The "World System" Of the Paris Agreement: Exploring The Construction, Dissemination, And Implementation of Climate Knowledge Through Redd

Climate change is one of the most pressing social and environmental issues of the 21st century, and will require innovative thinking to understand its complexity. The Paris Agreement, negotiated at the 2015 21st Conference of Parties, marked a monumental international agreement toward collective action on climate change. Through world systems theory and global value chain analysis, this paper explores how climate knowledge is co-constructed, differentially distributed, and consistently negotiated in the frontiers among diverse knowledge systems. These theoretical frameworks allow us to explore how power is manifest in knowledge systems. I argue that this theoretical approach may more broadly acknowledge the role that organizations play when navigating the complex field of climate change. World system theory and global value chains is used to understand the multi-scalar nature of Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) programs. In doing so, a new framework is proposed for grasping the complex nature of climate knowledge, governance, and policy implementatio

Hill Country Conservation: A Network and Narrative for Large-Scale Collaborative Conservation

This report describes the joint research and practitioner-based effort to understand the network and narrative that shapes Hill Country conservation opportunities and outcomes. From April 2015-July 2016, we collected and analyzed over 40 hours of interview data and developed an extensive database of information in an attempt to better understand the organizations and agencies that work to make the Hill Country a socially and ecologically thriving landscape. Our mixed-methods research approach also included an online survey. Through these efforts, we believe that opportunities exist to improve coordination of activities, leverage and pool resources, increase and use social capital, enhance conflict management (i.e., prevention, reduction, resolution), and improve knowledge management (i.e., generation, translation, and diffusion). Understanding the inherent capacities that a networked approach provides can identify opportunities for successful conservation action by leveraging largely informal networks that bridge geographic, economic, cultural, and political differences. The report that follows summarizes these efforts and offers insights and recommendations based on the analysis.LBJ School of Public Affair

The political ecology of local environmental narratives: power, knowledge, and mountain caribou conservation

Political ecology seeks to address notable weaknesses in the social sciences that consider how human society and the environment shape each other over time.   Considering questions of ideology and scientific discourse, power and knowledge, and issues of conservation and environmental history, political ecology offers an alternative to technocratic approaches to policy prescriptions and environmental assessment.  Integrating these insights into the science-policy interface is crucial for discerning and articulating the role of local resource users in environmental conservation. This paper applies political ecology to addresses a gap in the literature that exists at the interface of narratives of local environmental change and local ecological knowledge and doing so builds a nuanced critique of the rationality of local ecological knowledge.  The ways that we view nature and generate, interpret, communicate, and understand the "science" of environmental problems is deeply embedded in particular economic, political, and ecological contexts.  In interior British Columbia, Canada, these dynamics unfold in one of the most rigorously documented examples of the negative effect of anthropogenic disturbance on an endangered species – declining mountain caribou population.  Science notwithstanding, resource users tell narratives of population decline that clearly reflect historical regularities deeply embedded in particular economic, political, and ideological constructions situated in local practices. This research assesses these narratives, discusses the implications, and explores pathways for integrating local knowledge and narratives into conservation science and policy. A more informed understanding of the subjectivities and rationalities of local knowledges can and should inform conservation science and policy. Keywords: Political ecology, local ecological knowledge, narrative, environmental change, environmental management, British Columbia, Rangifer tarandus caribou

Unpacking the Role of Data in Philanthropy: Prospects for an Integrated Framework

This article reports qualitative research that explores the role of data in philanthropy and proposes an integrated framework. Interviews with charitable foundations in central Texas, including members of a regional evaluation and learning collaborative, reveal an orientation toward data that is becoming increasingly institutionalized. The research suggests that data are generated and used in a multiplicity of ways, including identifying populations and geographies in need of investment, informing funding decisions for service delivery as well as policy research and advocacy; evaluation and learning; and measuring community impact. This article discusses these thematic findings, notes specific practices, and presents six principles for integrating a data perspective into philanthropy

The political ecology of participatory conservation: institutions and discourse

Increasingly, natural resource conservation programs refer to participation and local community involvement as one of the necessary prerequisites for sustainable resource management. In frameworks of adaptive comanagement, the theory of participatory conservation plays a central role in the democratization of decisionmaking authority and equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. We observe, however, that the institutions of state, society, and economy shape the implementation and application of participation in significant ways across contexts. This paper examines the political ecology of participation by comparing and contrasting discourse and practice in four developed and developing contexts. The cases drawn from Central Asia, Africa, and North America illustrate that institutional dynamics and discourse shape outcomes. While these results are not necessarily surprising, they raise questions about the linkages between participatory conservation theory, policy and programmatic efforts of implementation to achieve tangible local livelihood and conservation outcomes. Participation must be understood in the broader political economy of conservation in which local projects unfold, and we suggest that theories of participatory governance need to be less generalized and more situated within contours of place-based institutional and environmental histories. Through this analysis we illustrate the dialectical process of conservation in that the very institutions that participation is intended to build create resistance, as state control once did. Conservation theory and theories of participatory governance must consider these dynamics if we are to move conservation forward in a way that authentically incorporates local level livelihood concerns. Keywords: participatory governance, political ecology, community-based conservation, environmental governance, discours

