Anita EngelsUniversity of Hamburg | UHH · Institute of Sociology
Anita Engels
Prof. Dr.
About
61
Publications
9,033
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,638
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Anita Engels is professor of sociology at the University of Hamburg. She is a social scientist working on climate change and society. One of her current project is 'Low-carbon developments in China'.
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (61)
The purpose of this second Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook is to systematically analyze and assess the plausibility of certain well-defined climate futures based on present knowledge of social drivers and physical processes. In particular, we assess the plausibility of those climate futures that are envisioned by the 2015 Paris Agreement, namely ho...
In diesem Artikel werden die verschiedenen klimapolitischen Steuerungsversuche in
(Land-)Kreisen untersucht. Hierfür werden der Landkreis Uckermark in Brandenburg,
der Kreis Nordfriesland in Schleswig-Holstein und der Kreis Steinfurt aus
Nordrhein-Westfalen anhand des Modes of Governing-Ansatzes miteinander verglichen.
Aufgrund ihrer Scharnierfunkt...
The demands of the climate movement – for rapid and profound change – are based on scientific findings and the political commitments to the Paris Agreement. The activists are, therefore, factually “right”. However, being right is not enough to justify or to accelerate the practical implementation of knowledge and decisions. We explain which social...
In the annual Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook, CLICCS researchers make the first systematic attempt to assess which climate futures are plausible, by combining multidisciplinary assessments of plausibility. The inaugural 2021 Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook addresses the question: Is it plausible that the world will reach deep decarbonization by 20...
Despite decades of producing climate change knowledge and engaging in science communication and policy advising, there is still no discernable structural shift from a high‐ to a low‐ or even zero‐carbon‐emissions development pathway. This editorial comment asks about status problems of climate change knowledge (and climate scientists), suggesting a...
Das „Gemeinschaftswerk“ Energiewende ist ins Stocken geraten. Angesichts der aktuellen Schwierigkeiten, insb. im Wärme- und Verkehrsbereich, wird zunehmend auf die Notwendigkeit einer sog. Sektorkopplung verwiesen. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellen wir eine soziologische Perspektive auf die Energiewende vor und zeigen, dass die Wahl politischer Maßnah...
This comment deals with the question of how current political regimes could effectively contribute to the mitigation of climate change—and why this might happen. Against the backdrop of the US government’s announcement to withdraw from the Paris agreement, the rise of populist governments across the globe, and the slow progress of energy transforma...
This study combines three purposes: to advance a valuation perspective for theorizing about social change and climate change; to contribute to the general debate on pricing as the dominant policy to meet climate mitigation goals; to improve our understanding of potential decarbonization processes in China. We apply a valuation perspective to an in-...
Dieses Kapitel des Klimaberichts befasst sich mit den Handlungsspielräumen für lokalen Klimaschutz, die spezifischen Formen lokaler Klima‐Governance sowie der Einbindung Hamburgs und der Metropolregion in ein komplexes Mehrebenensystem der Klima‐Governance. Da im vergangenen Klimabericht der Fokus auf Adaptationsprozessen lag, wird im Folgenden ins...
The project Urban Transformation Laboratories in Lokstedt (Hamburg) seeks to identify novel ways to combine local climate mitigation with urban planning, with a particular focus on the perspectives of local citizens. It serves as an example of trans - disciplinary collaboration between two university partners and two local authorities, practice par...
For the first time, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in September 2015 under the Agenda 2030 systematically link social and environmental sustainability targets. In the case of social sustainability targets, the industrialized countries were also addressed to the target population, not just the so-called develo...
China is experiencing a transition to low-carbon economic development. This paper assesses the current literature on the potentials of and barriers to China's transition to low-carbon development, identifying promising fields of action and suggesting a research agenda that systematically addresses the shortcomings. Through a broad literature review...
The establishment of a carbon market assumes that there is an effective means of transforming price information into technical carbon reduction measures. However, empirical evidence reveals that the links between price information and carbon management strategies are far from obvious. To understand how delegating CO2 responsibility affects CO2 trad...
Das Buch präsentiert die Ergebnisse einer umfassenden Begleitstudie, die die Autorinnen von 2007 bis 2013 zur deutschen Exzellenzinitiative durchführten. Es stellt die Voraussetzungen dar, mit denen Männer und Frauen den unsicheren Weg in der Wissenschaft auf sich nehmen, und die Bedingungen, die sie in der Exzellenzinitiative vorfinden. Dabei zeig...
