As the global climate balance visibly deteriorates and environmental degradation affects the daily lives of millions, the question of environmental protection is becoming ever more urgent in the public debate of societies worldwide. Yet, the political process, at both national and international levels, appears to many to be incapable of delivering the radical socio-economic changes needed to reverse the global economy’s trend towards resource depletion and ecological disruption.
The perceived inaction of decision-makers and economic actors is often direly contrasted with the consensus formed within the ‘scientific community’ on the physical and bio-chemical foundations of the current environmental crises. Increasingly large sectors of the public opinion thus advocate for more ‘science-based’ legal and political decision-making; yet, in other circles, critical attitudes towards what is perceived as a technocratic apparatus devoid of societal legitimization prevail.
The degree to which science should inform the decisions of adjudicators and policy-makers when confronted with environmental matters touches upon several core questions, whose urgency becomes ever more apparent in times of multiple and overlapping ecological crises. This meeting of the Max Planck Law Initiative, ‘Law, Climate Change and the Environment‘, aims at unpacking, through an interdisciplinary dialogue spanning across law and the social sciences, the several legal, political, sociological, and philosophical implications of the interface between scientific knowledge and legal and political decision-making.
Katalin Sulyok is Assistant Professor in International Law and Environmental Law at ELTE Eötvös Lorand University, Budapest. Dr Sulyok holds a Ph.D. in international law, a B.Sc. in Biology and an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School. Her English-language PhD thesis regarding the use of science in international environmental adjudication was awarded the Wheaton Prize by the Institut de Droit international and was published as a monograph by Cambridge University Press in 2021 entitled ‘Science and Judicial Reasoning—The Legitimacy of International Environmental Adjudication’. Dr Sulyok has been visiting researcher at several leading research institutions, including the Max Planck Institute of International and Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg, Cambridge University, the Lauterpacht Centre and Sorbonne University. Her research interest covers interdisciplinary questions in environmental and climate law and litigation.
Leon Wansleben is an economic and political sociologist. Before joining the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies as a research group leader, he held positions as Postdoc at the University of Lucerne and as Assistant Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His current research is focused on the relationships between ecological crises and social change. One specific area of interest is in internal transformations of state organizations and state-citizens-relations in the context of climate mitigation efforts. As a major outcome of previous research, Leon Wansleben published The Rise of Central Banks. State Power in Financial Capitalism with Harvard University Press this year. Other work is, inter alia, published in Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society, Regulation and Governance and Review of International Political Economy.