An Observatory Framework for Metropolitan Change: Understanding Urban Social-Ecological-Technical Systems in Texas and Beyond

In Texas and elsewhere, the looming realities of rapid population growth and intensifying effects of climate change mean that the things we rely on to live—water, energy, dependable infrastructure, social cohesion, and an ecosystem to support them—are exposed to unprecedented risk. Limited resources will be in ever greater demand and the environmental stress from prolonged droughts, record-breaking heat waves, and destructive floods will increase. Existing long-term trends and behaviors will not be sustainable. That is our current trajectory, but we can still change course. Significant advances in information communication technologies and big data, combined with new frameworks for thinking about urban places as social–ecological–technical systems, and an increasing movement towards transdisciplinary scholarship and practice sets the foundation and framework for a metropolitan observatory. Yet, more is required than an infrastructure for data. Making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable will require that data become actionable knowledge that change policy and practice. Research and development of urban sustainability and resilience knowledge is burgeoning, yet the uptake to policy has been slow. An integrative and holistic approach is necessary to develop e ective sustainability science that synthesizes different sources of knowledge, relevant disciplines, multi-sectoral alliances, and connections to policy-makers and the public. To address these challenges and opportunities, we developed a conceptual framework for a “metropolitan observatory” to generate standardized long-term, large-scale datasets about social, ecological, and technical dimensions of metropolitan systems. We apply this conceptual model in Texas, known as the Texas Metro Observatory, to advance strategic research and decision-making at the intersection of urbanization and climate change. The Texas Metro Observatory project is part of Planet Texas 2050, a University of Texas Austin grand challenge initiative.ArchitectureOffice of the VP for Researc

A network-based analysis of critical resource accessibility during floods

Numerous government and non-governmental agencies are increasing their efforts to better quantify the disproportionate effects of climate risk on vulnerable populations with the goal of creating more resilient communities. Sociodemographic based indices have been the primary source of vulnerability information the past few decades. However, using these indices fails to capture other facets of vulnerability, such as the ability to access critical resources (e.g., grocery stores, hospitals, pharmacies, etc.). Furthermore, methods to estimate resource accessibility as storms occur (i.e., in near-real time) are not readily available to local stakeholders. We address this gap by creating a model built on strictly open-source data to solve the user equilibrium traffic assignment problem to calculate how an individual's access to critical resources changes during and immediately after a flood event. Redundancy, reliability, and recoverability metrics at the household and network scales reveal the inequitable distribution of the flood's impact. In our case-study for Austin, Texas we found that the most vulnerable households are the least resilient to the impacts of floods and experience the most volatile shifts in metric values. Concurrently, the least vulnerable quarter of the population often carries the smallest burdens. We show that small and moderate inequalities become large inequities when accounting for more vulnerable communities' lower ability to cope with the loss of accessibility, with the most vulnerable quarter of the population carrying four times as much of the burden as the least vulnerable quarter. The near-real time and open-source model we developed can benefit emergency planning stakeholders by helping identify households that require specific resources during and immediately after hazard events

Networks and landscapes: a framework for setting goals and evaluating performance at the large landscape scale

The objective of large landscape conservation is to mitigate complex ecological problems through interventions at multiple and overlapping scales. Implementation requires coordination among a diverse network of individuals and organizations to integrate local‐scale conservation activities with broad‐scale goals. This requires an understanding of the governance options and how governance regimes achieve objectives or provide performance evaluation across both space and time. However, empirical assessments measuring network‐governance performance in large landscape conservation are limited. We describe a well‐established large landscape conservation network in North America, the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent, to explore the application of a social–ecological performance evaluation framework. Systematic approaches to setting goals, tracking progress, and collecting data for feedback can help guide adaptation. Applying the established framework to our case study provides a means of evaluating the effectiveness of network governance in large landscape conservation

Administrative and judicial review of NEPA decisions : risk factors and risk minimizing strategies for the Forest Service

48 pagesIn this synthesis and annotated bibliography, we seek to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence NEPA challenge risks and successes in order to inform and guide resource managers within the Forest Service and other land management agencies, collaborators, practitioners, and contractors as they participate in the NEPA process.Funding for this publication was provided by the Joint Fire Sciences Program

Drivers of wildfire suppression costs : literature review and annotated bibliography

40 pagesOver the past century, wildland fire management has been core to the mission of federal land management agencies. In recent decades, however, federal spending on wildfire suppression has increased dramatically; suppression spending that on average accounted for less than 20 percent of the USFS’s discretionary funds prior to 2000 had grown to 43 percent of discretionary funds by 2008 (USDA 2009), and 51 percent in 2014 (USDA 2014). Rising suppression costs have created budgetary shortfalls and conflict as money “borrowed” from other budgets often cannot be paid back in full, and resources for other program areas and missions are subsumed by suppression expenditures. Significant policy making over the past 15 years has been designed, at least in part, to address these issues and temper wildfire costs. Effective political efforts and strategies to control public spending on suppression rely on a thorough and comprehensive understanding of the drivers of suppression costs and recent trends.Funding for this publication was provided by the Joint Fire Sciences Program