to attract a diverse and large number of excellent papers.