Environmental and sustainability policy is facing new challenges concerning wicked problems in the accelerating interlinkages of the eco-socio-economic world, in the growing complexity of policy-and-beyond governance to deal with those problems and in the increasingly contested areas of knowledge and ignorance on which concepts of problems, goals and policies are based upon. Dr. Mayer-Ries will outline ideas and experiences of German environmental and sustainability policy dealing with those challenges from the perspective of strategic administrative and policy practice. The implementation of the UN-Agenda 2030 in Germany since 2015 and new German initiatives to strengthen the involvement of science into a sustainable transformation will serve as reference points.

Dr. Joerg Mayer-Ries has been working as Lecturer for political Economy at University Oldenburg, as Director of Studies at a Lutheran Academy and as Senior Consultant in the private sector. Since 2007 he is Head of Division in the Department for Fundamental Aspects of Environmental Policy at the Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) in Berlin. Dr. Mayer-Ries is responsible for the environmental dimension and monitoring of the German Sustainability Strategy and European and global aspects of German sustainability policy. He coordinated the National Environmental Programme 2030 of the Ministry, the first Integrated Nitrogene Report 2017 and several research projects on strategic and fundamental concepts for future environmental policy. Until end of this year Dr. Mayer-Ries is appointed as Senior Fellow to the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies IASS at Potsdam.