| 1. |
- Bergquist, Daniel, et al.
(författare)
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The Sustainability of Living in a "Green" Urban District : An Emergy Perspective
- 2020
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Ingår i: Sustainability. - : MDPI AG. - 2071-1050. ; 12:14
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While urban areas hold great potential for contributing to sustainable development, there is a critical need to better understand and verify what measures improve urban sustainability. To achieve this, this project implements emergy synthesis to evaluate the environmental support to a building-called Smaragden-located in a certified "green" urban district in Uppsala, Sweden. Inputs to the building's construction and maintenance phases are accounted for, as are flows supporting the residents' everyday practices (i.e., urban life), on a yearly per capita basis. In this way, the relative importance of lifestyle issues versus the built environment is quantified and compared. Key focus areas are identified where efficiency and sustainability gains are most likely. The emergy synthesis detailed the top contributors to urban resource consumption and revealed that both the lifestyle and built environment in Smaragden are highly unsustainable, ranking poorly in terms of the emergy indices calculated, and, when considered from a global emergy perspective, overshooting resource consumption by more than 70 times. The paper therefore concludes that interdependencies of urban districts on systems at larger scales of society and environment need to be explicitly addressed and actively incorporated in urban policy and planning, and that design interventions are hence grounded in a systems perspective on urban sustainability.
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| 2. |
- Boonstra, Wiebren J., et al.
(författare)
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The Social Dynamics of Degrowth
- 2013
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Ingår i: Environmental Values. - 0963-2719 .- 1752-7015. ; 22:2, s. 171-189
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Degrowth cannot be realised from within a capitalist society, since growth is the sine qua non for capitalism. But, societies are no blank slates; they are not built from scratch. Putting these two thoughts together seems to make degrowth logically impossible. In this paper we argue that this paradox can be solved with the use of classical and contemporary concepts from the social sciences. We illustrate the use of these concepts with reference to studies on current practices and patterns of food production and consumption. The concept of social mechanism is used to illustrate how social practices can simultaneously reinforce and challenge the dominant (food) regime. We argue that current discussions on degrowth fail to envision how such contrasting developments are linked, and that the degrowth paradox originates in the idea of capitalism and the steady-state economy as alternative systems. The paradox dissolves with studies of mechanisms and social practices that show how the two systems are not autonomous, but 'hybridised' and come into existence and gain shape as reactions to each other.
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| 3. |
- Boonstra, Wiebren J., Dr. 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Urban fishing reveals underrepresented diversity
- 2022
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Ingår i: Nature Food. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2662-1355. ; 3
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 4. |
- Carlson, Andrew K., et al.
(författare)
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More than ponds amid skyscrapers : Urban fisheries as multiscalar human-natural systems
- 2022
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Ingår i: Aquatic Ecosystem Health & Management. - : Michigan State University Press. - 1463-4988 .- 1539-4077. ; 25:1, s. 49-58
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Although social-ecological fisheries research is growing, comparatively little attention is paid to fisheries in urban environments. We aim to address this imbalance, because as cities expand worldwide, we expect urban fisheries to become more widespread and important in providing food/nutrition security, recreation, community well-being, and other benefits to fisheries stakeholders and urban dwellers across spatiotemporal scales. This paper contains a first analysis of the economic and sociocultural provisions, trade-offs, and dilemmas associated with urban fisheries to yield insights for sustainable management and planning of urban blue space. To address these objectives, we use the metacoupling framework, a method for assessing human-nature interactions within and across adjacent and distant fisheries systems. We use examples from multiple countries and data from the United States to illustrate how urban fisheries encompass flows of people, money, and information across multiple spatiotemporal scales and provide nutritional, recreational, social, and cultural benefits to fisheries stakeholders. Throughout the world, urban fisheries are influenced by wide-ranging human needs (e.g. food provisioning, recreation, aquatic resource education) that generate social-ecological effects within and beyond cities. Our analysis yields insights for developing holistic, metacoupling-informed management approaches that address the diverse social-ecological objectives and trade-offs involved in sustainable development of urban fisheries.
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| 5. |
- Fischer, Anke, et al.
(författare)
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How justice shapes transition governance - a discourse analysis of Swedish policy debates
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0964-0568 .- 1360-0559. ; 67, s. 1998-2016
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In both policy-making and academia, the realisation is growing that transitions striving for sustainability have to be just to be socially accepted. This insight has given rise to institutionalised approaches to a "just transition" - but also beyond these, justice is a key challenge in the governance of sustainability transitions. In this paper, we examine how justice arguments are being used in national-level discourses of transition governance in Sweden. Analysing 121 policy-related documents from 2019 to 2021, we found that justice was discursively treated in a way that essentially stifled change. Political actors attempted to trump each other's justice claims rather than to genuinely engage with them. Justice concerns that would not serve re-election, such as solidarity across social boundaries, were almost absent from the material. Based on these findings, we critically explore how justice arguments contribute to politicizing transition governance in particular ways, rendering some policy options impossible.
