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Transdisciplinary research is increasingly used in projects dealing with transitions to sustainable, resilient and low-carbon societies. Transdisciplinary research projects require collaboration and coordination between researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds. Academic literature provides valuable insights on designing, facilitating, leading and evaluating transdisciplinary projects. While a substantial body of literature explores the challenges associated with transdisciplinary research, there is a scarcity of case studies exploring the challenges faced during different phases of project execution. In this paper we present a reflective account and analysis of our experiences during the first fifteen months of a transdisciplinary research project. The project is used as a case study, following a participatory action research methodology. Our findings verified the three types of challenge mentioned in the literature – inherent, institutional and teamwork related. This paper identifies a fourth type – emergent – that has not been discussed in the literature. Emergent challenges introduce uncertainty into TDR projects and are uncontrollable. Such challenges require research consortium leaders to develop adaptive strategies, and to take a mediation and leadership role in dealing with them. The article makes the following recommendations: emergent challenges require emergent strategies; funding should be more flexible to account for the nature of TDR research; TDR could be evaluated on the basis of its overall impact rather than on inflexible ‘deliverables’; academic publishing strategies must be incorporated into TDR projects; team development and co-location should be facilitated; and academic institutions should include performance and promotion criteria encouraging researchers to undertake roles in TDR projects.

The General Medical Council revalidation process1 re-licenses doctors through an absence of clinical governance concerns and the positive demonstration of continued competence by doctors, who collect, reflect on, and discuss a defined portfolio of supporting information in appraisal. This process is recognised internationally as world class.23 It is much more flexible than periodic high stakes examinations. It recognises the depth, breadth, and diversity of medical careers while identifying unsatisfactory performance due to conduct, capability, or health related issues. Its definition and purposes are clear and subtle enough to provide support for development while also providing a robust re-licensing process.4 Tzortziou Brown and …

Action on climate change will require significant transformation of the urban infrastructure and living patterns of cities. This transformation will arise from the processes of decarbonising urban/city energy systems as well as disentangling carbon emissions from all the services of provision that enable urban life. Cities are complex technical-physical-ecological-social-cultural systems and transformation presents what is arguably the archetypical ‘wicked’problem where an effort to change one system of provision may generate unexpected (and possibly undesirable) changes in another. This chapter describes a four-year interdisciplinary research and engagement project to elaborate transformative decarbonisation scenarios for four Australian capital cities. The project used visualisation, scenario generation and pathways analysis, with the researchers supported by a panel of almost 250 professionals from business, government and civil society.

Visioning exercises were convened in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, to explore how these cities could become low-carbon and maintain resilience over the next 25 years. Drawing on the concept of frames—in particular Schon and Rein’s conceptualisation of a frame as a “diagnostic-prescriptive story” that is based on an underlying structure of beliefs, perceptions and appreciation—this paper seeks to: Attend to the ways that workshop participants framed the problems (of emissions reduction and maintaining resilience), surface framing processes and potential related sources of political contention, and discuss the role of visioning exercises in sustainability transitions. Five frames are identified, along with the interpretive orientations underpinning each frame, framing processes and the potential for frame conflict and alignment. The study suggests that the designers and facilitators of visioning exercises need to be attentive to framing processes, potential framing contests, and related social processes during a visioning exercise. Key implications are identified, with a focus on whether an exercise seeks to “open up” a complex issue or to agree upon a singular, i.e., consensual, agenda.

This paper presents results from a field experiment of running a prediction market for international climate negotiations. We draw upon our experience of running the Copenhagen Prediction Market during the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009. The Copenhagen Prediction Market consisted of 17 different markets, where participants could trade in shares predicting, amongst others, reduction targets for various countries, the long-term stabilisation goal or the level of funding from developed countries to developing nations for mitigation and adaptation actions. We show that this novel application of prediction markets to climate negotiations is distinct from more traditional applications and, in many ways, more challenging. We discuss our experiences in designing and setting up the market and interpreting its results. In particular, it is crucial to be able to define the outcome of a climate conference in the face of often ambiguous final communications in order to make the prediction market robust and to find benchmarks to compare prediction market performance against.

Alternative discourses to the traditional growth economy model have existed for many decades. One such concept, the theme of this book, is the steady state economy, most commonly associated with Herman Daly (e.g. Daly 1991). In the 1970s Daly provided a high-level set of criteria as to what constitutes a steady state economy, acknowledging that there was – and still is – much to debate and learn as to the best ways of achieving it. Alongside this concept, recently there has emerged a number of other discourses that would appear to be closely related to the steady state economy (SSE), including the green economy, the circular economy and the blue economy. A cursory look at these different terms indicates a significant overlap in the type of policies and strategies recommended by the four approaches. Furthermore, the green economy and circular economy concepts, in particular, have been successfully gaining prominence with governments and businesses. They are even being adopted by some businesses in their strategic planning (see Kopnina in this volume), something that the steady state economy has mostly failed to achieve to date (Charonis 2012).

