BIO

Helge Jörgens is Senior Lecturer of Comparative Politics at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the Freie Universität Berlin and Managing Director of the Environmental Policy Research Centre. He received his PhD in 2010 from Freie Universität Berlin. Before joining the Freie Universität Berlin he worked as senior researcher at the Department of Political Science of the University of Konstanz, Germany. Between 2001 and 2008 he was a scientific policy advisor to the German Ministry of the Environment at the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU).

He has published widely in the fields of comparative environmental, energy and climate politics. His most recent book „Understanding Environmental Policy Convergence: The Power of Words, Rules, and Money“ was published in 2014 with Cambridge University Press. He is guest-editor of two special journal issues on the cross-national transfer of environmental policies and co-editor of two comparative books on national sustainable development strategies. Helge Jörgens has published articles in the European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Policy Studies Journal, The Annals of the American Political Science Association, and Environmental Politics as well as numerous book chapters.

Currently, Helge Jörgens directs a large-scale research project mapping the actor-networks that have formed around the UN Conventions on Climate Change and on Biodiversity. Between 2003 and 2011 he was member of the steering committee of two large European research projects, “Environmental Governance in Europe: The Impact of International Institutions and Trade on Policy Convergence” and “Confronting Social and Environmental Sustainability with Economic Pressure: Balancing Trade-offs by Policy Dismantling?“.

His teaching and research focuses on comparative and German environmental, climate and energy politics, new modes of international and domestic environmental governance, cross-national policy transfer and diffusion, the role and influence of international public administrations in international politics, and the ecological transformation of individual lifestyles as a form of morality politics.