Call for presentations or sessions
Exploring Local Social Cohesion in Green and Just Transitions, 7-8 October, 2026
Location: Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
The Hannover Section of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (www.fgz-risc.de/en) invites you to participate in the conference “Exploring Local Social Cohesion in Green and Just Transitions”. The conference aims to advance interdisciplinary discussion on the links between social cohesion – understood as trust, participation, equality, and solidarity – and green and just transitions. Adaptation and mitigation measures to counter effects of climate change and biodiversity loss induce ‘green’ transitions across multiple fields such as infrastructures of greening, energy, economy, housing, and mobility. Yet, we lack profound insights into how these transitions affect social cohesion across scales and over time – from short-term disruptions to long-term transformation pathways.
While greener infrastructures can boost local cohesion, studies show that green transitions may also be unjust by marginalizing groups or eroding solidarity, thus threatening both social fabric and sustainability goals themselves. To explore these dynamics, the conference seeks to bring together researchers from various disciplines including geography, political science, sociology, spatial planning, landscape ecology, and others.
We welcome conceptual and empirical contributions addressing challenges, strategies, governance arrangements, and policies concerning social cohesion in green transitions from a spatial perspective. We particularly invite work that highlights intersections with inequality and environmental justice, as well as implications for policy-making toward socially cohesive green futures.
Topics of interest for presentations and sessions include, but are not limited to:
- Understanding the significance of social cohesion in local/regional environments for green and just transitions and vice versa
- Analyzing how green and just transitions reconfigure community identities, inequalities, and everyday solidarities at local/regional scales
- Design and effects of social and other infrastructures for social cohesion in green and just transitions
- Novel indicators and methods for researching social cohesion in green and just transitions
- Theoretical contributions to advancing the understanding of social cohesion in green transitions
- Interdisciplinary research on healthy and sustainable cities through green and blue infrastructure
- Understanding the role of civic engagement at local/regional levels in green and just transitions
- Benefits, co-benefits or trade-offs (unintended consequences) of specific examples of green infrastructure implementations including their relation to social cohesion
- Strategies and policies for linking local social cohesion and effective green and just transitions
Keynotes: We are pleased to welcome Niki Frantzeskaki (Utrecht University) and Tobias Rüttenauer (University College London) as keynote speakers at the conference.
Submission for a Presentation (currently planned as 20 minutes presentation plus 10 minutes for discussion): Please submit your name and affiliation, a title, and an informative abstract (max. 200 words). Please email your proposal to the scientific organizers (
Submission for a full Session (currently planned as 90 minutes): Please submit all details, including names of the presenters, title of session and of presentations, and abstracts (max. 200 words for each presentation). Each session consists of three or four presentations. We recommend one discussant and one chair. Please email your proposal to the scientific organizers (
Special Issue Contribution: In agreement with the journal, we are planning to guest-edit a Special Issue in Regional Environmental Change (Springer) featuring selected contributions from the conference. If you would like your contribution to be considered for the Special Issue, please indicate this in your submission.
Organization and Financial Support: The conference language is English. Participation is free of charge. We can provide up to €500 in travel and accommodation expenses to a limited number of early-career researchers from non-German universities. If you wish to be considered for funding, please indicate this in your submission.
