Search

Impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise and changes in annual precipitation, are becoming increasingly visible around the world and within Germany, thus increasing pressures to adapt. Forces of stability and change within established policy fields greatly determine the extent to which governance systems can adapt to worsening existing risks and new challenges. Employing a lock-in perspective and a comparative analysis of the governance of coastal risks in Schleswig-Holstein and water scarcity in Thuringia, we show how infrastructures, institutions, actors, and cognitive framing shape policy landscapes and together constitute dynamics of policy stability and change in the face of long-term climate impacts. This paper offers a comprehensive, systemic perspective of how adaptation challenges fit into established policy paradigms and programs as it highlights how non-material and material components are intertwined and can act as constraints to policy-making.

Coastal fresh groundwater reservoirs are often threatened by different salinization processes. Anthropogenic drivers for salinization include groundwater abstraction, land cultivation and artificial drainage. Global climate change, which modifies groundwater recharge patterns and results in sea-level rise, presents another important process enhancing groundwater salinization.A good understanding regarding the physical behaviour of coastal groundwater systems is needed for sustainable management, including the development of effective counter measures to antagonize future groundwater salinization. At present, however, such knowledge is incomplete.The aim of this study was to clarify the role of important factors expected to affect future groundwater salinization of low-lying coastal groundwater systems, namely sea-level rise, varying groundwater recharge and abstraction rates, changing drainage and river levels as well as land subsidence. A novel numerical 3-D variable-density groundwater flow and salt transport modeling approach was developed for this purpose, using Northwestern Germany as case study. To systematically evaluate the role of the individual salinization factors, separate model variants were employed.We found that sea-level rise causes strongest salinization, particularly close to the coastline. Lifting of drainage levels results in freshening of the marsh areas, while a decrease of drainage levels amplifies salinization. Variation of groundwater recharge patterns and abstraction rates have least impact on regional groundwater salinization. As the system is not at steady-state, autonomous salinization will continue into the future and contribute a significant portion of salt loads until the end of the 21st century. Findings and implications of this study may be relevant to similar low-lying coastal groundwater systems around the world.

Societies across the globe are battling with the effects of climate change as seen in the scientific evidence produced periodically by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Africa has been identified as more vulnerable to climate change given its weak governance systems, low technology, dependency on ecological resources for livelihood as well as conflict and high poverty levels. Educational responses to climate change though recognized, are yet to be explored by various countries on the continent. The researchers conducted a qualitative study to examine the perspectives and views of university lecturers, administrators and students on climate change related courses and programmes regarding opportunities and challenges for climate change education at Makerere University as part of a larger multiple comparative study in East Africa. A case study design was adopted. Semi-structured in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted to collect data from a total of 25 participants at the case university. Data was analysed using thematic analysis based on Braun and Clarke (2006) with the help of MAXQDA software. Findings revealed a wide range of perspectives and views regarding the challenges and opportunities for climate change education at this university. It is expected that the findings of this study may contribute to empirical scientific knowledge on climate change education at universities in the African context.

Transdisciplinary research has been introduced as an approach to integrate different bodies of knowledge to learn and to develop solutions towards socio-ecological transformations. In these concepts, broad stakeholder involvement is intended to promote knowledge integration, consensus formation and activation of local actors to initiate and advance learning and change processes. In doing so, however, transdisciplinary processes enter societal battlegrounds and meet conflicting interest and knowledge claims. Thus, building on the discussion on transdisciplinarity in the context of sustainability-related research, the paper seeks to understand when and why which types of conflicts emerge in sustainability-related transdisciplinary research, how they affect knowledge integration, and how they can be resolved. It develops a categorization of conflicts including differing values, conflicting interests, dissimilar claims of legitimacy, and diverse knowledge claims. They are applied empirically in the analysis of a project on regional adaptation to climate change in Northwestern Germany. It studies processes and outcomes with regard to the societal impact of the project and discusses experiences of conflicts and relevant solutions. The paper finds that societally relevant transdisciplinary research processes need to be prepared for conflict resolution and overcoming resistance and blockages in cases when consensus formation and mutual agreement is not attainable.

