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

Dynamics of trust, fairness, cognitive appraisals, and work engagement in organizational changes : development and test of a theoretical model

This dissertation examined employees’ psychological experiences during organizational changes. While change frequently occurs in today’s workplace, organizational changes bear a risk of adverse effects on employees’ well-being and motivation. To improve employees’ well-being, and thus also the success of change endeavors, it is essential to understand how different types of employees’ experiences evolve by influencing each other during change events. The first substudy of the dissertation presented a theoretical model. This model postulated key psychological processes that influence employees’ work engagement during organizational changes, and their dynamic relationships. The other two substudies provided a partial test of the model by utilizing a three-wave longitudinal survey data (N = 623) collected during the merger of City of Helsinki’s departments of Social and Health Care Services. This data captured employees’ experiences during 2012–2014 with one-year intervals; once before the merger and twice after the merger. The empirical substudies utilized longitudinal structural equation modeling as an analytical framework. The results of the second substudy showed that employees’ cognitive trust towards top management and favorable perceptions of merger process fairness were mainly reciprocally and positively related. While trust was associated with subsequent fairness perceptions throughout the merger, fairness was related to subsequent trust only during the first merger year. The findings suggest that subordinates trust towards leaders may not only be a product of favorable treatment as trust may also color fairness perceptions. The third substudy demonstrated reciprocal relationships between employees’ work engagement and cognitive appraisals of change. Employees’ negative appraisals regarding the personal impact of the change, and increases in such appraisals, were related to decreases in engagement throughout the organizational merger process. Positive change appraisals, and increases in these appraisals, were associated with increases in work engagement only during the first year of the merger. For the opposite direction, high work engagement, and increases in engagement, were related to decreases in negative appraisals, and increases in positive appraisals throughout the merger. These results showed how work engagement accumulates over time especially by mitigating employees’ negative change appraisals. Taken together, this study revealed how employees’ experiences, specifically trust and fairness, and work engagement and change appraisals, evolve via reinforcing reciprocal relationships throughout distinct phases of change events. These processes can result either in upward spirals that foster employees’ well-being and adaptation or to loss spirals with the opposite effect. Organizational change scholars and practitioners would therefore benefit from attending to more dynamic and bi-directional processes in employee change experience.Tämä väitöstutkimus tarkastelee työntekijöiden kokemuksia organisaatiomuutoksista. Organisaatiomuutoksia toteutetaan verrattain usein, ja merkittävissä työn muutoksissa riskinä on työntekijöiden hyvinvoinnin vaarantuminen. Työntekijöiden hyvinvoinnin ja sitä kautta myös organisaatiomuutosten onnistumisen edistämiseksi on tärkeää ymmärtää, miten työntekijöiden kokemukset kehittyvät ja vaikuttavat toisiinsa organisaatiomuutosten aikana. Ensimmäisen osatutkimus esitteli teoreettisen mallin, joka käsittelee työntekijöiden työn imuun vaikuttavia tekijöitä organisaatiomuutoksissa. Työn imulla tarkoitetaan myönteistä työssä koettua tunne- ja motivaatiotilaa. Väitöstyön kahdessa muussa osatutkimuksessa testattiin mallin kahta olettamaa. Kyseinen testaus perustui pitkittäiskyselyaineistoon (N = 623), joka kartoitti työntekijöiden kokemuksia Helsingin kaupungin sosiaali- ja terveysviraston fuusiosta vuosina 2012–2014. Aineisto kerättiin kolmena ajankohtana: noin kuukausi ennen fuusioitumista, vuosi fuusion jälkeen ja kaksi vuotta fuusion jälkeen. Aineisto analysoitiin tilastollisin menetelmin. Toisen osatutkimuksen tulokset osoittivat, että työntekijöiden luottamus ylintä johtoa kohtaan ja myönteiset fuusioon liittyvät oikeudenmukaisuuskokemukset pääsääntöisesti vahvistivat toinen toisiaan fuusioprosessin aikana. Sen lisäksi, että myönteiset kokemukset fuusioprosessin oikeudenmukaisuudesta edistivät luottamusta, johtajiinsa luottavat työntekijät myös arvioivat fuusioprosessin oikeudenmukaisemmaksi. Kolmannessa osatutkimuksessa havaittiin, että työn imu ja työntekijöiden pärjäämisarviot vahvistivat toinen toisiaan fuusion aikana. Mitä enemmän työntekijät arvioivat tulevien muutosten olevan itselleen myönteisiä ja uskoivat sopeutuvansa muutoksiin, ja mitä enemmän nämä odotukset vahvistuivat, sitä enemmän myös työn imu vahvistui fuusion ensimmäisen vuoden aikana. Vastaavat kielteiset odotukset olivat puolestaan yhteydessä työn imun heikentymiseen läpi fuusioprosessin. Ennen fuusiota ja sen aikana korkea työn imu ja työn imun vahvistuminen olivat yhteydessä kielteisten odotusten vähentymiseen ja myönteisten odotusten vahvistumiseen. Työn imun kokeminen ja sen yleistyminen ruokkivat myöhempää työn imua erityisesti vähentämällä työntekijöiden kielteisiä odotuksia muutosta kohtaan. Väitöstutkimuksen perusteella työntekijöiden luottamus ja oikeudenmukaisuusarviot rakentuvat sekä työn imu ja pärjäämisarviot kehittyvät vahvistamalla toinen toisiaan organisaatiomuutosten eri vaiheissa. Nämä prosessit voivat joko johtaa työntekijöiden hyvinvointia ja sopeutumista edistävään tai näitä tekijöitä heikentävään kierteeseen. Organisaatiomuutosten tutkimuksessa ja toteuttamisessa olisikin tärkeää huomioida työntekijöiden muutoskokemuksien kehittymiseen liittyvät dynaamiset ja kaksisuuntaiset vaikutussuhteet

