L'organisation des services d'entretien de la voirie rurale en Autriche et France : l'intérêt du cadre de l'économie néo-institutionnelle

International audienceThis paper presents an analytical framework for the analysis of the maintenance of minor roads in Austrian and French rural areas. Minor rural roads are essential components of landscapes, as constitutive elements and supports of access. Moreover, their management reflects the current evolution of uses in the countryside as well as the potential conflicts between new uses (recreation, sports, nature conservation) and traditional uses (circulation, production). The aim of the study is to shed light on the governance of rural landscapes. In the context of economic and demographic changes in the French and Austrian countryside, what are the implications of the organisation of the supply of landscape maintenance in terms of economic development and employment? From a theoretical point of view, the research is based on the fields of service economics and New Institutional Economics (NIE). We focus on the organisation of the environmental services at stake in the maintenance of minor rural roads. In our definition, the provision of environmental services is intentional from the point of view of the service provider and corresponds to a collective demand (Aznar, Perrier-Cornet, 2003). The framework of NIE and more particularly of Transaction Cost Theory (TCT) allows for an analysis of the organisational forms governing the provision of rural roads maintenance services (such as, mowing of road verges, marking of roads, planting and maintenance of hedges, trees or herbaceous borders). The paper describes the organisation of the maintenance of minor rural roads in the Austrian and French contexts and identifies several research issues in the light of the NIE framework

Understanding landscape stewardship. Lessons to be learned from public service economics

International audienceWe argue that public service economics provides a new perspective on landscape stewardship by explaining it as human-to-human transfer of partial property rights. These mutually linked exchanges involve rights to use, to access, or to control and allocate land, labour, skills or information. From the perspective of public service economics, we identify the actors involved in landscape stewardship and distinguish entrepreneurial strategies for service provision based on resource orientation, user orientation or competiveness orientation. The difficulties in evaluating the quality of services in general and landscape stewardship in particular result in substantial uncertainty. Three types of contracts that cope differently with this uncertainty can be distinguished: contracts focusing on the technical process, on the intended outcome or on the choice of suppliers based on trust and features of their performance potential. We conclude that a service economics perspective can add to the understanding of landscape stewardship. Due to the fact that ‘public service’ is already a well-known and broadly acknowledged concept in society, public service economics could possibly provide more rapid progress towards a better co-ordination of supply and demand for landscape qualities than other more novel concepts

Description et compréhension de services environnementaux dans le secteur rural : un cadre conceptuel et analytique

International audienceIn this paper, we focus on remunerated services that are intended to maintain or enhance recreational and aesthetic landscape quality, which have not been analysed in a sufficient way so far. After the theoretical framing and definition of remunerated landscape services', we sketch the supply chain for their provision. Relevant organisational and institutional contexts are discussed that differentiate the involved actors, the conventions and rules governing their interaction. Finally, the paper evaluates the relevance and usefulness of concepts and tools originating from service economics for the description, classification and understanding of remunerated landscape services. Based on the discussion of concepts and theories, the paper concludes with the cornerstones of a comparative research designs for trans-national analyses which will be used in France and Austria

Can landscape stewardship be analysed and enhanced through the concept of service economics?

International audienceIn this paper, a service economic analysis framework is developed and applied in order to define, understand, explain and improve landscape services. Together with the ecosystem functions and externalities approach, landscape services are understood as intentionally provided targeted outcomes of agricultural production, with the objective to improve landscape quality. Based on this conceptualisation, a five-step analysis framework is developed and applied to analyse the supply chain of three different landscape services. Empirical evidence was collected from two case studies located in France and Austria, whereas the French case study is the national grassland premium and the Austrian case study is on a local landscape scheme. It could be shown that a key strength of the utilised service economic perspective lies in its formalised structure which allowed the identification of involved actors, the organisation of their relation and the way they are acting within their institutional systems (i.e. how landscape services are organised). Moreover, the standardised analysis structure allows for comparisons of supply chains of landscape services and helps to identify scope for further improvements, independently from its geographic and administrative context. We conclude with potential risks and benefits of the service economics perspective for landscape services

Commonalities and Variations in Understanding Doctoral Supervision in Two Australian Universities: A Collaborative Autoethnography and an Interdisciplinary, Phenomenographic Case Study

Rossi, DM ORCiD: 0000-0002-5093-6443This chapter reports selected elements of a broader collaborative autoethnography and an exploratory case study involving a Doctor of Philosophy candidate and her three doctoral supervisors who, as participant–researchers, examined the commonalities and differences in the meanings that we assigned to the idea(l) of “supervision”. Guided by our defined boundaries for a collaborative autoethnographic case study, we examined our respective conceptions of supervision through phenomenographic means, utilising data from interviews conducted with each of the authors individually to explicate our varied understandings of supervision. The analysis elicited three distinct categories of description – doctoral supervision as a relational endeavour, as a pedagogical commitment and as reciprocal growth – and an outcome space centred on the holistic development and self-actualisation of doctoral students and their supervisors alike

The role of pliability and transversality within trans/disciplinarity: Opening university research and learning to planetary health

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. In recent decades, there have been calls to open university research and learning through transdisciplinarity. The inference here is that the increased specialisation of disciplines has created isolation, division, exclusion, separation and fixity within research and learning. This chapter explores the potential for openness in university research and learning through a discussion of the relationality of transdisciplinarity and disciplinarity. An examination of this relationality is valuable, given that transdisciplinarity and disciplinarity are intimately connected and co-dependent. This relationality is explored through two concepts that we argue constitute its potential to create openness in university research and learning: pliability and transversality. This chapter argues that disciplines, be they science, planning, law, health or religion, manage to be both open to change, constantly becoming-other, and universal, abstract, and eternal. Whilst this pliability of disciplinarity is often translated as disciplinary inadequacy, we argue that this pliability is a valuable component of disciplinarity, and that it provides the site for the transversality of transdisciplinarity. We explore these concepts through reference to a recent problematization of disciplinary research and learning at the human and environment nexus, which has given rise to the notion of planetary health, and its call for a substantial and urgent opening of research and learning to understand and address emerging geo-social assemblages such as the Anthropocene