| 1. |
- Bodin, Örjan, et al.
(författare)
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A diagnostic for evaluating collaborative responses to compound emergencies
- 2022
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Ingår i: Progress in Disaster Science. - : Elsevier BV. - 2590-0617. ; 16
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The burgeoning literature on compound disasters has advanced the understanding on the causes and drivers of multiple hazard events. Yet, so far, this literature has provided limited insights concerning how multiple hazard events, triggering compounded emergencies, challenge emergency response systems. Here we develop a diagnostic to assess specific challenges facing response systems when confronted with spatially and/or temporally compounded hazard events. The diagnostic comprises three elements. First, compound emergency scenarios are defined based on biophysical links within and between communities, and/or temporal overlap between hazardous events. Second, by drawing from recent public administration literatures, we develop a network-centric model of an emergency response system consisting of actors, venues and functions. Third, we formulate a set of diagnostic questions to specify whether and how compound emergencies challenge response systems. These advances together form a diagnostic tool for researchers as well as practitioners to identify potential weak spots in emergency response systems. The diagnostic also helps assessing what cognitive, preparatory, and planning capacities are needed to ensure more effective responses to compound emergencies.
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| 2. |
- Oostdijk, Maartje, et al.
(författare)
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Governing Open Ocean and Fish Carbon : Perspectives and Opportunities
- 2022
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Marine Science. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 2296-7745. ; 9
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Marine life plays a vital role in the ocean’s biological pump by sequestering and mediating fluxes of carbon to the deep sea and sea floor. The roles that fish and other marine vertebrates play in the biological pump are increasingly attracting scientific and policy attention. In this paper, we investigated the interest in and possibilities for the international governance of open ocean and fish carbon ecosystem services. We used semi-structured interviews with representatives from environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs), policy makers, and policy experts, along with an exploratory review of grey and peer-reviewed literature to: 1) trace the pathway of important milestones, key actors, and their strategies to influence governance of ocean carbon, and, 2) investigate which frameworks might be used to govern open ocean and fish carbon. Strategies of key actors to direct attention to open ocean and fish carbon included collaborating with scientists, organising side events at climate and biodiversity negotiations and seminars to engage policy makers, as well as educational campaigns directed to the public and policy makers about the co-benefits of open ocean and fish carbon. While we found a strong focus of ENGO activities related to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, we also found strong opposition against active governance of open ocean and fish carbon by key Intergovernmental actors in this forum. Opposition stems from a lack of scientific information on how long open ocean and fish carbon is stored, difficulties in attributing carbon flows with individual countries mitigation actions, and fewer perceived co-benefits (e.g. coastal protection in the case of coastal blue carbon) for coastal communities. More viable routes for the future governance of open ocean and fish carbon may lie in international fisheries management and in current negotiations of a treaty for biodiversity conservation in the high seas.
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| 3. |
- Orach, Kirill, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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Interests Influencing Information? Analyzing interest group contribution to information flows in EU Common Fisheries Policy
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Information and knowledge is important for sustainably managing natural resources. Uncertainty and lack of information can lead to inability to identify and manage complex social-ecological feedbacks and slow change. However scientific information and knowledge, even when present, does not always find its way to policy and when it does – may fail to make any impact. Public policy researchers often stress the ever-present ambiguity, time constraints, lack of access and issue framing as some of the reasons why policy-relevant information may be misinterpreted or ignored. Resilience research recognizes the importance of participation of the broad diversity of stakeholders in the policy process for allowing a broader diversity of knowledge to influence decision-making and better detect and respond to environmental change. Organizing to influence policy, stakeholders may form interest groups that often engage in supplying information to policymakers as one of the ways to influence policy outcomes. Although interest groups undoubtedly contribute to the information flow within the policy process, it is unclear whether they contribute to the diversity of available information or are able to strengthen the link between scientific information and decision-making. Previous empirical research shows that agencies with own capacity to generate own information may ignore organized interests, while the quality and diversity of information provided by interest groups may vary significantly. This paper looks at the case of 2013 EU Common Fisheries Policy reform in order to find how interest group actors have contributed to the flow of issue-relevant information supplied to policymakers during the critical stages of the reform. It analyses interest group position papers, letters and briefings as well as interviews with interest group representatives and policymakers in order to assess the type of information supplied, its source, framing and recipients, aiming to get a broader picture of interest groups’ contribution. The paper finds that interest groups have been using informational lobbying as one of their main strategies during the reform process. Most interest groups have frequently used scientific information, already available to policymakers, in order to support their own framing of the issue.
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| 4. |
- Orach, Kirill, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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Sustainability of natural resource governance under interest group competition in policy making
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Non-state actors play an increasingly important role in environmental policy processes. Lobbying activities of interest groups have often been associated with policy stasis and environmental degradation. Little is known, however, about the causal mechanisms through which competition between diverse interest groups can enhance or reduce the adaptive capacity of a governance system. By combining an empirical study with agent-based modelling we explore competing interest group behavior and its implications for responses of the policy system to perceived changes in a fishery. We find that interest group coalition formation as a response to changes in the resource allows the policy system to better respond to resource decline. This mechanism, however, is highly contingent on the distribution of funding among interest groups, issue salience and characteristics of the political system (beliefs of policymakers). Testing the mechanism of interest group influence on policy change allows us to better understand the conditions under which environmental policymaking involving diverse interests and strong (economic/industry) pressure can avoid resource overexploitation.
