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Introduction
I am a social scientist and critical realist. My main research interest is the role of knowledge and science in politics and policies. I want to understand the processes that lead to epistemic authority, legitimacy and scientific and political self-evidence, which I conceptualise in terms of ‘epistemic selectivities’. My current research analyses the epistemic and political dimensions of emerging institutional arrangements at the interface between conservation science and biodiversity policy.
Publications
Publications (68)
In Europe, various conservation programs adopted to maintain or restore biodiversity have experienced differing levels of success. However, a synthesis about major factors for success of biodiversity-related conservation programs across ecosystems and national boundaries, such as incentives, subsidies, enforcement, participation, or spatial context...
A new legally binding agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) was adopted by consensus on 19th June, 2023. Setting new regulations and filling regulatory gaps of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea are expected to be informed by “best available science”. It is cri...
Marine biodiversity monitoring is a complex task given the vast ocean areas to be covered, the types of data to be integrated, and the large number of possible parameters to consider when measuring biodiversity change. International agreements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) or the recently adopted ‘BBNJ treaty’protecting biod...
The negotiations for a new instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of high-seas marine biodiversity (marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction; BBNJ) finally concluded after difficult negotiations. The BBNJ negotiations had to address a regime complex of sectoral and regional organizations regulating different aspects of marine b...
This article broadens the understanding and empirical study of regime complexes by shifting the focus from the negotiation outcome to the processes of negotiating new international agreements. Although they are important to regime-complex formation and delimitation, the sites where states negotiate new agreements are rather neglected. We aim to enh...
Global environmental negotiations have become central sites for studying the interaction between politics, power, and environmental degradation. This book challenges what constitutes the sites, actors, and processes of negotiations beyond conventional approaches and provides a critical, multidisciplinary, and applied perspective reflecting recent d...
Global environmental negotiations have become central sites for studying the interaction between politics, power, and environmental degradation. This book challenges what constitutes the sites, actors, and processes of negotiations beyond conventional approaches and provides a critical, multidisciplinary, and applied perspective reflecting recent d...
Global environmental negotiations have become central sites for studying the interaction between politics, power, and environmental degradation. This book challenges what constitutes the sites, actors, and processes of negotiations beyond conventional approaches and provides a critical, multidisciplinary, and applied perspective reflecting recent d...
Global environmental negotiations have become central sites for studying the interaction between politics, power, and environmental degradation. This book challenges what constitutes the sites, actors, and processes of negotiations beyond conventional approaches and provides a critical, multidisciplinary, and applied perspective reflecting recent d...
Global environmental negotiations have become central sites for studying the interaction between politics, power, and environmental degradation. This book challenges what constitutes the sites, actors, and processes of negotiations beyond conventional approaches and provides a critical, multidisciplinary, and applied perspective reflecting recent d...
The dataset on the involvement of international organizations (IOs) in in the negotiations for a new legally binding instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of marine Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) underlies the visualizations (Figure 1,2,3) and overvie...
Les négociations en personne du nouveau traité pour conserver et utiliser durablement la biodiversité marine au-delà des juridictions nationales (BBNJ) ont été interrompues par la pandémie du Covid-19 et ses confinements, à l’instar de nombreuses autres réunions internationales sur l’environnement. Dans le cas du BBNJ, les acteurs étatiques et non...
The ongoing negotiations for a legally binding UNCLOS (United Nations Law of the Sea Convention) Implementing Agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) take place within the framework of a complex landscape of existing International Organizations (IOs) addressing different aspects...
In the Anthropocene debates about “values” are connected to the idea that the importance of nature for society can be expressed quantitatively. However, as this chapter shows, the increased uptake of political instruments drawing on the monetary value of nature has led to contestation and increased political debate on how to renegotiate the complex...
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is a body that publishes global, regional, and thematic assessments about the state of biological diversity. Narratives and “epistemic selectivities”- as I call them- played an essential role in the making of this biodiversity knowledge body. Future (critic...
Science is both an indispensable source of evidence concerning global environmental change and a precondition for an accelerated destruction of nature. With the aggravation of climate change and the emergence of new environmental threats the role of science in supporting policy responses will increase in importance but will also continue to be cont...
