How to make complexity look simple? Conveying ecosystems restoration complexity for socio-economic research and public engagement

Ecosystems degradation represents one of the major global challenges at the present time, threating people’s livelihoods and well-being worldwide. Ecosystem restoration therefore seems no longer an option, but an imperative. Restoration challenges are such that a dialogue has begun on the need to re-shape restoration as a science. A critical aspect of that reshaping process is the acceptance that restoration science and practice needs to be coupled with socio-economic research and public engagement. This inescapably means conveying complex ecosystem’s information in a way that is accessible to the wider public. In this paper we take up this challenge with the ultimate aim of contributing to making a step change in science’s contribution to ecosystems restoration practice. Using peatlands as a paradigmatically complex ecosystem, we put in place a transdisciplinary process to articulate a description of the processes and outcomes of restoration that can be understood widely by the public. We provide evidence of the usefulness of the process and tools in addressing four key challenges relevant to restoration of any complex ecosystem: (1) how to represent restoration outcomes; (2) how to establish a restoration reference; (3) how to cope with varying restoration time-lags and (4) how to define spatial units for restoration. This evidence includes the way the process resulted in the creation of materials that are now being used by restoration practitioners for communication with the public and in other research contexts. Our main contribution is of an epistemological nature: while ecosystem services-based approaches have enhanced the integration of academic disciplines and non-specialist knowledge, this has so far only followed one direction (from the biophysical underpinning to the description of ecosystem services and their appreciation by the public). We propose that it is the mix of approaches and epistemological directions (including from the public to the biophysical parameters) what will make a definitive contribution to restoration practice

Extra-academic transdisciplinarity and scientific pluralism : what might they learn from one another?

Peer reviewe

Intergovernmental organizations and climate security : advancing the research agenda

Climate-related security challenges are transnational in character, leading states to increasingly rely on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) – such as the European Union and the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization – for policy solutions. While climate security issues do typically not fit comfortably within the mandates of existing IGOs, recent decades have seen increasing efforts by IGOs to link climate change and security. This article reviews existing studies on IGOs’ responses to climate security challenges. It draws together research from several bodies of literature spanning political science, international relations, and environmental social science, identifying an emerging field of research revolving around IGOs and climate security. We observe significant advancement in this young field, with scholars extending and enriching our understanding of how and why IGOs address climate security challenges. Yet we still know little about the conditions under which IGOs respond to climate security challenges and when they do so effectively. This article discusses the main gaps in current work and makes some suggestions about how these gaps may be usefully addressed in future research. A better understanding of the conditions under which IGOs respond (effectively) to climate security challenges would contribute to broader debates on climate security, institutional change, and effectiveness in international relations and environmental social science, and may facilitate crafting effective global solutions to society’s most intractable climate security challenges

Co-creation in living labs

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017.Living Labs are places for open innovation where co-creation is a method for addressing real-life issues through the attribution of knowledge from science and society, the latter being a form of transdisciplinary social learning. In a Living Lab the representatives from business, society and academia, as well as citizens, have different value perceptions and propositions, providing heterogeneity across the stakeholder value spectrum. This provides a rich set of ideas and values for co-creation which can be used for both the operational phase and the integral shaping and creating the design for the physical infrastructure of the Living Lab itself. The use of co-creation workshops are demonstrated for ideation amongst the stakeholders for the HSB Living Lab. This is exemplified in the development of the social washing room which will be prototyped and tested in a fit-for-purpose multifunctional design space

Eine Reflexion über Legitimation, Partizipation und Intervention im Kontext transdisziplinärer Forschung.

Ausgangsbeobachtung ist, dass in der Debatte um die Rolle von Forschung mit Blick auf das Herbeiführen eines gesellschaftlichen Wandels nicht ausreichend unterschieden wird zwischen der Generierung wissenschaftlichen Wissens und der Generierung gesellschaftspolitischer Veränderungen. Es wird dafür argumentiert, Wissensproduktion und gesellschaftspolitische Einflussnahme als getrennte, wenn auch nicht disjunkte Größen zu behandeln, insbesondere mit Blick auf Partizipation und Legitimation. Transdisziplinäre Forschung ist primär der Produktion wissenschaftlichen Wissens verpflichtet, deshalb ist die Beteiligung von Praxisakteuren primär anhand des Kriteriums Expertise zu begründen. Zur Erhöhung der gesellschaftspolitischen Wirkung der Ergebnisse transdisziplinärer Forschung sollte ergänzend zur Partizipation an der Wissensgenerierung zusätzlich eine Partizipation zur Steigerung der praktischen und der gesellschaftspolitischen Legitimität der Ergebnisse stattfinden; dafür sollten (weitere) Praxisakteure nach anderen Kriterien als dem der Expertise bestimmt werden. Es wird also für eine Auffächerung von Partizipationszielen und Praxisakteuren argumentiert. Dies ist weiter zu differenzieren für Forschung, die Interventionen realisiert, sowie für transformative Forschung: Hier kommen die wissenschaftliche, die praktische und die gesellschaftspolitische Legitimität der Interventionen, der angestrebten transformativen Ziele und der realisierten transformativen Aktivitäten hinzu

Promising degrees of stakeholder interaction in research for sustainable development

Stakeholder interactions are increasingly viewed as an important element of research for sustainable development. But to what extent, how, and for which goals should stakeholders be involved? In this article, we explore what degrees of stakeholder interaction show the most promise in research for sustainable development. For this purpose, we examine 16 research projects from the transdisciplinary research programme NRP 61 on sustainable water management in Switzerland. The results suggest that various degrees of stakeholder interaction can be beneficial depending on each project’s intended contribution to sustainability, the form of knowledge desired, how contested the issues are, the level of actor diversity, actors’ interests, and existing collaborations between actors. We argue that systematic reflection about these six criteria can enable tailoring stakeholder interaction processes according specific project goals and context conditions