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| 5. |
- Orach, Kirill, 1987-
(författare)
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Understanding interest politics in social-ecological systems : Mechanisms behind emergent policy responses to environmental change
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Environmental policymaking is embedded in social-ecological systems (SES) that continuously evolve and change, often in unexpected and non-linear ways. Such challenges call for responsive policymaking that adjusts policy when new information and knowledge about social-ecological change is available. However, policy adaptation can be difficult as policies often emerge as an outcome of multiple interactions between state and non-state actors that pursue their different interests, aim to achieve their individual and shared goals and make sense of information and knowledge. Complexities inherent in SES can be better captured through diverse types of information and knowledge, while adaptation to social-ecological change can occur through innovation and learning. Research has emphasized the contribution of non-state actors or interest groups in realizing such processes in policymaking. However, interest group participation can also be a source of conflict or result in dominance of powerful interests and resistance to learning and policy change. This thesis aims to shed light on the dynamics of the policy process in social-ecological systems to better understand some of the mechanisms that drive its responsiveness to social-ecological change. It focuses on interest groups and their properties as well as the social and ecological conditions of their participation in the policy process to investigate how responsive and sustainable policies can emerge out of the “messy” political struggle. The thesis first explores the case of 2013 EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform to trace the mechanism of interest group influence and identify their contribution to the flow of information from SES. Further it applies the empirical mechanism in an agent-based model to: 1) test the scope conditions of the mechanism; 2) extend it to include interest group responses to change in the managed SES. Paper I of the thesis analyses theoretical frameworks of the policy process originating in public policy research to assess their suitability for capturing political complexity in SES governance research. Paper II looks at the CFP reform case, using process tracing to understand how interest groups have been able to achieve influence on the reform. Paper III further investigates the case to find the role of interest groups in shaping information flows within the policy process. Paper IV uses empirical findings in Papers II and III, along with frameworks analyzed in Paper I to develop an agent-based model that explores how individual characteristics of political actors in interaction with political conditions and issue characteristics influence the responsiveness of the policy process and result in sustainable outcomes. I find that through interest group participation policies can better respond to change in the managed SES; however structural factors (such as presence of institutional ‘window of opportunity’, issue salience and beliefs of policymakers) can make the response adverse or weaken it. Interest groups also engage in transmitting and interpreting diverse information about policy impacts, social and ecological context of the issue and use framing to convey information that better supports their proposals.
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| 6. |
- Schlüter, Maja, 1970-, et al.
(författare)
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Unraveling complex causal processes that affect sustainability requires more integration between empirical and modeling approaches
- 2023
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - 0027-8424 .- 1091-6490. ; 120:41
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Scientists seek to understand the causal processes that generate sustainability problems and determine effective solutions. Yet, causal inquiry in nature–society systems is hampered by conceptual and methodological challenges that arise from nature–society interdependencies and the complex dynamics they create. Here, we demonstrate how sustainability scientists can address these challenges and make more robust causal claims through better integration between empirical analyses and process- or agent-based modeling. To illustrate how these different epistemological traditions can be integrated, we present four studies of air pollution regulation, natural resource management, and the spread of COVID-19. The studies show how integration can improve empirical estimates of causal effects, inform future research designs and data collection, enhance understanding of the complex dynamics that underlie observed temporal patterns, and elucidate causal mechanisms and the contexts in which they operate. These advances in causal understanding can help sustainability scientists develop better theories of phenomena where social and ecological processes are dynamically intertwined and prior causal knowledge and data are limited. The improved causal understanding also enhances governance by helping scientists and practitioners choose among potential interventions, decide when and how the timing of an intervention matters, and anticipate unexpected outcomes. Methodological integration, however, requires skills and efforts of all involved to learn how members of the respective other tradition think and analyze nature–society systems.
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| 7. |
- Schlüter, Maja, et al.
(författare)
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Why care about theories? Innovative ways of theorizing in sustainability science
- 2022
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Ingår i: Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. - : Elsevier BV. - 1877-3435 .- 1877-3443. ; 54
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- The complex nature of sustainability problems and the aim of sustainability science to support emergent processes of transformation require rethinking how we build and make use of theories. We highlight the diversity of ways in which theories, as assemblages of different elements that can serve a variety of purposes, can emerge within inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary processes. Such emerging theories are (i) contextualized, constantly changing, and build on a plurality of knowledge from science and practice, (ii) embedded in change-making processes arising when diverse actors try to collectively solve a complex problem. We propose four ideal-typical modes of theorizing, and the notion of ‘ecologies of theories’, to explicate and further advance theorizing to meet the challenges and needs of sustainability science.
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