The Global Governance Project is a joint project of three leading institutions in Germany: the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), the Environmental Policy Research Unit of the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Oldenburg. We currently seek to broaden our institutional base, and negotiations are underway to include both the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the Institute for Environmental Studies of the Free University, Amsterdam, as co-operating partners for the Global Governance Project.

The research programme of the Global Governance Project is closely linked to the research programme of IDGEC. The Project's main focus is the analysis of international institutions, organisations, actors and political processes that influence the emerging system of global environmental governance, with an emphasis on questions of institutional and organisational effectiveness within the system of multi-layered governance, on learning processes in environmental policy, on institutional interplay, on new forms of transnational co-operation through private actors, and on normative questions such as North-South equity and the democratic legitimatisation of the emerging system of global governance. Major analytical tools are qualitative social science methods, including structured case studies, as well as legal analysis and integrated modelling. Project members represent political science, policy studies, ecological economics, international law and integrated modelling.

The Global Governance Project is not only linked to IDGEC and IHDP through its academic work, but also supportive of the IDGEC endeavour through practical co-operation. The Global Governance Project has initiated and subsequently organised, on behalf of the Environmental Policy and Global Change section of the German Political Science Association which I chair, the 2001 and 2002 Berlin Conferences on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. Both conferences have been endorsed by IDGEC, and they have been widely advertised through the IHDP and IDGEC web sites and newsletters.

Our Berlin Conferences have also been addressed by leading scholars from the IHDP community, including the former and the present chairs of IHDP (Arild Underdal and Coleen Vogel), and two members of the IDGEC steering committee, Oran Young and Peter Sand. Both conferences attracted a large group of scholars and significantly contributed to increasing the awareness of the IHDP/IDGEC research programme within the German academic community.

In addition, the Global Governance Project has initiated the Indo-German Forum on International Environmental Governance (www.indo-german-forum.net), a new network of experts in both countries that assists in bridging the North-South divide in global change research. The importance of the Indo-German Forum is indicated by the high-level attendance of its meetings. Speakers have included the directors of the major Indian institutes, such as Dr Pachauri of the Tata Energy Research Institute, Professor Jyoti Parikh of the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment, and Professor P. S. Ramakrishnan of Jawaharlal Nehru University. The Forum's inaugural conference in September 2002 has also been attended by the former Indian minister of the environment, and a greeting address of the current Indian environment minister has been transmitted.

The Global Governance Project also seeks to locally increase awareness about the human dimensions of global environmental change through the Global Governance Speaker Series in Berlin, the last speaker of which has been Professor Klaus Töpfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. More information on the Global Governance Project, including its three research programmes, can be found at the Project's web site at www.glogov.org.