Keynote Address | Stakeholders, Scenarios, And Sustainable Futures Within And Beyond The Arctic

地域環境知プロジェクト第1回国際シンポジウム，総合地球環境学研究所 講演室，2014-09-14，総合地球環境学研究所 地域環境知プロジェク

Innovations for Sustainability: Pathways to an efficient and post-pandemic future

3rd Report prepared by The World in 2050 initiativ

Taking Time, Sharing Spaces: Adaptive Risk Governance Processes in Rural Japan

Abstract Rural and peri-urban communities in Japan, as well as in many other regions of the world, face risks of discrete event natural phenomena, including earthquakes, floods, and landslides. They also face persistent disruptive stress due to risks that remain active over long durations, such as the loss of community capacities due to an aging population. This article describes my observations of and subsequent reflections on adaptive risk governance and community resilience building processes in two areas of western and southern Japan—Chizu in Tottori Prefecture and towns near Kumamoto City in Kumamoto Prefecture. Four aspects of adaptive risk governance from this limited set of observations stood out: (1) the importance of establishing a durable, patient process, (2) initiated and facilitated by a trusted figure, in (3) a space or venue accessible and open to the community, and (4) augmented by boundary objects that facilitate role playing, iteration, and ownership by the community of solutions generated in these dialogues

How “Green Knowledge” Influences Sustainability through Behavior Change: Theory and Policy Implications

The urgent and critical challenges of transforming patterns of behavior from current unsustainable ones are encapsulated in the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Central to these goals and targets are systems of sustainable consumption and production. This crucial goal depends on consumers and producers making choices that depend on knowledge available to them and on other factors influencing their preferences in accordance with norms and culture. This paper investigates how “green knowledge” (i.e., knowledge of ecologically and socially sound products and practices) influences sustainability in the intersections of knowledge, preferences, behavior, and economic and environmental performance. By employing a general equilibrium economic model, we show that consumers, producers, and industry regulators with different degrees of knowledge and concern about the health and environmental benefits of products and production would lead to different economic and environmental consequences. As “green knowledge” influences consumption patterns and government policy-making, our model shows that, in principle, there will be a shift in the content of the economy to that which supports the achievement of long-term sustainability

From shouting matches to productive dialogue - establishing stakeholder participation in Polish fisheries governance

Environmental governance is increasingly turning away from classic top-down hierarchical governance regimes and experimenting with more collaborative forms of governance, e.g., analytic-deliberative participation of resource users. In this paper, we examine the role of the Polish Baltic Sea Fisheries Roundtable as a multi-stakeholder platform in Polish Baltic Sea fisheries governance. The fisheries sector within a country rapidly transitioning from a centrally planned system to (pseudo) market conditions provides an illustrative case in a very difficult context. Employing an action- and learning-based approach, we participated in the initiation and institutionalisation of a process of levelling the playing field and building trust within the fisheries sector in Poland. Using Adler and Birkhoff's collaborative process model for action planning and implementation, we evaluate the approach and outcomes of this project and discuss the results in relation to the existing literature