The ecosystem-based management (EBM) philosophy draws upon the principle that holistic understanding of the system to be governed needs to guide the decision-making process. However, empirical evidence is growing that knowledge integration is still a main bottleneck for EBM decision-makers. This paper argues that transdisciplinary knowledge management (TKM) is a key competence in achieving knowledge integration, while simultaneously it represents an underdeveloped research area in EBM if understood as a process of human interaction. Based on a literature review, this article summarizes and reflects upon the most recent development in the field of TKM. The paper presents a detailed definition and in-depth description of TKM as a process of human interaction and a diversity of organizational structures that effectuate TKM. Theoretically discussed premises are furthermore illuminated and evaluated by a case study that exemplifies pro-active development and implementation of TKM. Deviating case observations are presented as novel contributions to the field. They suggest new ideas and inspiration for future EBM research and policy agendas.

Einführung in das Schwerpunktthema

While most climate change vulnerability assessments focus on regional or city-levels, this paper studies villages and their different forms of vulnerability vis

Die Klimabewegung, getragen von „Fridays for Future“ und „ Extinction Rebellion“, hat es geschafft, politisch wirksam zu werden und für Regierungen unausweichlichen politischen Druck zu erzeugen. Wie kann dieser Handlungsdruck in konkrete politische und gesellschaftliche Veränderungen überführt werden?

Several case studies show that social factors like institutions, perceptions and social capital strongly affect social capacities to adapt to climate change. Together with economic and technological development they are important for building social capacities. However, there are almost no methodologies for the systematic assessment of social factors. After reviewing existing methodologies we identify the Adaptive Capacity Wheel (ACW) by Gupta et al. (2010), developed for assessing the adaptive capacity of institutions, as the most comprehensive and operationalised framework to assess social factors. The ACW differentiates 22 criteria to assess 6 dimensions: variety, learning capacity, room for autonomous change, leadership, availability of resources, fair governance. To include important psychological factors we extended the ACW by two dimensions: "adaptation motivation" refers to actors' motivation to realise, support and/or promote adaptation to climate; "adaptation belief" refers to actors' perceptions of realisability and effectiveness of adaptation measures. We applied the extended ACW to assess adaptive capacities of four sectors – water management, flood/coastal protection, civil protection and regional planning – in northwestern Germany. The assessments of adaptation motivation and belief provided a clear added value. The results also revealed some methodological problems in applying the ACW (e.g. overlap of dimensions), for which we propose methodological solutions.

The article introduces the notion of adaptiveness and discusses the role of social learning in it. Adaptiveness refers to the capacity of a social actor or social–ecological system to adapt in response to, or in anticipation of, changes in the environment. We explore arguments both from a theoretical perspective and through illustrations from case studies of water management in the Alps of Europe and Mekong in southeast Asia. We propose and illustrate that social learning processes are important for building adaptiveness in several ways and at different scales. Social learning can help cope with informational uncertainty; reduce normative uncertainty; build consensus on criteria for monitoring and evaluation; empower stakeholders to take adaptive actions; reduce conflicts and identify synergies between adaptations; and improve fairness of decisions and actions. Findings in the case studies provide some support for these generalizations but often with caveats related to diversity of stakeholder interests, levels of shared understanding versus contested knowledge and scale of coordination. For this reason, we suggest that future work pays greater attention to issues of agency, knowledge and scale: What strategies have individuals and organizations pursued in successful examples of social learning? How are the boundaries and interactions between science, policy and practice managed? How does social learning occur across spatial and temporal scales?

In 2001, the Earth System Science Partnership declared an urgent need to develop 'strategies for Earth System management'. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remain unspecified. We argue that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biogeophysical systems are both insufficient and poorly understood. For this reason, we have developed, and present here, the science and implementation plan for the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research agenda under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). © 2010 Elsevier B.V.

