We are delighted to announce that Roberto Ramos Obando has been awarded the 2024 GLOBALCIT – Rainer Bauböck Essay Award on the Global State of Citizenship for his essay “Climate Change and the Transformation of Citizenship”.
The award aims to encourage and highlight original thinking by early-career scholars on a topic related to present and future challenges for citizenship from a global perspective.
In this year’s first edition of the Essay Award authors were asked to answer one or both of the following questions: “How will climate change impact on citizenship?” “How should citizenship adapt to climate change?”.
The jury was composed of the four GLOBALCIT co-directors (Rainer Bauböck, Jelena Džankić, Jo Shaw, Maarten Vink) and Helga Kromp-Kolb, an Austrian meteorologist and climate scientist.
The winner of the 2024 essay award is Roberto Ramos Obando who in the verdict of the jury provided the most convincing response. The essays by Madeleine Chambers and Bantayehu Demlie Gezahegn were also evaluated highly by the jury and ranked equally as runner-up submissions. All three essays will be published on the GLOBALCIT website and in the EUI’s CADMUS repository.
Roberto studied law at the Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana in Honduras; he holds a Master’s degree in International and European Tax Law from Lund University and is currently a doctoral candidate in Law at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. He also serves as an Associate Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. His research explores the role of taxation in everyday life and its relationship with citizenship, the right to vote, and armed conflict.
Roberto’s essay considers a clearly stated question: Do those individuals who suffer a particularly severe impact of climate change on their lives experience as a result also a deterioration of their citizenship in comparison with their fellow citizens? Roberto answers this question by examining different scenarios of deprivation and displacement triggered by climate change and asks how each affects citizenship as a legal status, as a bundle of rights, and as a shared identity. The jury appreciated how Roberto manages to cover the impact of climate change on several dimensions of citizenship while communicating his answers succinctly and in a very vivid way by imagining a Honduran women Alejandrina whose life is upset through losing her business or her home as a result of climate change.
Roberto will receive the 2024 essay award, which is endowed with 1,000 euro, on 17 June at a ceremony on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre. Congratulations!