The global climate policy environment is currently characterised by a small number of national or regional ‘flagship’ emissions trading schemes and a very large number of smaller more targeted ‘flotilla’ policies. We use an assessment framework to identify the characteristics of policies that affect their likelihood of introduction and alteration during the policy development process. We conclude that this mix of flagship and flotilla policies is at least in part an inevitable consequence of incumbent stakeholder pressure that results in flagship policies being blocked or weakened by those opposing action, and if weakened sufficiently, possibly blocked by those seeking stronger action. In contrast, smaller flotilla policies can be designed to have less impact on large incumbents and/or be of benefit to a different group of stakeholders who then provide political support. As a result, flotilla policies are likely to remain as key elements of the climate policy mix, to reduce emissions beyond those achieved by flagship policies, and to reduce emissions where no flagship policies exist. These findings have two consequences for policy design: the need to ensure that flagship policies do not reduce the effectiveness of flotilla policies, and that flagship policies are capable of being enhanced over time.

Over the last decade, cap-and-trade emissions schemes have emerged as one of the favoured policy instruments for reducing GHG emissions. An inherent design feature of cap-and-trade schemes is that, once the cap on emissions has been set, no additional reductions beyond this level can be provided by the actions of those individuals, organizations and governments within the covered sectors. Thus, the emissions cap constitutes an emissions floor. This feature has been claimed by some to have undesirable implications, in that it discourages ethically motivated mitigation actions and preempts the possibility that local, state and national governments can take additional mitigation action in the context of weak national or regional targets. These criticisms have become prominent in Australia and the US within the public debate regarding the adoption of an emissions trading scheme (ETS). These criticisms and their potential solutions are reviewed. A set-aside reserve is proposed to automatically retire ETS permi...

Over the last two decades, carbon pricing - particularly the use of carbon markets - has become a prominent environmental policy option for controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Orthodox economic theory suggests that carbon markets are the least-cost method of achieving emission reductions, and governments in Europe, New Zealand, and now Australia have introduced carbon pricing schemes with faith that this will transform their economies and meet global emission targets. A number of other states and countries are also considering or developing their own national schemes including California, China, Japan, South Korea and Brazil.

The plan to introduce a carbon pricing scheme in Australia has focused attention on the future relevance and necessity of using other policy instruments to reduce carbon emissions. Significant reports, including the Wilkins Review and reports by the Productivity Commission, have argued using the standard neoclassical economics framework that once a carbon price is established, it should be (almost) the only instrument needed to tackle climate change mitigation in Australia. With a small number of exceptions for complementary instruments to address some market failures, the use of other climate policy instruments, it is argued, will result only in unnecessary duplication and potential distortions. The aim of this article is to show that there are, in fact, a significant number of rationales for implementing several climate policy instruments in combination with a carbon price, and we should not be too quick to dismiss certain climate policy instrument combinations.

We explore the relationship between low-carbon objectives and the strategic security of electricity in the context of the UK electricity system. We consider diversity of fuel source mix to represent one dimension of security—robustness against interruptions of any one source—and apply two different diversity indices to the range of electricity system scenarios produced by the UK government and independent researchers. Our results show that low-carbon objectives are uniformly associated with greater long-term diversity in UK electricity generation. With reference to data on wind generation we also consider the impact of source variability on a second dimension of security—the reliability of generation availability. We conclude that this does not undermine our fundamental conclusion that low-carbon scenarios are associated with greater strategic security of supply in UK electricity. We discuss reasons for this result, explore sensitivities, and briefly discuss possible policy instruments associated with diversity and their limitations.

Agent‐based modelling is a bottom‐up approach to understanding systems which provides a powerful tool for analysing complex, non‐linear markets. The method involves creating artificial agents designed to mimic the attributes and behaviours of their real‐world counterparts. The system’s macro‐observable properties emerge as a consequence of these attributes and behaviours and the interactions between them. The simulation output may be potentially used for explanatory, exploratory and predictive purposes. The aim of this paper is to introduce the reader to some of the basic concepts and methods behind agent‐based modelling and to present some recent business applications of these tools, including work in the telecoms and media markets.

Thorstein Veblen's seminal paper 'Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?' (1898) is well known for its critique of rational economic man. However, rather than just criticize this model, Veblen developed an alternative, evolutionary-informed approach to understanding human nature, based partly on the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and, later, William McDougall. The aim of this paper is to show how recent results from a number of cognitive disciplines are beginning to reaffirm many of Veblen's core psychological assumptions. The paper argues that an active, multimodular and hierarchical approach to the mind can help provide a more integrative framework in which to examine economic behavior. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.

An Additional Action Reserve (AAR) is proposed as a mechanism to allow for initiatives by government and voluntary private interests to make additional emissions reductions beyond a nationally set cap. The key idea of the AAR is to annually set aside a proportion of the Australian Emission Units (AEUs) which can then be retired if state or local government, businesses or individuals take specific emission reduction measures which go beyond those expected to be driven by the CPRS. AEUs allocated to the reserve that are not retired through additional activities would then be made available to CPRS participants. By providing an upper bound to such actions, the scheme would limit the uncertainty as to the quantity of available permits for emitters and provide a limit to the potential losses of auctioning revenue from AEU retirements. Compared to some other options to allow for additional action (such as buying-and-retiring of permits or future reductions of the national cap) the scheme combines the favorable features of accounting for tangible, psychologically-satisfying actions (such as installing a home solar PV system) with a transparent process that assures the participant that such actions are having an immediate effect in reducing national emissions. Elements of this approach have already been seen in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an inter-state emissions trading scheme which began in the United States in 2009.