29 research outputs found
Understanding Science-Policy Interfaces
This article gives a brief overview of the theoretical approaches towards SPIs. Against this theoretical background, the research projects of nine early-career researchers exploring SPIs in their various forms are then presented. These projects all take an empirical stance. The article shows how these projects tackle research gaps in three overarching areas crucial to the understanding of SPIs: a) knowledge co-production, b) communication of research results to decision-makers, and c) policy impact assessment processes as institutionalised instruments for enhancing SPIs. The empirical material from the ESR projects illustrates that SPIs can benefit from greater interaction between scientists, policy-makers and societal stakeholders, but that the functioning of these three groups is highly dependent on contextual circumstances
Understanding Science-Policy Interfaces
This article gives a brief overview of the theoretical approaches towards SPIs. Against this theoretical background, the research projects of nine early-career researchers exploring SPIs in their various forms are then presented. These projects all take an empirical stance. The article shows how these projects tackle research gaps in three overarching areas crucial to the understanding of SPIs: a) knowledge co-production, b) communication of research results to decision-makers, and c) policy impact assessment processes as institutionalised instruments for enhancing SPIs. The empirical material from the ESR projects illustrates that SPIs can benefit from greater interaction between scientists, policy-makers and societal stakeholders, but that the functioning of these three groups is highly dependent on contextual circumstances
Structural and electrical characterization of PZT on gold for micromachined piezoelectric membranes
Anthropogenic dark earths in the landscapes of Upper Guinea, West Africa:intentional or inevitable?
Drawing on the recent identification of anthropogenic dark earths (ADEs) in West Africa’s Upper Guinea forest region, this article engages with Amazonian debates concerning whether such enriched soils were produced intentionally or not.We present a case study of a Loma settlement in Northwest Liberia in which ethnography, oral history, and landscape mapping reveal subsistence practices and habitus that lead African dark earths (AfDEs) to form inevitably around settlements and farm camps. To consider the question of intentionality and how the inevitability of AfDE is experienced, we combine historical and political ecology with elements of nonrepresentational theory. The former show how the spatial configuration of AfDEs in the landscape reflect shifting settlement patterns shaped by (1) political and economic transformations, mediated by (2) enduring ritual practices and social relations between first-coming and late-coming social groups that are symbolically related as uncles and nephews. We use nonrepresentational theory to show how the Loma phenomenological experience of these soils and their origins is better conceptualized in terms of sensual objects, the formation of which is inflected by these social and political processes. We thus reframe the debate away from intentionality, to theorize enriched anthropogenic soils and landscapes in terms of shifting sociocultural, political, and historical factors interplaying with the practical, sensually experienced, and inevitable effects of everyday life