The idea of a low-carbon society has gained political momentum. Actors worldwide seek effective and efficient ways to reduce global CO2 emissions and to switch to a more sustainable pathway of production and consumption. However, industrialized countries are firmly wedded to the carbon economy, and developing countries are only starting to explore...
The European Union tried to meet the agreed emissions reduction target in the Kyoto Protocol with the creation of an Emission Trading System.
Due to lobbying and uncertainty, the Phase I (2005-2007) finished with an overallocation of emission certificates and the authorities decided to change the main objective from „reduction of emissions“ to “l...
Die Exzellenzinitiative des Bundes und der Länder wurde als Wettbewerb eingeführt, um der deutschen Hochschullandschaft zusätzliche Ressourcen zur institutionellen Erneuerung zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Bedingungen für die Durchführung von Spitzenforschung sollten weiter verbessert und neue Formen der Forschungsorganisation erprobt werden. Außerd...
Wirtschaftliche Rationalität bedeutet zugleich eine Handlungsaufforderung und ein Erfolgsversprechen. Mit dem Begriff sind Eigenschaften benannt, die als Erwartungen an die Qualität von Handlungen und Entscheidungen herangetragen werden. Gleichzeitig, so das Versprechen, mündet die konsequente Ausrichtung an den Erwartungen in dauerhaften wirtschaf...
Finanzkrise, ökologische Wachstumsdebatte, Zukunftsfähigkeit: Wirtschaft steht derzeit unter verschärfter Beobachtung. Eine soziologische Auseinandersetzung mit der Bedeutung und den Prämissen von wirtschaftlicher Rationalität erscheint deshalb aktuell: Gibt es eine spezifisch wirtschaftliche Rationalität? Was wären ihre Determinanten, wie ist ihre...
The European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is a central instrument of European climate policy and the first large-scale
multi-national greenhouse gas trading programme in the world. It was referred to as the “grand new policy experiment” (Kruger
and Pizer 2004). One of the central promises of emissions trading is to provide a price signal on th...
Die Wirtschaft gilt vielen einerseits als Gesellschaftsbereich, in dem Rationalitätserwartungen in besonderem Maße verankert sind: von der ubiquitären Verbreitung rationaler Wahlhandlungen unter Wirtschaftsakteuren bis zu einer erfolgreichen Durchsetzung einer auf Zwecke ausgerichteten Makroordnung. Andererseits wird in Bezug auf die Wirtschaft auc...
Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit den Möglichkeiten, wie ökologische, d. h. die natürliche Umwelt betreffende Aspekte im
Wirtschaftssystem der modernen Gesellschaft Berücksichtigung finden können. Diese Thematik enthält zwei interessante Teilaspekte.
Erstens geht es um die Frage, inwiefern das Wirtschaftssystem innerhalb unterschiedlicher Theorie...
Dieser Vortrag beschäftigt sich mit einem spezifischen Aspekt der gesellschaftlichen Transformationen, die im Zusammenhang mit globalem Klimawandel zu beobachten sind, nämlich mit der Schaffung neuer Märkte für handelbare Emissionsrechte. Für Unternehmen bedeutet die Einführung solcher Märkte den Beginn eines sich seit längerem abzeichnenden Regime...
European companies were confronted with new organisational challenges when the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) was introduced in 2005. What were their cognitive sources for developing an orientation in this scheme? This paper presents original data from a survey of the University of Hamburg, dealing with companies' responses to the EU ET...
This chapter on environmental policy institutions and learning opens with a brief introduction on the problems and dilemmas political institutions face in dealing with knowledge and power. The reason is twofold: on the one hand, such an introduction provides a framework which, in our view, is critical for an adequate understanding of the challenges...
European companies have reacted in different ways to the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), Phase I. While some companies engaged in an active trading behaviour focused on additional revenues, others adopted a strategy orientated to mere compliance with the scheme and aimed for balanced accounts only. This article provides the outcomes of...
This paper presents data on publication and collaboration patterns of USA and German research institutions in the field of global environmental change research. A dataset derived from the Web of Science showed that a marked rise in international co-authorship occured in the period 1993–2002. However, this increase covered different world regions un...
Introduction Many have celebrated the creation of pollution markets as the triumph of markets over states. Along with a general move towards marketbased approaches in environmental regulation and other fields of public policy (see Djelic ch. 3), successful examples of these new markets can be cited, including the creation of pollution rights, resou...
