Stewardship for Planet Earth: Sustainable Resources & Governance - call for papers

Climate change, unprecedented urbanisation, increasingly transnational flows of people, capital and materials are profoundly challenging a sustainable management of resources. Stewardship is a way of responding to these challenges by invoking an ethics of responsible planning and management. Its application can be found in many areas of public life: in environmental policy, economics, health, theology, land use, planning & community. At the same time, it assumes a legitimacy to decide, intervene and control. Who decides, and how? How might sustainable resources be governed and at what level? And what role is there for ethics, culture, business, politics and institutions?

On 6 & 7 November 2014, the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources (UCL ISR) & UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction (GCII) will be hosting a two day conference in London that will seek to explore the concept of stewardship for planet earth from a multitude perspectives: multidisciplinarity of research; international value chains and international relations; ethics; experience on the ground and in history and exploring new concepts of governing stewardship. The programme will consist of a mix of plenary, parallel and networking sessions with speakers from across UCL and a range of external speakers from grassroots community organisations to high profile national and international speakers.

We now invite applications from academic colleagues and early career researchers (UCL and other) interested in presenting their findings at the symposium event. The symposium provides an excellent opportunity for you to present your work to a mixed audience of academics, industry representative, NGOs and policy-makers. Interested parties are invited to submit an abstract of up to 250 words outlining the research they would wish to present, under the following themes.

• Challenges to Stewardship & Resource Use 
• Local approaches to stewardship: Cultures of ownership, conflicts, and cooperation
• Emerging new forms of Governing Stewardship

The Conference Organising Committee will consider all abstracts and make a selection that best fits the research theme of the symposium. Limited travel expenses may be available for speakers not based in London. All speakers are expected to submit a draft paper in advance; a high-level publication (special journal issue / book) is planned.