Synopsis

Climate change, rising resource competition and global inequality pose tremendous challenges to contemporary societies around the globe and urgently require fundamental processes of transformation to sustainable practices and global justice. Historical research contributes valuable knowledge about the complexities, conflicts and impediments of such transformation as well as experiences of successful cases of change and best practices. We believe that the problem fields in question – sustainable development, resource security and global justice – are closely linked, but research mostly neglects these links. Likewise, perspectives of the Global South and the Global North need to be considered, negotiated and developed together.

The international Research Group Technology, Environment and Resources (RGTER), an established consortium of scholars led and coordinated by the applicant, provides an ideal opportunity to attack these challenges and aims at pursuing historical research related to transformations to sustainability, fair trade and global justice. The project has the scope to investigate cases and analyse experiences, challenges, impediments and best practices of transformation. Emphasis is on integrating scholars of the Global South in scholarly discussion and research and attacking and solving methodological challenges to the envisaged research such as (1) integrate historical research approaches on a) global resources, b) environmental and climate change and c) global justice and (2) investigate, discuss and aim at better integrating diverging positive and negative narratives of global (sustainable) development in the context of (neo-) colonialism, global inequality, and global resource dependencies. One part of this initiative will be the development of a special research focus on global plant oil production and use and its sustainability and global justice challenges.