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 Dr Giridharan Ramasubramanian, we highlight the limited utility of 'Global North' and 'Global South' imagineries in a world that is marked by hyperconnectivity and complexity.

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Conceptually, multilateralism is too much the linear extrapolation of an old idea that was revived by the ‘Global North’ with the end of the Cold War.  Multilateralism has tended to be an exclusive affair, which mostly excluded the ‘Global South’.  The aim and objective of this project therefore is to re-think and to re-examine the principles and precepts of ‘old’ multilateralism and to offer an analytical framework for ‘new’ multilateralism in earth system governance.  Preliminary findings were published in a 2025 special issue of Earth System Governance, Locating the 'Global South' in Earth System Governance.

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Rethinking international cooperation is part and parcel of a much broader reflection on the nature and potential future trajectories of global orders, aiming to examine the diverse and often contested understandings of orders and disorders.  Prantl and Ramasabrumanian currently contribute to the 'Transnational and planetary challenges' workstream of the international multi-year Global (Dis)Order research programme, co-convened by The British Academy and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Facing a triple planetary crisis of climate change, environmental pollution, and biodiversity loss, global societies are challenged to explore new institutional mechanisms to engage in international cooperation and tackle global (dis)order.  We argue that transnational challenges must be explored in their wider complex polysystemic context and be addressed from multiple, and mutually reinforcing, leverage points.

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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.

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