In global environmental governance, numerous new international organizations have emerged from dozens of multilateral treaties signed over the last 30 years. This paper focuses on intergovernmental organizations in an organizational theory perspective with a particular focus on organizational learning processes. It explores where and when international organizations exhibit organizational learning with significant effects on the organizations' internal structure and behavior. Key hypotheses from principal-agent theory and organizational learning theory are tested in eight case studies of international organizations involved in global environmental governance. The analysis shows that organizations engage in three forms of learning: reflexive learning, adaptive learning, and no learning. Explanations of the observed variation depend on specific learning mechanisms, change agents in leadership functions and external triggers such as pressures from governments or nongovernmental actors.

The Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has become the centre of heated debates concerning its function as the science–policy interface of the Convention. Based on explorations of the role, nature, and organisation of scientific advice mechanisms for multilateral environmental agreements in general, we give reasons for SBSTTA's inherently political role in the current governance process of the CBD, and then explore ways to enhance SBSTTA's effectiveness as a science–policy interface, going beyond the usual view that it should merely be “more scientific”. As the quality of SBSTTA's work depends primarily on the processes that guide the discussions during its meetings and on the material on which these discussions are based, we suggest that SBSTTA (a) improves its scientific foundation by systematically strengthening its relations to more scientific institutions outside the formal CBD regime, and (b) focuses on providing for a more substantive political debate to resolve alternative policy choices during its meetings. For this approach to succeed there is a need for a mechanism that provides SBSTTA with timely, salient, legitimate, and credible advice—a role that an International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity (IMoSEB) could well provide.

Social learning studies emerged as part of the ecological economics research agenda rather recently. Questions of how human societies and organisations learn and transition on the basis of environmental knowledge relate to the core ideas of ecological economics with its pluralistic understanding of human behaviour in contrast to the limited focus on incentive-driven behaviour. Our study analyses the emergence and thematic foci of social learning studies within ecological economics over the past 15 years. We selected and analysed 54 articles published after peer review in established journals adhering to the epistemological tradition of ecological economics. This study is guided by the interest in how social learning is conceptualised, how this research is positioned in terms of process dynamics, causal factors and outcomes of learning. Results show, that the number of related papers grew substantially in recent years. Also the role of formal or informal institutions has been found to be a strong causal factor for social learning and change processes vis-à-vis technological, economic or political factors. In addition, there is a growing awareness of social learning processes in various environmental policy fields such as biodiversity governance, water and land management, fisheries, and climate adaptation. We conclude that these insights can give new impulses to research on socio-ecological transition and to the related debate on societal change and transformation processes as core topics for ecological economics.

Governance depends upon inputs from science. Whereas the conventional view portrays science as advisor of policy makers, more recent understandings see knowledge creation processes and decision processes as highly interrelated and intermingled. Against this background, we analyse the new research programme on socio-ecological research set up in Germany. In doing so, we firstly discuss current conceptual approaches to redefining the role of science in society. Secondly, we identify five challenges for scientific activities and apply these as criteria for an assessment of the socio-ecological research initiative. Thirdly, we analyse the potential limits and opportunities of this programme for social learning towards sustainable development. We also indicate what can be learned for ecological economics. 2