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| 6. |
- Fischer, Anke, et al.
(författare)
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How research on communication can help to understand the management of natural resources and sustainability transformations: practices, concerns and new perspectives on environmental communication
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. - 0964-0568 .- 1360-0559. ; 67, s. 1871-1885
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Communication is an integral part of natural resource management and sustainability transformations, and questions on how communication helps or hinders the development of more sustainable relationships between people and their environments have become increasingly urgent. This special issue directs our attention to the processes and outcomes of such communication and explores what a focus on communication makes visible and accessible for practical as well as academic analysis. The twelve articles collected in this issue examine a wide range of contexts and practices of environmental communication, here understood as the joint construction of meaning related to environmental and sustainability issues. In this editorial, we propose five conceptual lenses that, as we argue, are crucial for an in-depth engagement with environmental communication. Together, these provide us with an understanding of communication as arising from manifold interactions that are shaped by and shaping disagreement, power relations and, more generally, the interplay between structure and agency. We examine the contributions to this special issue in light of these conceptual lenses and highlight how the twelve articles help us to understand the role of meaning-making in environmental management and sustainability transformations. We conclude with suggestions for future work, identifying spaces for further conceptual development and empirical scrutiny as well as scope for new ideas on environmental communication to gain in importance and influence.
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| 7. |
- Granvik, Madeleine, et al.
(författare)
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Confusion and Misunderstanding – Interpretations and Definitions of Local Food
- 2017
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Ingår i: Sustainability. - : MDPI AG. - 2071-1050. ; 9
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Developing a more resilient food system based on sustainable food production and consumption is of major concern in creating food security. One issue in this complex field concerns the scale of the food system. Trends and tendencies show that the interest for local food has increased the last decade in Sweden, as well as in other parts of the world. Although the concept local food is commonly used, research shows that there is no single definition of it, instead definitions and meanings vary widely. This has led to a need by consumers of clearer information when buying local food. Several main actors in the Swedish food sector have joined forces to meet this issue. This paper contributes to knowledge on definitions, interpretations, and practice on local food by presenting views and opinions among different actors in the food chain in a Swedish context, but also in the light of an international pilot study. Main findings concern how the meaning of local food related to production, processing, raw material, and distance differs among stakeholders in the food chain. A majority stated that the basic meaning of local food concerns both the production and consumption within a certain geographical area.
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| 8. |
- Grubbström, Ann, 1967-, et al.
(författare)
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Balancing family traditions and business : Gendered strategies for achieving future resilience among agricultural students
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of Rural Studies. - : Elsevier. - 0743-0167 .- 1873-1392. ; :35, s. 152-161
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper emphasises the future generation of farmers, a group that has been relatively neglected in previous research. Based on focus group interviews, it highlights Swedish agricultural students’ gendered strategies to create a successful farm business in the future, along with the opportunities and obstacles they foresee in generational succession and their future farming activities. The interviews are analysed within the framework of resilience theory, focusing on adaption and renewal. Students highlight the importance of balancing emotional bonds to family and traditions with business goals. It is shown that strategies of renewal are guided by social values. The solitary farmer is replaced by a networking farmer that gathers knowledge in local and international settings. The view of how a partner contributes is, on the one hand, traditional while also showing signs of gender role transformation. We argue that a functioning ‘work-love balance’ reinforces resilience processes in farming.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Haider, Jutta, et al.
(författare)
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Algorithmically embodied emissions: the environmental harm of everyday life information in digital culture
- 2022
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, Oslo Metropolitan University, May 29 - June 1, 2022. - Borås : University of Borås.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Introduction. This conceptual paper introduces the notion of algorithmically embodied emissions to highlight how everyday choices facilitated by commercial algorithmic information systems such as commercial search engines, social media and recommender systems contribute to the climate crisis and other forms of environmental destruction.Method/Analysis. The proposed concept is developed by integrating terminology from the fields of information studies, critical algorithm studies and environmental impact assessment, and by examining a strategic selection of examples.Results. Through the examples, the authors show that semantic interpretation of queries as well as the information architecture involve normative dimensions with implications for the climate crisis and other forms of environmental destruction.Conclusions. The paper proposes a terminological framework that integrates conceptual considerations from environmental impact assessment, environmental communication, information studies and critical algorithm studies to articulate how algorithmic information systems are co-constitutive of environmental harm. The paper further suggest to extend environmental impact assessment to include algorithmic harms in order to take into account how responsibility and accountability are distributed among different actors with profoundly different conditions and opportunities to exercise them.
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