Mathias Zannakis

Presentation

Mathias Zannakis is researcher and teacher at the Department of Political Science, GU. His primary fields of interest are environmental politics and policy; the evolution of environmental discourse and its relation to various societal institutions including politics, the environmental movement, public opinion and the media; institutional analysis of prerequisites and obstacles for environmental management and development.

He received his Ph.D. in political science in 2010 from University of Gothenburg on a doctoral thesis titled Climate Policy as a Window of Opportunity. Sweden and Global Climate Change. The thesis explores Sweden's theoretically unexpected behaviour (the country trumped international climate obligations and later over-implemented its own targets) in climate politics, and hence contributes to the literature dealing with global social dilemmas and the difficulty to make states submit to and comply with international agreements. The thesis can be downloaded here.

During his postdoc (2010–2012) Zannakis was guest resercher at the division of Environmental System Analysis (ESA) at Chalmers University of Technology and worked in an inter-disciplinary research project (Governance for a high environmental quality of the Baltic Sea).

Current research

From December 2012 Zannakis works in the project "Development at Risk – Investigating the Institutional Sources of Successful Adaptation to Climate Change" together with Martin Sjöstedt and Anna Persson.

Teaching

Course leader and teacher on European Environment and Energy, Master in European Studies.

Course leader and teacher on Miljövetenskaplig kunskapsbildning, Programme in Environmental Social Sciences.

Teacher on Introduktion till miljöpolitik and Prospects for Environmental Politics, Dept. of Political Science.

Seminar leader on Styrsystem, organisation och bedömning and Styrdokument, uppföljning och analys för förskollärare, The Proramme for teacher Training.

Supervisor and examinator of student theses on various educational programmes.