The SLIM (Social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) Final Report

Background: SLIM stands for 'Socuak Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale'. It is a multi-country research project funded by the European Commission (DG RESEARCH - 5th Framework Programme for research and technological development, 1998-2002). Its main theme is the investigation of the socio-economic aspects of the sustainable use of water. Within this theme, its main focus of interest lies in understanding the application of social learning as a conceptual framework, an operational principle, a policy instrument and a process of systemic change

Intangible trust requirements - how to fill the requirements trust "gap"?

Previous research efforts have been expended in terms of the capture and subsequent instantiation of "soft" trust requirements that relate to HCI usability concerns or in relation to "hard" tangible security requirements that primarily relate to security a ssurance and security protocols. Little direct focus has been paid to managing intangible trust related requirements per se. This 'gap' is perhaps most evident in the public B2C (Business to Consumer) E- Systems we all use on a daily basis. Some speculative suggestions are made as to how to fill the 'gap'. Visual card sorting is suggested as a suitable evaluative tool; whilst deontic logic trust norms and UML extended notation are the suggested (methodologically invariant) means by which software development teams can perhaps more fully capture hence visualize intangible trust requirements

Boundary objects, power, and learning: The matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations

This article develops an understanding of the agential role of boundary objects in generating and politicizing learning in organizations, as it emerges from the entangled actions of humans and non-humans. We offer two empirical vignettes in which middle managers seek to develop more sustainable ways of working. Informed by Foucault’s writing on power, our work highlights how power relations enable and foreclose the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with boundary objects. Our data demonstrate how this impacts the learning that emerges as boundary objects are configured and unraveled over time. In so doing, we illustrate how boundary objects are not fixed entities, but are mutable, relational, and politicized in nature. Connecting boundary objects to affordances within a Foucauldian perspective on power offers a more nuanced understanding of how ‘the material’ plays an agential role in consolidating and disrupting understandings in the accomplishment of learning

Multi-level Governance of Climate Change Adaptation: United Nations Negotiations and Adaptation Project Implementation in Nicaragua and Samoa

The rapid entry into force of the Paris Agreement reaffirmed, with certainty, that the international community would continue its efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change impacts opening a new era of international cooperation on climate change. This thesis explores how both negotiations around climate change adaptation and adaptation project implementation have evolved in this post-Paris Agreement era (from adoption in December 2015 to present). Using the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Adaptation Fund as the central lens, the chapters explore international negotiations around the Fund as well as two Adaptation Fund funded projects—one in Nicaragua and the second in Samoa. This research which traverses the levels of governance from international to local prompts an examination of how exactly adaptation stakeholders and institutions work across and between governance levels and scales. Thus, the framework of multi-level governance is used as a way to unpack the interactions and structures involved in the Adaptation Fund and its funded projects. At the international level negotiations around the Adaptation Fund, we find that developing countries use the Adaptation Fund as a tool to defend justice-based norms in a UNFCCC system that has rapidly transition to a more liberal-based norm structure with the introduction of the Paris Agreement. Developing countries\u27 ardent and almost unanimous support for the continuation of the Adaptation Fund under the Paris Agreement throughout the duration of the negotiating process (2015-2018) provides insights into their efforts to defend and promote justice-based norms. We explore how this unwavering support for the Adaptation Fund could impact Fund structures, operations, and on-the-ground project implementation (looking to the national and sub-national levels). We then trace the Adaptation Fund from negotiations to project implementation. These projects inherently present a multi-level governance challenge because they are developed at the national level, funded and monitored at the international level, and ultimately implemented in communities. It is well understood that these levels of governance exist and function within this overall system of climate adaptation. However, the synergies that facilitate effective adaptation and the barriers that inhibit smooth multi-level governance of adaptation are not well understood in the literature. Chapter 3 and 4 presents evidence from Adaptation Fund projects in Samoa and Nicaragua to highlight areas where multi-level governance had been leveraged to enhance the governance of adaptation as well as areas of the projects where this has not occurred. They further examine the trade-offs inherent in efforts to work across governance scales and levels in conducting climate adaptation

Emerging spheres of engagement: the role of trust and care in community-university research

Community-engaged research takes place at a complex social site that has both a history and a future as well as encompassing the project activities of the researchers and community members. We argue that a crucial methodological aspect of undertaking such research is the development of trust relationships between researchers and community. We propose that for each research project, this relationship can best be understood as a ‘sphere of engagement’, after Ingold’s ‘sphere of nurture’, and that trust and care are emergent and binding qualities of this sphere. Tracing the development of trust relationships in a case study, using the idea of security-based trust and harmony-based trust, we conclude that trust, and the related concept of care, bind together people, events, histories and futures beyond the dichotomous and time-delimited relationship of a research contract, and carry the sphere of engagement of researchers and community beyond the life of any one project

Addressing climate vulnerability : promoting the participatory rights of indigenous peoples and women through Finnish foreign policy

Julkaistu versi

Who Killed the Primary Care Strategy? A Socio-Material Analysis

This study places the intended creation and implementation of an inter-professional education strategy at the intersection of three networks. The networks in question are cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), actor network theory (ANT), and a complex healthcare organisation (NHSX). CHAT and ANT, whilst both socio-material in origin, afford quite different readings of NHSX: therefore, the former has been used to identify, distil, and decompose the organisational activity systems, and the latter has been used to problematise them. The strategy was created in 2005 and had ceased to exist by 2010. This study therefore employs CHAT and ANT accounts to trace the lifespan of the strategy through the organisation, in particular through organisational working, learning, and boundary crossing, in an attempt to explain its untimely demise. It is envisaged that this study will provide an aid to framing how socio-material approaches can be combined to support inter-professional policy construction and implementation in a way that will allow flexibility for others to adapt to their own distinctive circumstance