Early Career Researchers Dialogues event on 28 – 29 October 2021, titled “Earth System Governance in Turbulent Times: Pathways to Just and Green Recovery”

In late October this year, our joint research centre SlovakGlobe, represented by Stanislava Brnkaľáková, co-organised an international early career researchers event of the Earth System Governance research community. Members of our SEA team also took part, namely Tomáš Szabo, Natalia Novakova, and Natália Matviaková. As the event name suggests, its main goal was to foster existing, as well as future communication and collaboration among early career researchers of the network. This was reflected in the programme, which consisted of interactive group activities focused on communication, cooperation, and getting to know each other.

Apart from these activities, lectures from experienced researchers from all over the world were part of the programme as well. These included:

  • prof. Susan Park, who talked about eco-justice for harm from international development,
  • prof. Louis Kotzé, who delved into law in context of earth system governance,
  • prof. Letícia Merino, who talked about policies of natural resources and extractive economic models,
  • a prof. Aarti Gupta, who presented on anticipatory governance of speculative technologies.
These lectures were of inspirational character, thus had the objective of introducing a topic and spur a debate among the participants, which every one of the lectures achieved successfully. Have there not been a schedule, quite strictly adhered to by the organisers, all four of the lectures and discussions would have gone way over their given time slot. Our colleagues took active part in the event by joining in on the discussions and actively networking with other members of this internationally acclaimed research community. There were also multiple opportunities to become active part of the community, among others the volunteer opening for early careers coordinator, which Ms. Novakova, among other participants, took and is currently communicating about further steps and long-term vision for the role with the network. We are thrilled that thanks to co-organising the international ESG conference and various other events, such as this one, we are keeping in touch with such an interesting and important international organisation as the Earth System Governance network.