Beyond North-to-South: Knowledge, Power, and Flows In Transnational Policy Mobilities

Governments increasingly adopt international best practices to confront converging challenges of climate change. Policy mobilities research has extensively examined how such practices travel and localize, tracing the funding flows, knowledge networks, and mobile professionals that channel them across borders. In doing so, existing literature has substantially detailed the informational infrastructures that select, package, and validate certain approaches to climate mitigation and adaptation as "global" solutions as they move from one jurisdiction to another.

Yet this global circuit of knowledge is largely examined in terms of North-to-South transfer, with models of climate resilience, decarbonization, and energy transition travelling outward from the Global North. So far, how knowledge moves in the opposite direction and which learned lessons are, or are not, recognized as legitimate and adopted in practice remain less understood. There is also limited attention to the learning potential of the Global South's accumulated experience in confronting climate challenges the Global North is now beginning to face, and its longer engagement with community-based, participatory approaches to climate action.

This session brings together researchers examining the power relations embedded in transnational knowledge transfer in climate mitigation and adaptation, with particular attention to African, Asian, and Latin American regions. The session invites contributions examining the mechanisms moving knowledge beyond North-to-South pathways, the asymmetries shaping whose knowledge counts in the process, and the arrangements translating selected lessons into practice. By connecting fragmented regional literatures, it also aims to lay groundwork for a new cross-border, interdisciplinary platform linking researchers across the Global North and South.