Gaston Meskens Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, University of Ghent, Belgium Structure Intro Cosmopolitanism and environmental health 1. The fact of complexity of environmental health governance. 2. The fate and rescue of cosmopolitanism. 3. Cosmopolitanism as an ethics of reflexivity ‘bound in complexity’.
Many scientific hypotheses are nowadays granted with a social, political or commercial function. They are prematurely released from the laboratory, without full support from empirical evidence, but with a specific task: to warn the world about dangerous situations or evolutions, or to inform it about promising trends and capacities. And,
Ethics of Environmental Health – Edited by Friedo Zölzer and Gaston Meskens © 2017 – Routledge Introduction Environmental health encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is often assumed that the assessment
Abstract What do we mean when we say we live in a complex world? This paper characterises problems such as combating climate change, the provision of affordable access to healthy food for all, or evaluation of the possible use of nuclear energy as ‘complex social problems’ of which the complexity
This working paper is an output of the Fukushima Global Communication research workshop “Understanding and Communicating Risks Post Fukushima”, held in Tokyo on 12–13 November 2015. The workshop brought together international experts to explore the specific challenges of understanding and discussing risks related to nuclear accidents, and identify appropriate and
The missing goal: a new global governance for sustainable development One of the results of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, as presented in the outcome document entitled The Future We Want, was a mandate for the UN to establish an open working group to develop a set
Discussion text published on the occasion of the Post-2015, Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals events, United Nations General Assembly, New York, September 2013 (Dutch version: read here) Since last year, I moderate a discussion about human rights among an international network of NGO’s. The discussion is part of
Vertaling van een discussietekst gepubliceerd ter gelegenheid van de ‘Post-2015’ –, ‘Millennium Development Goals’ – en ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ activiteiten in het kader van de United Nations General Assembly, New York, September 2013 (english version: read here) Sinds vorig jaar organiseer ik een discussie over mensenrechten binnen een internationaal netwerk
[Paper presented at the Earth Systems Governance Tokyo Conference ‘Complex Architectures, Multiple Agents’, 28 – 31 January 2013, United Nations University Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan] Summary Sustainable development is impossible without a continuous care for the implementation of human rights as made explicit in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
[Paper presented at the 2012 Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change] This paper proposes an alternative qualitative vision on sustainable development that could inspire a global ethics for societal development and intergenerational accountability and, at the same time, expose specific responsibilities for policy, the private sector,
The Possibility of Global Governance 