Research Themes
Cultural Policy Mobility
I have a lonstanding interest in the processes that drive the uptake of policy ideas and tropes across the world. By empirically exploring how and why certain ideas become mobile, I hope to shed light on processes of "friction", "fast policy", and "policy synchronisation". In doing so, I focus on the links between culture and development, by researching the global spread of cultural and creative industries as a policy discourse, through empirical work across African countries.
Shipping in the Anthropocene
Given the urgency of addressing anthropogenic carbon emissions to curb climate change, I aim to understand the urgent need of decarbonising the maritime shipping industry. As international shipping occurs between countries on the high seas, its emissions were not directly targeted by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol or the 2015 Paris Agreement. This makes the regulation of shipping emissions in the “global environmental commons” a complex matter. Hardin’s argues in Tragedy of the Commons that common use of resources only works in environments with limited populations, and suggests further “enclosure” of commons in order to ensure their economic and ecological viability. Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990) refutes Hardin’s claims, by showing that commons can and are managed without resorting to private enclosure.
The theoretical conundrum of governing the commons manifests practically in the context of environmental regulation, when tensions emerge between the willingness to set international agreements and the ability to implement them through domestic policies. My research explores these tensions through the nascent regulation of international shipping by focusing on two related issues.
First, I analyse the global-local regulatory context that aims to make changes within the existing political economy of shipping. Based on this, I will advance a conceptual framework for public policy to govern the oceanic commons.
Second, I investigate if sailing ships are a feasible “prefigurative” alternative to conventional cargo ships. The “sail cargo” movement aims to decarbonize shipping by using technology that has been around for thou-sands of years. They aim to show that commercially viable cargo transport with sailing vessels is possible but warn that merely changing the propulsion mechanism will not suffice. The problem, they argue, is not simply the technology or type of fuel used, but excessive consumption and the demand for shipping this creates.
By analysing the regulatory and prefigurative climate action in the shipping industry, through interviewing poli-cymakers, document analysis, and participant observation, I will clarify tensions between the “ecomodernist” belief in the “creative destruction” of innovation to grow out of polluting technologies and the “degrowth” belief that only less consumption can avert disastrous climate change. I explores these competing perspectives in environmental politics through the example of the shipping industry.
Greening the Arts, Fostering Environmental Citizenship?
Through this research, I explore the links between culture and sustainability, by looking at the roles culture (as expression, praxis, heritage, and identity) play in transitions to sustainable societies. Previously, I have explored these links in broad terms through my participation in the research network Investigating Cultural Sustainability. This word led to publications that explored the question of how cultural policies can play a more active and focused role in transitioning to sustainable societies.
I have since shifted my focus somewhat, by looking more at the question of what constitutes citizenship in the Anthropocene. I hope to advance our thinking on how to connect cosmopolitanism and environmental citizenship in relation to cultural policy. In doing so, I indirectly build on Ulrich Beck’s unfinished project ‘Methodological Cosmopolitanism – In the Laboratory of Climate Change’, which he was working on when he passed away in 2015. His posthumously published book, The Metamorphosis of the World (Beck 2016) analyses how the cosmopolitanised world can react to climate change as it unfolds. This book raises questions and proposes approaches, but does so through sociological analysis, leaving many questions for cultural policy responses unaddressed. This project asks how cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanisation can help inform a new kind of ‘cosmopolitan environmental citizenship’, beyond mere national citizenship. In doing so, we will explore the future of cultural policy in the ‘Anthropocene’.