The concept of sustainable development implies the need for organizational learning in business corporations to find innovative solutions. In this context, the paper analyzes the requirements and options for environmental policy to induce sustainability-related learning processes in corporations. It discusses the impacts of different policy instruments on these processes. Initially, the particular challenges of organizational learning for sustainability are being sketched out. Drawing on organizational learning studies, a subsequent section of the paper addresses fundamental elements and drivers for organizational learning processes on different levels in business corporations. The particular nodes where public policy can influence corporate learning processes are the central focus of these considerations. On this basis, we examine existing policy instruments frequently used in environmental policy with regard to their potential to foster learning processes towards sustainability. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Combating global warming, safeguarding ecological support systems and reducing energy and resource use as well as maintaining functioning societies are key challenges for many businesses today and in the near future. These problems have been addressed under the integrating concept of sustainable development. Implementing sustainable development in corporations, however, necessitates organizational learning. In light of a wide variation in corporate behaviour in accepting these challenges or not, the question arises of when and why companies pursue processes of learning and change to integrate sustainability, what effects these innovations have, and to what extent, and what factors promote or inhibit learning. This article addresses these questions on the basis of an empirical analysis of six companies. The study analyses internal and external explanatory factors for the occurrence of sustainability-oriented learning and change processes in medium-sized and large companies. Our findings highlight the role of learning mechanisms, leadership styles, internal networks and change agents. In terms of company-external factors, the study focused on the pressure applied by stakeholders and governmental regulation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The paper presents a case study analysing the effects of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity as an intergovernmental organisation. Within the study, the effects of organisations are measured by their outcome, i.e. the influence on the behaviour of other actors such as national governments. Three forms of outcomes are being distinguished, namely knowledge brokerage and diffusion, capacity building, and negotiation facilitation. In addition, the paper tries to explain the observed effects on the basis of internal and external variables. The CBD Secretariat has been established in 1992 and is now located in Montreal with about 70 employees. As most other secretariats of international conventions, it is the main organiser and facilitator of the convention process. The empirical material shows that the Secretariat has a measurable influence on the intergovernmental cooperative process which can be attributed to the effective internal management processes and the qualities of its leaders. Lacking capacity building functions and highly selective effects with regard to the provision of knowledge are explained by the limited formal autonomy and the structure of the global biodiversity problem.

Institutional learning has been studied under different labels within different social science disciplines. In this paper, we will apply an integrated conceptual framework that starts out from a notion of boundedly rational actors. It builds on the literature on policy learning as well as on the field of organizational learning as it has been established in management science. Within this framework, institutional learning is understood as a process in which individual or collective actors acquire knowledge that leads to a change in their behavior and results in a new or amended institutional design in a given policy arena. A policy arena is constituted through a set of actors with distinct agendas and objectives in one issue area of policy making. Therefore, the empirical analysis of institutional learning processes in international policy arenas has to study the role of actors and networks in the development of the respective arena as well as the precise steps of the learning processes and the key influencing factors. This will be done in the analytical part of the paper which focuses on institutional learning in the implementation process of the access and benefit-sharing provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). It will be shown that the first decade in the implementation process since the Convention's entry into force in 1993 has demonstrated the CBD's potential for institutional learning and that this potential is key for successful subsequent decision-making.

The concept of access and benefit-sharing (ABS) in genetic resources as maintained by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims at promoting the conservation of biodiversity and equity between the North and the South at the same time. Its implementation challenges various disciplines. First, from an economic point of view, designing efficient ABS provisions turns to be highly complex given its multi-task and multi-agent problem structure, and given the lack of evidence that the economic benefits drawn from the exploitation of genetic resources will suffice to fund the preservation of biodiversity. Second, from a legal point of view, the principles of the CBD are very general. Their proper implementation requires the design of new intellectual property rights and new liability regimes, which challenge the current legal doctrines and have complex interactions with pre-existing legal regimes. Third, from the perspective of political and management sciences, the implementation of the CBD raises the question of how to design institutional frameworks that enable both democratic decision making taking into account the interests of the diverse stakeholders at the global level and collective learning considering the fact that humanity is dealing with complex problems characterized by numerous dimensions and high uncertainties. This special issue assembles a set of papers dealing with these issues and questions. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In a number of recent research projects, computer models have been included in participatory procedures to assess global environmental change. The intention was to support knowledge production and to help the involved non-scientists to develop a deeper understanding of the interactions between natural and social systems. This paper analyses the experiences made in three projects with the use of computer models from a participatory and a risk management perspective. Our cross-cutting analysis of the objectives, the employed project designs and moderation schemes and the observed learning processes in participatory processes with model use shows that models play a mixed role in informing participants and stimulating discussions. However, no deeper reflection on values and belief systems could be achieved. In terms of the risk management phases, computer models serve best the purposes of problem definition and option assessment within participatory integrated assessment (PIA) processes.

