In 2015, 2016, and 2017, Jochen Prantl delivered a series of major addresses at the African Union and European Union Headquarters and explored with the diplomatic corps and senior policymakers why the global power shift to Asia creates a strong demand for a strategic realignment of Africa and Europe.

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Strategic Diplomacy was workshopped as a political-economic policy tool to help re-position Africa and Europe within the emerging global system in which both African and European economies will increasingly have to rely on the middle class of the Asia-Pacific.

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In 2018, Prantl joined the Earth System Governance global research alliance, which is the largest social science network in the area of governance and global environmental change.

 

In 2024, together with a team of Brazilian scholars, he completed a book project, Building Capabilities for Earth System Governance, contracted with Cambridge University Press. Utilising the Strategic Diplomacy model, the book develops a new Strategic Capabilities Framework for studying and steering complex socio-economic systems. It is driven by the central question of what are the most essential capabilities that ought to be fostered for addressing the fundamental 21st Century environmental challenges and Earth system transformations. The title has been published as Open Access on Cambridge Core and is available here.

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In today's complex and competitive geopolitical context, the paradigms and pathways for institutional cooperation are no longer fit for purpose. There is a critical demand for effective multilateral frameworks, where 'Global South' and 'Global North' see eye-to-eye. In a new project, undertaken together with Giridharan Ramasubramanian, we highlight the limited utility of 'Global North' and 'Global South' imagineries in a world that is marked by hyperconnectivity and complexity.

 

The project asks: 

1. How do multilateral processes reflect 'Global North' and 'Global South' relations that are complex, non-binary, and contingent?

2. What norms dominate Earth System Governance that involve 'Global South' and 'Global North' international collaboration?

3. How can we make international cooperation work to shape the future we want?

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Prantl is also completing a single-authored book manuscript, Paradigms for Progress: Reimagining Strategies of Statecraft in the Age of Complexity, to be published by a major University Press.