Collaboration

in Global Higher Education

International collaboration is a strong element of the work across all departments in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. Our Centre for Sustainable Development Law and Policy (CSDLP) is an interdisciplinary centre for research, collaboration and education with a focus on sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The CSDLP looks for innovative solutions to global challenges facing the international community and humanity as a whole, such as climate change, the energy transition, biodiversity loss and planetary health. Our objective is to offer solutions beyond academia and across societies, including in the Global South. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) serve as cross-cutting themes in our research projects, policy work and collaborative initiatives, including education and training, gender, health and wellbeing.

We support individual and joint projects, offering development opportunities in particular to Masters students, PhD students, and early career researchers. We’ve launched an exciting new Masters programme on International Environmental Law, which includes a focus on International Climate Change Law. Students will join our community and be closely involved in the CSDLP, its research projects and convenorship, including additional seminars, lectures and conferences.

We aim to deliver local and global projects and are working with international partners and organisations including the International Research Advisory Board and CDP. In 2022, we signed a memorandum of understanding with the Centre for International Law (CIL) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). In October, we collaborated with NUS to organise two workshops on the ‘Global Stocktake’ under the Paris Agreement with the support of the UNFCCC secretariat.

We also organised a session at the Education Hub during COP27: ‘Collaboration in Climate Research and Education’, which received over 61,000 views on social media. The event had three main objectives. The first was to extend collaborations with others, from a diverse range of UNFCCC constituencies, through communicating our own research interests. The second was to share our ongoing projects and educational programmes, for example our Global Environmental Law Lecture Series, which is contributed to by Justices from the highest courts globally (India, Thailand, Nepal, Germany, Australia and others); our collaboration with CIL/NUS to provide workshops on the Global Stocktake; and our aforementioned new Masters programme. The third objective was to promote new initiatives in other institutions, and to invite partners interested in working together, to achieve better climate and SDG education and at a larger scale.

Finally, we set out the ESEI objectives (Extending, Sharing, Exploring and Involving) in the CSDLP – where we seek to extend partnerships and collaboration, share knowledge and networks, explore how we can support the UNFCCC and its goals, and involve our students and researchers at all levels of their career into the work we’re doing.

We support individual and joint projects, offering development opportunities in particular to Masters students, PhD students, and early career researchers.