Agent based modeling is a technique for simulating complex systems that allows the modeler to investigate both the potential for and the sources of emergent properties: behaviors of the system quite different from the behavior of any of the elements within it. Problems well suited to investigation by agent based models are those with many people solving a similar problem where their individual responses to the problem influence the choices that others make, where new technologies may emerge to assist them solve the problem, and where social dilemmas exist. These features are inherent in many problems of adaptation to climate change. Agent based modeling can not predict the future of a complex adaptive system - no method of modeling can - but it can offer insights into the relationship between features of current systems and the range of possible future adaptations that will be likely in response to climate change. Die agentenbasierte Modellierung als Methode der Simulation komplexer Systeme ermöglicht die Analyse von Potentialen und Ursprüngen emergenter Eigenschaften, die nicht allein auf Basis des Verhaltens der Elemente des Systems erklärt werden können. Für agentenbasierte Modellansätze bieten sich insbesondere solche Probleme an, bei denen eine Vielzahl von sich wechselseitig beeinflussenden Individuen in die Lösung desselben Problems einbezogen sind. Zudem kann die Entstehung neuartiger Techniken sowie bestehende Umgangsformen mit sozialen Dilemmasituationen analysiert werden. Die Probleme der Anpassung an den Klimawandel zeichnen sich durch diese Kennzeichen aus. Zwar kann die agentenbasierte Modellierung die Zukunft eines komplexen adaptiven Systems ebenso wenig vorhersagen wie andere Modelle, doch kann sie Einsichten in die Beziehungen zwischen verschiedenen Eigenschaften dieser Systeme und in die möglichen zukünftigen Anpassungsmaßnahmen an den Klimawandel und deren Kosten liefern.

In 1988, the incoming head of one of the most prominent scientific assessment bodies, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), explained: “Right now, many countries, especially developing countries, simply do not trust assessments in which their scientists and policymakers have not participated.” Since then, the international community gathered significant experience in designing and organising international assessments that allow for broad participation by representatives of national governments and influence domestic and international policy making. By analysing the case study of the IPCC, the paper focuses on the role of individual nation states played in international assessments and how this role changed over time and why. It is shown that there is a tendency of increasing internationalisation in the field of climate research and climate policy that limits the specific influence of individual nation states. The study of the internal processes of the IPCC reveals a growth of internal dynamics that built up boundaries for the behaviour of individual actors (such as government representatives and scientists). However, over the years the actors involved also learned how to use the IPCC mechanisms more effectively.

Scientific assessments play a crucial role in advising and shaping political decisions particularly in the environmental domain. Therefore, this and the accompanying paper (Part 2) present two case studies of international environmental assessments with a perspective on internal learning processes. When carried out over a longer period of time, scientific assessments provide an opportunity for learning from past experience and from other assessment experiences which gives them the opportunity to become more powerful institutions in the process of solving environmental problems and in advising political decision-making. The paper will investigate how the assessments at hand organised their learning processes and which factors might have been influential in these processes. To answer these questions, a conceptual framework will be developed drawing particularly on literature on organisational learning. This concept will be applied to two case studies on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and (Part 2) on the scientific assessments under the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP). Both cases are iterative processes with significant changes of the assessment institutions over time, but they differ in their basic structures and in their effectiveness with regard to political outcomes which allows for their comparison in order to draw general conclusions.

This chapter draws on some existing approaches from political science, sociology, management studies and social psychology in order to outline a conceptual framework for the analysis of social learning processes towards sustainability. It highlights the need for social learning in the context of sustainability and leads to a related definition of social learning. The chapter discusses concepts of social and political learning that have been developed in political science. It sketches out a conceptual framework that focuses on societal actors as change agents in social learning processes towards sustainability. The chapter specifies the meaning of social learning that is relevant for a transition towards sustainable development. It refers to social learning as processes of learning that take place on a collective level constituting changes that are more than the mere sum of individual contributions to it. The chapter concentrates on the practical outcomes that foster sustainable development.