Endogenous Social Preferences, Heterogeneity and Cooperation

We set up an analytical framework focusing on the problem of interaction over time when economic agents are characterized by various types of distributional social preferences. We develop an evolutionary approach in which individual preferences are endogenous and account for the evolution of cooperation when all the players are initially entirely selfish. In particular, within motivationally heterogeneous agents embedded in a social network, we adopt a variant of the indirect evolutionary approach, where material payoffs play a critical role, and assume that a coevolutionary process occurs in which subjective preferences gradually evolve due to a key mechanism involving behavioral choices, relational intensity and degree of social openness. The simulations we carried out led to strongly consistent results with regard to the evolution of player types, the dynamics of material payoffs, the creation of significant interpersonal relationships among agents and the frequency of cooperation. In the long run, cooperation turns out to be the strategic choice that obtains the best performances, in terms of material payoffs, and "nice guys", far from finishing last, succeed in coming out ahead.Behavioral Economics; Cooperation; Prisoner's Dilemma; Social Evolution; Heterogeneous Social Preferences; Indirect Evolutionary Approach

Hybrid laws: constitutionalizing private governance networks

s.a.: Das Recht hybrider Netzwerke. Zeitschrift für das gesamte Handelsrecht und Wirtschaftsrecht 165, 2001, 550-575.. Italienische Fassung: Diritti ibridi: la costituzionalizzazione delle reti private di governance. In: Gunther Teubner, Costituzionalismo societario. Armando, Roma 2004 (im Erscheinen)

Vengefulness Evolves in Small Groups

We discuss how small group interactions overcome evolutionary problems that might otherwise erode vengefulness as a preference trait. The basic viability problem is that the fitness benefits of vengeance often do not cover its personal cost. Even when a sufficiently high level of vengefulness brings increased fitness, at lower levels, vengefulness has a negative fitness gradient. This leads to the threshold problem: how can vengefulness become established in the first place? If it somehow becomes established at a high level, vengefulness creates an attractive niche for cheap imitators, those who look like highly vengeful types but do not bear the costs. This is the mimicry problem, and unchecked it could eliminate vengeful traits. We show how within-group social norms can solve these problems even when encounters with outsiders are also important.

Big Data Ethics in Research

The main problems faced by scientists in working with Big Data sets, highlighting the main ethical issues, taking into account the legislation of the European Union. After a brief Introduction to Big Data, the Technology section presents specific research applications. There is an approach to the main philosophical issues in Philosophical Aspects, and Legal Aspects with specific ethical issues in the EU Regulation on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (Data Protection Directive - General Data Protection Regulation, "GDPR"). The Ethics Issues section details the specific aspects of Big Data. After a brief section of Big Data Research, I finalize my work with the presentation of Conclusions on research ethics in working with Big Data. CONTENTS: Abstract 1. Introduction - 1.1 Definitions - 1.2 Big Data dimensions 2. Technology - 2.1 Applications - - 2.1.1 In research 3. Philosophical aspects 4. Legal aspects - 4.1 GDPR - - Stages of processing of personal data - - Principles of data processing - - Privacy policy and transparency - - Purposes of data processing - - Design and implicit confidentiality - - The (legal) paradox of Big Data 5. Ethical issues - Ethics in research - Awareness - Consent - Control - Transparency - Trust - Ownership - Surveillance and security - Digital identity - Tailored reality - De-identification - Digital inequality - Privacy 6. Big Data research Conclusions Bibliography DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11054.4640

Moral Hypocrisy, Power and Social Preferences

We show with a laboratory experiment that individuals adjust their moral principles to the situation and to their actions, just as much as they adjust their actions to their principles. We first elicit the individuals' principles regarding the fairness and unfairness of allocations in three different scenarios (a Dictator game, an Ultimatum game, and a Trust game). One week later, the same individuals are invited to play those same games with monetary compensation. Finally in the same session we elicit again their principles regarding the fairness and unfairness of allocations in the same three scenarios. Our results show that individuals adjust abstract norms to fit the game, their role and the choices they made. First, norms that appear abstract and universal take into account the bargaining power of the two sides. The strong side bends the norm in its favor and the weak side agrees : Stated fairness is a compromise with power. Second, in most situations, individuals adjust the range of fair shares after playing the game for real money compared with their initial statement. Third, the discrepancy between hypothetical and real behavior is larger in games where real choices have no strategic consequence (Dictator game and second mover in Trust game) than in those where they do (Ultimatum game). Finally the adjustment of principles to actions is mainly the fact of individuals who behave more selfishly and who have a stronger bargaining power. The moral hypocrisy displayed (measured by the discrepancy between statements and actions chosen followed by an adjustment of principles to actions) appears produced by the attempt, not necessarily conscious, to strike a balance between self-image and immediate convenience