On Wednesday 26 August 2026 Dr. Simone Schleper (Maastricht University) will present this year’s RIAS Environmental History Lecture Global Environmental Governance from Elsewhere.
About the speaker:
Dr. Simone Schleper is an Assistant Professor at Maastricht University. Her research brings together environmental history, science and technology studies (STS), and global environmental politics to examine how policy and conservation practices are shaped by the cultures of international organizations, ideas about scientific expertise, by local communities, and more-than-human actors. She is the author of Planning for the Planet (Berghahn, 2019). Her recent projects examine the private governance networks behind the rise of corporate environmentalism (NWO OCXS) and the overlooked role of non-Western conservationists as gatekeepers in international environmental policymaking (NWO Veni). She is the Benelux representative to the European Society for Environmental History and one of two editors-in-chief of the Journal for the History of Knowledge.
About the lecture:
Where does global environmental governance happen? We might think of the negotiation spaces of intergovernmental conferences, such as Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992, or Paris 2015. Often, these formal settings have dominated the historiography on international environmentalism. In this talk, Dr. Schleper would like to open up a different history of global environmental governance, showing that some consequential forces shaping it have operated from elsewhere: from private homes, from field stations, through correspondence, and behind-the-scenes negotiations by actors who appear less prominently in the official records. Dr. Schleper will attend to these ‘elsewheres’ by revisiting some of her recent research on informal elites and the gatekeeping roles of geographically peripheral members of international organizations.
Join us for this lecture and discover how global environmental governance is shaped not only in global summits, but also in the many places and practices that often remain unseen.
Event Details:
Title: Global Environmental Governance from Elsewhere
Lecturer: Dr. Simone Schleper
Date: Wednesday 26 August 2026 at 16:00 – 17:30 (doors open at 15:30)
Location: De Punt, Middelburg
Please register here by Friday 21 August.
