The Objectives of Stakeholder Involvement in Transdisciplinary Research. A Conceptual Framework for a Reflective and Reflexive Practise

Transdisciplinary research is a well-recognised approach to address complex real-world problems. However, the literature on a central aspect of transdisciplinarity, namely stakeholder involvement, largely lacks a reflection on its objectives. In response, we present a framework defining four general rationales for stakeholder involvement: normative, substantive, social-learning, and implementation objectives. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework and analyse how the design and processes of three collaborative research projects dealing with sustainable land management in Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America were affected by motivations to include stakeholders. Our assessment indicates that at the projects' outset, many scientists pursued a normative rationale and saw stakeholder involvement as a burden. In the course of the projects, the substantive objective became more relevant as being closely linked to the core mandate of scientists. The projects also aimed for social learning and implementation processes, which, however, did not remain uncontested among team members. Overall, our study indicates that jointly negotiating, clarifying, communicating, and reflecting the underlying objectives of stakeholder involvement can help developing more effective interaction strategies and clarifying expectations. The conceptual framework can guide a systematic reflective and reflexive practise and support the planning and co-designing of future transdisciplinary research projects

Tema Con Variazioni: Quantum Channel Capacity

Channel capacity describes the size of the nearly ideal channels, which can be obtained from many uses of a given channel, using an optimal error correcting code. In this paper we collect and compare minor and major variations in the mathematically precise statements of this idea which have been put forward in the literature. We show that all the variations considered lead to equivalent capacity definitions. In particular, it makes no difference whether one requires mean or maximal errors to go to zero, and it makes no difference whether errors are required to vanish for any sequence of block sizes compatible with the rate, or only for one infinite sequence.Comment: 32 pages, uses iopart.cl

Identifying governance challenges in ecosystem services management – Conceptual considerations and comparison of global forest cases

Ecosystems around the world generate a wide range of services. Often, there are trade-offs in ecosystem service provision. Managing such trade-offs requires governance of interdependent action situations. We distinguished between (1) enhancing action situations where beneficiaries create, maintain, or improve an ESS and (2) appropriation action situations where actors subtract from a flow of ESS. We classified ESSs in order to identify focal action situations and link them to ESS governance types which are likely to strengthen sustainable ecosystem management. The classification is applied to six forest cases in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Our results confirm that ecosystem management, which more strongly supports the provision of public goods and common pool resources, is often under strong pressure to be transformed into systems that mainly provide private goods. This can be partly explained by incentive constellations in the action situations of public goods and common pool resources. Therefore, governance has to be adapted to specific ESSs. ESS governance needs to identify institutions which best fit to different ESSs and to harmonize them for all the ESSs provided by the system. Our approach helps to understand why institutions fail or succeed in maintaining ESSs

Typical support and Sanov large deviations of correlated states

Discrete stationary classical processes as well as quantum lattice states are asymptotically confined to their respective typical support, the exponential growth rate of which is given by the (maximal ergodic) entropy. In the iid case the distinguishability of typical supports can be asymptotically specified by means of the relative entropy, according to Sanov's theorem. We give an extension to the correlated case, referring to the newly introduced class of HP-states.Comment: 29 pages, no figures, references adde

Entropy and Quantum Kolmogorov Complexity: A Quantum Brudno's Theorem

In classical information theory, entropy rate and Kolmogorov complexity per symbol are related by a theorem of Brudno. In this paper, we prove a quantum version of this theorem, connecting the von Neumann entropy rate and two notions of quantum Kolmogorov complexity, both based on the shortest qubit descriptions of qubit strings that, run by a universal quantum Turing machine, reproduce them as outputs.Comment: 26 pages, no figures. Reference to publication added: published in the Communications in Mathematical Physics (http://www.springerlink.com/content/1432-0916/