The Lorax Project: Understanding Ecosystemic Politics (LORAX)

“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.” 
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

The Lorax project is a comparative effort to expand scholarly understanding of hitherto largely overlooked sites of politics – those located between global and national politics and built up around mutually acknowledged ‘shared ecosystems.’ The core question here is: Do regional politics around border-crossing ecosystems share important resemblances and differ in significant ways from global politics?

To address this question, the Lorax project analyzes the networks of participation, hierarchies of actors and diplomatic norms of the governance fields that have grown up around efforts to ‘speak for’ border-crossing ecosystems in three locations – the Arctic, the Amazon Basin, and the Caspian Sea. 

The team consists of the PI (Wilson Rowe) and a postdoctoral and PhD researcher to be recruited in the course of 2019 (please follow NUPI's vacancies website for further information as all positions will be posted there).

Funding program

The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.