The concept of responsibility is omnipresent in political debates on environmental and sustainability issues. Private actors are required to think and implement sustainability within their own structures and corporate practices as responsible actors (Corporate Sustainability Governance), individual consumers are required to reflect on their own consumption and thereby reduce their ecological footprint on their own responsibility, and states must provide the necessary framework conditions for the assumption of responsibility. At a time when humanity as a collective subject (predominantly) acknowledges its own contribution to global environmental changes, and accordingly proclaims the "Anthropocene" as a new epoch in human history, the concept of responsibility seems to become an all-encompassing guiding principle of political organization and governance. However, this development is also accompanied by a multitude of heterogeneous processes: we observe that responsibility in specific environmental issues is individualized and collectivized in others, shared by some actors and rejected by others (by attribution or delegation), sometimes understood as accountability, sometimes as liability, sometimes as precaution, etc., and always dependent on concrete geographical, socio-cultural and political conditions. How responsibility is understood and practiced by the respective actors has a direct influence on what measures are taken in the future to make societies at all levels more sustainable. The chair is dedicated to these and related questions in this research field.
Selected publications on the topic
- Gumbert, Tobias; Fuchs, Doris. Forthcoming. ‘Moral Geographies of Responsibility in the Global Agrifood System’. In Routledge Handbook on Responsibility in International Relations Theory, edited by Hansen-Magnusson, Hannes and Antje Vetterlein. London: Routledge.
- Hayden Anders, Fuchs Doris, Kalfagianni Agni. 2020. ‘Critical and Transformative Perspectives on Global Sustainability Governance.’ In Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance, edited by Kalfagianni Agni, Fuchs Doris, Hayden Anders, 1-10. London: Routledge.
- Bohn, Carolin; Fuchs, Doris; Kerkhoff, Antonius; Müller, Christian (Hrsg.): 2019. Gegenwart und Zukunft sozial-ökologischer Transformation. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
- Fuchs, Doris. 2017. ‘Consumption Corridors as a Means for Overcoming Trends in (Un-)Sustainable Consumption.’ In The 21st Century Consumer: Vulnerable, Responsible, Transparent?, edited by Bala Christian, Schuldzinski Wolfgang, 147-159. doi: 10.15501/978-3-86336-918_13.
- Fuchs, Doris; Gross, Tandiwe. 2012. Corporate Social Responsibility: Der Kampf um die Deutungshoheit. Diskursive Formationen der Unternehmensverantwortung in Deutschland und Großbritannien Sustainable Governance Discussion Papers 01/2012. Münster, 2012.