The paper discusses systematic barriers for an enhanced institutionalisation of integrated environmental assessments at the level of European Union (EU) environmental policy-making. It draws from recent experiences of a programme that aimed to provide useful assessments as a basis for more rational decision-making in this field. Two complementary e...
In der sozialwissenschaftlichen Literatur sind verschiedene Aspekte von Globalisierung und Denationalisierung kontrovers diskutiert worden. Dieser Artikel prüft nun empirisch für einen gesellschaftlichen Bereich (Wissenschaft) die Reichweite und die Mechanismen von Globalisierung sowie den Stellenwert von Nationalstaatlichkeit. Wissenschaft ist ins...
Various aspects of globalization and denationalization are discussed in the social sciences' literature. This article focuses on the scope of and mechanisms for globalization with regard to one societal area (science) and discusses the importance of national contexts. Science is a specific case as it is often considered to be inherently global wher...
The paper takes the case study on policy programmes of the Euro-pean Forum on Integrated Environmental Assessment (EFIEA) as starting point for a more general reflection on science-policy interfaces in the con-text of European policymaking. First, the European Union is described as a challenging context in which scientific expertise is met with cha...
Summary The possible existence of specialisation patterns by research fields of the Italian regions is investigated. Accordingly, bibliometric data on papers published in international scientific journals have been processed and tailored for regional comparative analysis. The results show that the trends in scientific regional specialisation are re...
Public perceptions of climatic events have changed dramatically over the past two decades. Once, climate change (or weather) was widely thought of as a natural source of calamities to which humans can only try to adapt. Moreover, the climate in one world region appeared more or less unconnected to other regions’ climates. However, in the 1990s a ne...
To come a full circle we return, in this concluding chapter, to the title of the book: “How Institutions Change — Perspectives on Social Learning in Global and Local Environmental Contexts”. It is now time to summarise our responses to the central questions: How do institutions change? How can we induce dynamics of social learning? What have we lea...
Das englischsprachige Buch untersucht die Frage nach institutionellem Wandel in lokalen und globalen umweltrelevanten Kontexten. How do institutions change? What can we learn about possibilities of and barriers to induced institutional changes? Where are potentials for more reflexive and more enduring processes of social learning? The book seeks to...
This paper summarizes the results of a research project analyzing communication about global warming among those in the fields of science, politics, and the media in Germany between 1975 and 1995. The methodology of discourse analysis has been applied to investigate the changing perceptions of climate change over time and the ways in which it becam...
Seit 1992 gibt es die Klimarahmenkonvention der Vereinten Nationen, die weltweit zur Entwicklung nationaler Klimaschutzprogramme geführt hat. Die vorliegende soziologische Arbeit zu Gesellschaft und anthropogenem Klimawandel verfolgt das Ziel, den Prozess der nationalen Verarbeitung eines globalen Umweltproblems am Beispiel des westafrikanischen En...
"Globale Umweltforschung erzeugt einen universalistischen Referenzrahmen zur Beschreibung, Beobachtung und Bewertung ökologischer Krisen mit planetaren Ausmaßen. Das Konstrukt einer globalen Umwelt unterstellt eine weltweit geteilte gemeinsame Bedrohung im Sinne der ökologischen Selbstgefährdung der Menschheit. Es bildet die Voraussetzung für das p...
Projects
Projects (3)
The Paris climate agreement from December 2015 has provided a powerful impetus not only for climate policy but also for climate research. To address the resulting new challenges, the Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS) will establish a long-term program spanning the range from basic research on climate dynamics and climate-related social dynamics to the transdisciplinary exploration of human–environment interactions.
CLICCS will explore climate change with broad expertise. CLICCS will investigate how the climate changes and how society changes with it, thereby feeding back on climate. Understanding these changes, including how societies adapt, will enable us to assess with far greater confidence than before the range of imaginable climate futures. In taking on this challenge, CLICCS is guided by the overarching question: "Which climate futures are possible and which are plausible?”
More Information here: https://www.cliccs.uni-hamburg.de
Achieving the goals of the Paris agreement requires fundamental changes in established production systems and energy provision. Today, both are highly carbon-dependent. Due to investment cycles of several decades in key industries, the required transformation towards a low carbon development has to start immediately in order to avoid lock-in effects long into the second half of this century. The project seeks to understand if, how fast, and by which mechanisms deep decarbonization of the economy can be expected within the next few decades.
