The Centre for Sustainability and Environmental Governance (CSEG) was established in 2009 drawing together staff, researchers and PhD students across the Faculty of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences with an interest in social science and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability.  It is affiliated to the Institute for a Sustainable World which brings together over 100 Queen’s University Belfast researchers, making sustainability, broadly defined, the single biggest research theme within the University.

The challenges and opportunities of the transition to sustainability are and will continue to be the defining issues of the 21^st century.  Together with scientific and technological innovation (which other colleagues at Queens are working on – see below for a list of other sustainability research groups), issues of governance, policy, politics and management are, and will continue to be central to the analysis of current unsustainable trends and practices and vital components of the social, cultural, political, economic and organisational innovations required for the creation of a less unsustainable society. 

The Centre adopts an explicitly interdisciplinary approach to sustainability and governance, on the basis that no one discipline or body of knowledge can provide either a full analysis nor propose solutions to the challenge of the transition to sustainability.   The main disciplines the centre draws upon are politics, management, law and sociology.

Contacts

Director: Dr. John Barry, email: j.barry@qub.ac.uk,