The 10th International Symposium on Environmental Sociology in East Asia Transboundary Climate and Environmental Governance in East Asia 31 October to 2 November, 2025
As achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 has become a global consensus, it is urgent to take close look into how high carbon emitting manufacturing countries react to the influences of global climate governance and further jointly overcome path dependence on fossil fuels and alter to green socio-economic transition. It is also crucial to examine the potential policy-makings and regulations from government to Industries as well as civic participation in order to establish mindsets aside from the structure of Developmental State. The greenhouse gas emission structures of East Asian countries, with Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan as example, not only act as intensive roles in global supply chains, but also suggest the crucial need for producing knowledge framework to understand the dominant carbon emission characteristics in East Asia.
These dominant industrial structures with high energy and water consuming and high carbon emitting characteristics reflect the brown economy that East Asian countries are currently embedded in, have carried out a high degree of accumulation by dispossession and environment grabbing. The large manufacturing industries have profound impacts on East Asian countries’ green transition, and climate governance, including carbon reduction policy-making, systems, regulations and social participations, which demand nuanced knowledge intervention. In other words, to determine whether the global net-zero carbon emission goal could be achieved, we need to understand how East Asian countries respond to net-zero carbon emission transition under the dominance structure of high-carbon emission industries.
In facing of contemporary climate and environmental problems, the analytical approaches and methodologies of sociology need to be reconstructed to apply transboundary and scale crossing implications from the concept of “cosmopolitanism,” while also require encompassing analytical horizons that span disciplines, technologies, social classes, ethics, generations, genders, and ethnicities.
This academic awareness brings out this year’s theme “Transboundary Climate and Environmental Governance in East Asia,” which emphasizes the further expansion and (re)construction of the scale of governance. From the perspectives of the global net-zero carbon transition frameworks, how to academically construct and analyze the unique climate and environmental governance situations of East Asian countries is the goal that the East Asian environmental sociology community strives to achieve.
Both theoretical and empirical papers related to conference theme are welcome. Other topics within environmental sociology are also welcome, including but not limited to:
Submission
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