Australian Research Council Linkage Project
Partner institutions:
Australian Museum
Museum Victoria
Questacon
Powerhouse Museum
Liberty Science Center (USA)
lyndakelly |
Museums and the Global Governance of Climate Change |
2011.05.03 21:24:34 | |
Associate Professor Brett Neilson, Centre for Cultural Research, UWS: Changing Institutional Climates: Museums and the Global Governance of Climate Change
In the build-up to the United Nations climate conference held in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, Connie Hedegaard, the chairperson of the event and current European Commissioner for Climate Action, declared that any failure to reach a political agreement at this meeting would be ‘not just about climate’. Such an outcome, she said, would show ‘the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining challenges of our century’. This paper interrogates the relevance of this statement for the global governance of climate change in the light of the outcomes of the Copenhagen conference.
If the institutions that comprise the ‘global democratic system’ are inadequate to meet the challenge of climate change, what are the new institutional forms that must emerge to face this task? Focusing on the role of museums and their relations with publics, social movements and electronic networks, the paper suggests that the emergence of such new institutional forms requires mutual interactions between existing social institutions and decentralized networks committed to practices of social collaboration and political experimentation. Tags: #hotscience | climate change | hot science global citizens
|