We argue that the democratization of global governance will ultimately depend upon the creation of an appropriate public sphere that connects decision‐making processes with transnational constituency. The emergence of such a public sphere would require more transparency in international organizations as well as institutional settings in which policy‐makers respond to stakeholders’ concerns. Organized civil society plays a key role by exposing global rule‐making to public scrutiny and bringing citizens’ concerns onto the agenda. We illustrate the prospects and difficulties of building a transnational public sphere with the example of the WTO.

Resolving the grand challenges and wicked problems of the Anthropocene will require skillfully combining a broad range of knowledge and understandings-both scientific and non-scientific-of Earth systems and human societies. One approach to this is transdisciplinary research, which has gained considerable interest over the last few decades, resulting in an extensive body of literature about transdisciplinarity. However, this has in turn led to the challenge that developing a good understanding of transdisciplinary research can require extensive effort. Here we provide a focused overview and perspective for disciplinary and interdisciplinary researchers who are interested in efficiently obtaining a solid understanding of transdisciplinarity. We describe definitions, characteristics, schools of thought, and an exemplary three-phase model of transdisciplinary research. We also discuss three key challenges that transdisciplinary research faces in the context of addressing the broader challenges of the Anthropocene, and we consider approaches to dealing with these specific challenges, based especially on our experiences with building up transdisciplinary research projects at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies. ll

No abstract

No abstract