Skip to main content
This course is archived
Course date
June 29–July 3, 2020
Location
Budapest
Application deadline
Course delivery
In-person

If Europe and the rest of the world are to achieve their 2030 sustainable development goals, significant action needs to be taken during the next 10 years to address the impacts of environmental pollution on people’s health and well-being, the alarming rate of biodiversity loss, climate change and its increasing impacts, and the overconsumption of natural resources. The issues faced are of unprecedented scale and urgency, bringing challenges to how practitioners across society respond to them and how knowledge is used to support action. There are, nevertheless, several reasons for hope, amid increased public awareness of the need for fundamental shifts in how we source energy, move around, and produce, consume, and dispose of food and other material goods and services. There is increasing attention and actions from the business, research, and finance sectors, more and more social, institutional, and technological innovations, community initiatives, and ambitious policies like the European Green Deal.

While these trends are positive, Europe and the world will not achieve their sustainability goals by continuing to promote economic growth at any cost and seeking to manage the environmental and social impacts ex-post. More and more citizens are demanding that political and business leaders and policymakers seize the opportunity and use the next decade to radically transform, scale up, and speed up actions to avoid irreversible change and damage and start on a sustainability journey.

Enabling and embarking on transformative change for sustainability nevertheless calls for rethinking the interfaces between knowledge and actions for public policies, businesses, communities, and individual citizens. Governments will need to work closely together to harness the ambition, creativity, and power of citizens, businesses, and communities. EU and international institutions and countries have a vital role in these processes, as do cities and local communities. They can accelerate systemic change by promoting innovation, fostering networking, mobilizing communities, and reorienting finance towards sustainability. They can also create the conditions for a just transition, help identify and navigate risks uncertainties, and unintended consequences, and develop needed knowledge and skills.

This calls for exploring alternative knowledge creation and governance approaches and tools to respond to the complex challenges of this decade and century.

Sustainability needs to become the overarching principle guiding coherent policies and actions across society. This overarching principle can in turn build on a series of governance principles including key principles of EU Law such as fundamental rights or subsidiarity and specifically the four environmental principles of the EU Treaty: precaution, prevention, rectification at source, and polluter pays.

Transition processes and the innovations inherent to them are unpredictable and often produce unintended negative consequences and surprises, and so require mixtures of anticipatory and adaptive governance approaches to navigate them. In this context, the precautionary principle is crucial to help decision-makers take action when there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, where the scientific evidence is uncertain or missing, and where values are in dispute. Although sometimes interpreted as a barrier to technological progress, the principle can be a source of guidance when risk assessment tools are inadequate and actually foster innovation. It also opens up a range of response options centered on acknowledging ignorance and uncertainty. 

The purpose of this Summer School is to explore the implications of sustainability transitions from the perspectives of knowledge, policy-making, innovations, and actions across society. It will explore a range of knowledge challenges and pathways for long-term transitions to sustainability, including the possible ways forward for the effective and appropriate application of the precautionary principle in sustainability governance.

It will bring together a solid and diverse group of scholars and practitioners with expertise in earth systems research, risk assessment, and management, business transformation, innovation governance, and innovations in sustainability governance with experience in supporting decision-making under conditions of uncertainty and complexity.

The school will seek to do this through a learning process that convenes a diverse group of participants (namely practitioners and researchers from the EU, national and international policy-making institutions, NGOs, business, academia, and international organizations) to engage in an exercise of mutual learning. Participants will be able to experience and compare different approaches to what they already know, in a critical perspective, with intellectual rigor, and supported by the scientific robustness of theoretical inputs. The school will use a combination of learning methods - from lectures to case studies analysis and practical exercises. There will be opportunities for participants to make use of their creative potential, in a critical and reflexive attitude towards their own personal and organizational experience. The learning approach will enable the school’s contents to link to participants’ specific contexts and backgrounds, with particular attention devoted to how to transfer knowledge into working realities.

This course is the sixth edition of the highly successful 2015 to 2019 SUN courses on the same topic. The faculty is composed of renowned and high-profile scholars and practitioners with broad experience in interdisciplinary research and integrative policy-making. The team includes the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency and two of its senior managers, the former Senior Advisor of EEA and 'Late Lessons' project leader, the former Chair of the Scientific Committee of EEA, as well as professors from renowned Universities and Business executives.

******************

This summer course can be taken as part of the European and Transnational Governance Network (ETGN) certificate program.
To find out more about how to obtain the Joint Certificate on European and Transnational Governance, please visit https://www.ceu.edu/etgn/ .
 

Completed CEU Summer University Application Form

We strongly advise the use of Google Chrome to enable the full functionality of the form.

Notes:

  • You may apply to a maximum of two summer courses. In case of being admitted, you can only attend both if the two courses do not overlap in time.
  • If you applied to CEU before, please use your existing login and password to start a new application. If you do not remember your password from last year click on Forgotten Password. With technical problems, bugs, or errors related to the online application forms please contact the CEU IT Help Desk.
  • Right after login, please select the ”Summer University” radio button from the "Type of course" list, and leave all other fields empty.
  • All application materials must be submitted with the online application form(s). Materials sent by postal mail, electronic mail, or fax are not considered.
  • The maximum allowable file size for upload is 2MB per file and the acceptable file formats are PDF, JPG, and JPEG. Ensure all security features (e.g. passwords and encryption) are removed from the documents before uploading them.
  • Applications cannot be edited after submission. Please submit your application only when it is 100% final and complete.
  • Further user instructions for the online application are included in the form itself. Should you have questions regarding the application form, check the relevant Frequently Asked Questions.
  • Applications submitted after the deadline will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Inquiries

If you need help or more information during the application process, please feel free to contact the SUN staff via email.

Notification

The SUN Office will notify applicants about the selection results in April. Please check the 'Dates and deadlines' section on the relevant course websites for notification deadlines planned earlier or later. The final decision is not open to appeal.