Lessons from Area-Wide, Multi-Agency Habitat Conservation Plans in California

How can the Endangered Species Act and other conservation programs cope with population and development pressures, the current biodiversity crisis, and climate change? Over 30 years ago, public and private partners in California pioneered the concept of inter-governmental habitat conservation planning in an attempt to balance the competing demands of developing desirable land and the need to provide sufficient habitat to protect species at risk. The evolution of this early innovation in governance provides valuable insights for the many ensuing and emerging federal and state initiatives seeking to promote landscape-level inter-agency planning. This report, prepared by the University of California, Irvine Law Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources (CLEANR), explores the key challenges of promoting effective and comprehensive conservation governance through the experience of area-wide, multi-agency habitat conservation plans, with a particular focus in California. Based on interviews with seasoned practitioners and intensive collaborative dialogues co-convened with the Center for Collaboration in Governance as part of CLEANR\u27s innovative Workshop Roundtable series, the report identifies the tradeoffs between plan scale, depth, duration, cost, certainty, and efficacy. However, close attention to these underlying tradeoffs — along with recognition of when appropriate conditions exist and careful institutional design choices — can maximize the likelihood of effective, multi-jurisdictional, large-scale, and adaptive conservation planning

Asset Building for Social Change: Pathways to Large-Scale Impact

Provides an in-depth examination of current and historic initiatives, in an effort to discern patterns of successful scaling up from among Ford's Assets Program portfolios worldwide

Future scenarios to inspire innovation

In recent years and accelerated by the economic and financial crisis, complex global issues have moved to the forefront of policy making. These grand challenges require policy makers to address a variety of interrelated issues, which are built upon yet uncoordinated and dispersed bodies of knowledge. Due to the social dynamics of innovation, new socio-technical subsystems are emerging, however there is lack of exploitation of innovative solutions. In this paper we argue that issues of how knowledge is represented can have a part in this lack of exploitation. For example, when drivers of change are not only multiple but also mutable, it is not sensible to extrapolate the future from data and relationships of the past. This paper investigates ways in which futures thinking can be used as a tool for inspiring actions and structures that address the grand challenges. By analysing several scenario cases, elements of good practice and principles on how to strengthen innovation systems through future scenarios are identified. This is needed because innovation itself needs to be oriented along more sustainable pathways enabling transformations of socio-technical systems

Final report TransForum WP-046 : images of sustainable development of Dutch agriculture and green space

In the project “Images of sustainable development of Dutch agriculture and green space” three PhD candidates studied the topic of images in sustainable development. Frans Hermans focused on the topic of societal images and their role and influence in innovation projects. The title of his subproject was “Social learning for sustainability in dynamic agricultural innovation networks.” Joost Vervoort explored the topic of “visualisation”, that is, using and producing images for specific purposes, in the context of innovation projects and programmes, in a subproject called “Step into the system: interactive media strategies for the exchange of insights on social-ecological change.” Finally, Dirk van Apeldoorn took a complex adaptive systems approach to images. He modelled various agro-ecosystems to compare images of those systems with the behaviour of those systems. His subproject was called “Modeling resilience of agro-ecosystems.

Collaborative Leadership and the Design of a School-Based Chemical Health Service System

This work-related project used strategies of collaborative leadership behavior to facilitate the design and implementation of a county-wide, comprehensive, and coordinated school-based chemical health service system. People involved in the design included representatives from school districts, county government departments, chemical dependency treatment agencies, nonprofit organizations, and a parent. The goal of this project was to create an effective, sustainable, and cohesive collaboration through the use of a facilitation process that illustrated the principles of collaborative leadership. The project demonstrated that interagency collaboration, along with effective leadership skills, can be successful in achieving meaningful system change that benefits adolescents and their families

A Qualitative Inquiry into Organisational Culture\u27s Moderating Effect on Knowledge Management Projects in the Aerospace and Defense Industry

The management of knowledge permeates the social fabric of business enterprises today. Many suggest that the success of knowledge management is predominately associated with organisational culture. However, while researchers typically conclude that organisational culture affects knowledge management projects, initiatives and organisational effectiveness, there is a lack of research in this regard in the aerospace and defense industry. The research in this manuscript leveraged grounded theory protocols and existing research conducted in other industries to investigate specific cultural implications of organisational knowledge management activities in aerospace and defense companies. A constructivist knowledge claim position yielded theoretical observations about this phenomenon

Adaptive Governance and Evolving Solutions to Natural Resource Conflicts

New Zealand is facing increasing challenges in managing natural resources (land, freshwater, marine space and air quality) under pressures from domestic (population growth, agricultural intensification, cultural expectations) and international (climate change) sources. These challenges can be described in terms of managing ‘wicked problems’; i.e. problems that may not be understood fully until they have been solved, where stakeholders have different world views and frames for understanding the problem, the constraints affecting the problem and the resources required to solve it change over time, and no complete solution is ever actually found. Adaptive governance addresses wicked problems through a framework to engage stakeholders in a participative process to create a long term vision. The vision must identify competing goals and a process for balancing them over time that acknowledges conflicts cannot always be resolved in a single lasting decision. Circumstances, goals and priorities can all vary over time and by region. The Resource Management Act can be seen as an adaptive governance structure where frameworks for resources such as water may take years to evolve and decades to fully implement. Adaptive management is about delivery through an incremental/experimental approach, limits on the certainty that governments can provide and stakeholders can demand, and flexibility in processes and results. In New Zealand it also requires balancing central government expertise and resources, with local authorities which can reflect local goals and knowledge, but have varying resources and can face quite distinct issues of widely differing severity. It is important to signal the incremental, overlapping, iterative and time-consuming nature of the work involved in developing and implementing adaptive governance and management frameworks. Managing the expectations of those involved as to the nature of the process and their role in it, and the scope and timing of likely outcomes, is key to sustaining participation.Adaptive capacity; governance; resilience

Designing as Construction of Representations: A Dynamic Viewpoint in Cognitive Design Research

This article presents a cognitively oriented viewpoint on design. It focuses on cognitive, dynamic aspects of real design, i.e., the actual cognitive activity implemented by designers during their work on professional design projects. Rather than conceiving de-signing as problem solving - Simon's symbolic information processing (SIP) approach - or as a reflective practice or some other form of situated activity - the situativity (SIT) approach - we consider that, from a cognitive viewpoint, designing is most appropriately characterised as a construction of representations. After a critical discussion of the SIP and SIT approaches to design, we present our view-point. This presentation concerns the evolving nature of representations regarding levels of abstraction and degrees of precision, the function of external representations, and specific qualities of representation in collective design. Designing is described at three levels: the organisation of the activity, its strategies, and its design-representation construction activities (different ways to generate, trans-form, and evaluate representations). Even if we adopt a "generic design" stance, we claim that design can take different forms depending on the nature of the artefact, and we propose some candidates for dimensions that allow a distinction to be made between these forms of design. We discuss the potential specificity of HCI design, and the lack of cognitive design research occupied with the quality of design. We close our discussion of representational structures and activities by an outline of some directions regarding their functional linkages