Listen for the Desert: An Ecopsychological Autoethnography

What does it mean for human beings to be part of nature – not just as a conceptual justification for doing right by the planet, but actually as an embodied, emotional, and sensuous experience? What happens to the experience of being human when notions as fundamental as voice, absence, suffering, and psyche are re-encountered from a perspective rooted within, rather than apart from, the natural world? While this dissertation responds to these questions, it initially took shape in response to something that felt less like a research question and more like a summons. Following a startling experience of feeling called and claimed by a part of California’s Mojave Desert known as Jawbone, the author returned to Jawbone to camp without human company for a month. Interweaving ecopsychological perspectives with autoethnographic methodology allowed the author to share the story of her fieldwork in ways that disturb the expectation of an individualized, separate, and anthropocentric “auto,” or self. The experience of being with Jawbone, as well as the aftermath of that experience, prompted the author to explore what it means for humans to engage with the other-than-human natural world as a relational partner, as well as how an understanding that human beings are a part of the natural world invites those working in mental health fields to consider how their work can be of service to nature. The project that resulted is in part a love letter to a place, in part an ecopsychological exploration of the experience of relationship, and in part one human animal’s story about the grief and the joy of belonging deeply to ecology in an ecocidal time

Designing stakeholder learning dialogues for effective global governance

A growing scholarship on multistakeholder learning dialogues suggests the importance of closely managing learning processes to help stakeholders anticipate which policies are likely to be effective. Much less work has focused on how to manage effective transnational multistakeholder learning dialogues, many of which aim to help address critical global environmental and social problems such as climate change or biodiversity loss. They face three central challenges. First, they rarely shape policies and behaviors directly, but work to ‘nudge’ or ‘tip the scales’ in domestic settings. Second, they run the risk of generating ‘compromise’ approaches incapable of ameliorating the original problem definition for which the dialogue was created. Third, they run the risk of being overly influenced, or captured, by powerful interests whose rationale for participating is to shift problem definitions or narrow instrument choices to those innocuous to their organizational or individual interests. Drawing on policy learning scholarship, we identify a six-stage learning process for anticipating effectiveness designed to minimize these risks while simultaneously fostering innovative approaches for meaningful and longlasting problem solving: Problem definition assessments; Problem framing; Developing coalition membership; Causal framework development; Scoping exercises; Knowledge institutionalization. We also identify six management techniques within each process for engaging transnational dialogues around problem solving. We show that doing so almost always requires anticipating multiple-step causal pathways through which influence of transnational and/or international actors and institutions might occur

Can Non-State Certification Systems Bolster State-Centered Efforts to Promote Sustainable Development through the Clean Development Mechanism

Increasing economic globalization has coincided with the emergence and escalating influence of non-state actors and organizations in domestic and international policymaking, from shaping policy agendas to promoting private authority. The latter phenomenon has arisen, at least in part, from a critique of states\u27 failures to adopt effective and enduring environmental policies. Rather than contest command and control institutions, non-state strategies embrace market approaches built around incentives and price mechanisms. Several forms of non-state authority have emerged, including corporate social responsibility, provision of information through labeling, and self-reporting

Towards durable multistakeholder-generated solutions: The pilot application of a problem-oriented policy learning protocol to legality verification and community rights in Peru

This paper reports and reflects on the pilot application of an 11-step policy learning protocol that was developed by Cashore and Lupberger (2015) based on several years of Cashore’s multi-author collaborations. The protocol was applied for the first time in Peru in 2015 and 2016 by the IUFRO Working Party on Forest Policy Learning Architectures (hereinafter referred to as the project team). The protocol integrates insights from policy learning scholarship (Hall 1993, Sabatier 1999) with Bernstein and Cashore’s (2000, 2012) four pathways of influence framework. The pilot implementation in Peru focused on how global timber legality verification interventions might be harnessed to promote local land rights. Legality verification focuses attention on the checking and auditing of forest management units in order to verify that timber is harvested and traded in compliance with the law. We specifically asked: How can community legal ownership of, and access to, forestland and forest resources be enhanced? The protocol was designed as a dynamic tool, the implementation of which fosters iterative rather than linear processes. It directly integrated two objectives: 1) identifying the causal processes through which global governance initiatives might be harnessed to produce durable results ‘on the ground’; 2) generating insights and strategies in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. This paper reviews and critically evaluates our work in designing and piloting the protocol. We assess what seemed to work well and suggest modifications, including an original diagnostic framework for nurturing durable change. We also assess the implications of the pilot application of the protocol for policy implementation that works to enhance the influence of existing international policy instruments, rather than contributing to fragmentation and incoherence by creating new ones