Research Statement

The Environmental Politics Research Group (EPRG) at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna conducts sound, excellent, reflexive, and internationally visible research spanning different actors, sites, and processes of global environmental agreement-making. Our research strives to be creative, innovative, and impactful within and beyond academia. We have a strong focus on empirical research, combining different qualitative and quantitative methods such as event ethnography, social network analysis, surveys, interviews, bibliometrics, oral histories, and text-mining. We study the institutions, discourses, practices, and social relations of global environmental politics. We collect data in and contribute to the understanding of several international agreements and negotiations such as the Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the International Seabed Authority (ISA), Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on a Global Plastics Treaty (INC), and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).