Does marine planning enable progress towards adaptive governance of marine systems? Lessons from Scotland’s regional marine planning process

Paul Tett was partly funded by H2020 project no. 774426, ‘The Blue Growth Farm’.This paper examines marine planning in Scotland and the extent to which it constrains or enables change towards adaptive governance. An in-depth case study of the partnership-based regional marine planning process is presented, based on interviews and documentary analysis. Drawing on adaptive governance theory, analysis focussed on key themes of: (1) local governance and integration across scales; (2) participation and collaboration; (3) learning, innovation and adaptability; and (4) self-organisation. Results present regional marine planning as an interface between hierarchical and collaborative governance based on empowerment of regional actors, and an attempt to enable co-existence of ‘top-down’ arrangements with experimentation at smaller scales. In this system, national government provides legal legitimacy, economic incentives and policy oversight; while the partnerships support collaboration and innovation at the regional level, based on strong leadership and participation. Contrasting experience of partnership-working is evident between the large and complex region of the Clyde and the island region of Shetland, where devolved powers and a more cohesive and community-based stakeholder group better facilitate adaptive governance. Overall findings of the study show the tensions of institutionalising adaptive governance and provide insights into how marine planning contributes to governance of marine systems. Firstly, vertical integration between central and decentralised authority in multi-level marine planning arrangements is challenged by an unclear balance of power and accountability between national government and regional marine planning partnerships. Secondly, the interaction between marine planning and existing policy, planning and management emerged as critical, because marine plans may only operate as an instrument to ‘guide’ management and prevailing, limited adaptive capacity in broader management structures constrains adaptive outcomes. Lastly, adaptive governance requires incremental and rapid response to change, but limited financial and technical resources constrain the depth and scale of reflection and ability to act. Understanding the contribution of marine planning requires clarification of the interaction between marine planning and other management (the extent to which it can influence decision-making in other domains) and, in addressing governance deficiencies, attention is also required on the adaptive capacity of existing and emerging legislative frameworks which govern decision-making and management of activities at sea.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

It all just clicked: a longitudinal perspective on transitions within University

This paper explores the transitions that a group of students, admitted from further education colleges as part of broader widening access initiative at a Scottish research–intensive university, made across the lifetime of their degrees. It investigates how they negotiate their learning careers beyond the first year, and how they (re)define their approaches to independent learning as they progress to the later years of their courses. Evidence is drawn from 20 students who were interviewed during each of their three or four years of study to provide a longitudinal account of their experiences of engagement and participation at the university. We draw attention to three ways in which the students made transitions across the course of their degrees: to increased knowledge of the conventions of academic writing; to enhanced critical skills; and to practical strategies to prioritise learning

Competitive nationalism:state, class, and the forms of capital in devolved Scotland

Devolved government in Scotland actively reconstitutes the unequal conditions of social class reproduction. Recognition of state-led class reconstitution draws upon the social theory of Bourdieu. Our analysis of social class in devolved Scotland revisits theories that examine the state as a `power container'. A range of state-enabling powers regulate the legal, economic, social, and cultural containers of class relations as specific forms of what Bourdieu called economic, social, and cultural `capital'. The preconditions of class reproduction are structured in direct ways by the Scottish state as a wealth container but also, more indirectly, as a cultural container and a social container. Competitive nationalism in the devolved Scottish state enacts neoliberal policies as a class- specific worldview but, at the same time, discursively frames society as a panclass national fraternity in terms of distinctive Scottish values of welfare nationalism. Nationalism is able to express this ambiguity in symbolic ways in which the partisan language of social class cannot

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Event attribution of Parnaíba River floods in Northeastern Brazil

The climate modeling techniques of event attribution enable systematic assessments of the extent that anthropogenic climate change may be altering the probability or magnitude of extreme events. In the consecutive years of 2018, 2019, and 2020, rainfalls caused repeated flooding impacts in the lower Parnaíba River in Northeastern Brazil. We studied the effect that alterations in precipitation resulting from human influences on the climate had on the likelihood of flooding using two ensembles of the HadGEM3-GA6 atmospheric model: one driven by both natural and anthropogenic forcings; and the other driven only by natural atmospheric forcings, with anthropogenic changes removed from sea surface temperatures and sea ice patterns. We performed hydrological modeling to base our assessments on the peak annual streamflow. The change in the likelihood of flooding was expressed in terms of the ratio between probabilities of threshold exceedance estimated for each model ensemble. With uncertainty estimates at the 90% confidence level, the median (5% 95%) probability ratio at the threshold for flooding impacts in the historical period (1982–2013) was 1.12 (0.97 1.26), pointing to a marginal contribution of anthropogenic emissions by about 12%. For the 2018, 2019, and 2020 events, the median (5% 95%) probability ratios at the threshold for flooding impacts were higher at 1.25 (1.07 1.46), 1.27 (1.12 1.445), and 1.37 (1.19 1.59), respectively; indicating that precipitation change driven by anthropogenic emissions has contributed to the increase of likelihood of these events by about 30%. However, there are other intricate hydrometeorological and anthropogenic processes undergoing long-term changes that affect the flood hazard in the lower Parnaíba River. Trend and flood frequency analyses performed on observations showed a nonsignificant long-term reduction of annual peak flow, likely due to decreasing precipitation from natural climate variability and increasing evapotranspiration and flow regulation

State business: gender, sex and marriage in Tajikistan

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Constructing women’s leadership representation in the UK press during a time of financial crisis : gender capitals and dialectical tensions

A continuing challenge for organizations is the persistent underrepresentation of women in senior roles, which gained a particular prominence during the global financial crisis (GFC). The GFC has raised questions regarding the forms of leadership that allowed the crisis to happen and alternative proposals regarding how future crises might be avoided. Within this context women’s leadership has been positioned as an ethical alternative to styles of masculinist leadership that led to the crisis in the first place. Through a multimodal discursive analysis this article examines the socio-cultural assumptions sustaining the gendering of leadership in the popular press to critically analyse how women’s leadership is represented during the GFC of 2008–2012. Highlighting the media’s portrayal of women’s leadership as a gendered field of activity where different forms of gender capital come into play, we identify three sets of dialectics: women as leaders and women as feminine, women as credible leaders and women as lacking in credibility, and women as victims and women as their own worst enemies. Together, the dialectics work together to form a discursive pattern framed by a male leadership model that narrates the promise of women leaders, yet the disappointment that they are not men. Our study extends understandings regarding how female and feminine forms of gender capital operate dialectically, where the media employs feminine capital to promote women’s positioning as leaders yet also leverages female capital as a constraint. We propose that this understanding can be of value to organizations to understand the impact and influence of discourse on efforts to promote women into leadership roles