Diverse and inclusive marine research is paramount to addressing ocean sustainability challenges in the 21st century, as envisioned by the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. Despite increasing efforts to diversify ocean science, women continue to face barriers at various stages of their career, which inhibits their progression...
The UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) aims to tackle several challenges on the path towards more sustainable ocean futures. Its central objectives are to close knowledge gaps, increase the usability of scientific knowledge on the ocean, strengthen science-policy interfaces, and make oceanography fit for purpose. The...
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the use of online tools in the conduct of multilateral environmental negotiations. Although scholars have recognized that information and communication technologies have gradually been reshaping traditional diplomatic practice, such technologies are not considered to be transformative of diplomatic...
Science plays an important role in the emergence, development, and implementation of new environmental regimes. However, there are opposing views regarding the type of knowledge that is considered policy-relevant to address global environmental problems. In intergovernmental negotiations, these tensions are visible in debates about the inclusion of...
This chapter focuses on experts and the scientific knowledge that they bring to bear in marine environmental governance. It introduces a number of prominent features of expertise and science in marine governance. Indeed, without experts and the ideas that they bring to the process, it would be all but impossible to apprehend the environmental chall...
Interdisciplinary research is paramount to addressing ocean sustainability challenges in the 21st century. However, women leaders have been underrepresented in interdisciplinary marine research, and there is little guidance on how to achieve the conditions that will lead to an increased proportion of women scientists in positions of leadership. Her...
Over the past two decades, the scientific study of marine biodiversity developed into one of the most dynamic research fields within environmental research in general and ocean science in particular. Marine biodiversity research spans a broad range of spatial and temporal scales, scientific disciplines, and infrastructures for assessing patterns of...
This perspective identifies how recent advances contribute to re-evaluating and re-constructing global environmental negotiations as a research object by calling into question who constitutes an actor and what constitutes a site of agreement formation. Building on this scholarship, we offer the term agreement-making to facilitate further methodolog...
The governance of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) lacks a legal framework that would ensure the conservation and sustainable use of the oceans. In order to fill this gap, governments have been negotiating a new treaty under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Negotiations have been afflicted by pola...
Measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic have indefinitely postponed in-person formal international negotiations for a new legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). As a result, online init...
International scientific collaboration is vital for supporting global and regional measures to protect marine biodiversity in and beyond national jurisdiction. While scientists and governments seem to agree that scientific cooperation is also needed to reduce global imbalances to explore and exploit marine biodiversity, progress in defining and ass...
Over one hundred governments are currently negotiating a new legally binding instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). The new agreement is to address four broad themes: marine genetic resources (MGRs); area-based management tools (ABMTs), including marine protec...
Vor dem Hintergrund des alarmierend schlechten Zustands der Biodiversität bildete sich das Netzwerk Biodiversität Österreich. Aus dieser Initiative heraus schlossen sich Expert(inn)en und Wissenschaftler(innen) zu einem fachübergreifenden, transdisziplinären und unabhängigen Österreichischen Biodiversitätsrat zusammen. Ziel des Netzwerks ebenso wie...
This paper reviews the early history of IPBES and focuses on epistemic choices that occurred early on in its establishment and assessment work. Firstly, it examines the challenges of handling both the vast amount of data and their associated uncertainties in trying to produce authoritative global assessments of the on-going biodiversity loss. Secon...
This forum piece discusses why multilateral spaces are key ‘sites’ for studying struggles over environmental knowledge and how Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE) can open up new avenues for Critical Policy Studies. Frank Fischer has argued that contestation over environmental knowledge is a discursive struggle over whose reality counts. Yet, the...
The development of this methods project, and the articles in the special sec- tion, started from a simple shared observation: the concepts for studying global environmental agreement-making did not fit with what we— researchers in this area of study—have observed in practice. This observation raised two critical questions: first, what constitutes a...
This article has two aims. The first is to provide an account of the struggle over the term biocultural diversity during the intergovernmental approval of the first IPBES thematic assessment report. Second, in detailing this struggle, we aim to contribute to scholarship on global environmental negotiating processes and the place and power of knowle...
Compared to climate change, the loss of biological diversity is less visible and popular in global environmental politics. However, for the last decade, the study of international biodiversity politics has received new impetus, inter alia because of the increased recognition that biodiversity and climate change must be tackled together. Another imp...
Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision‐making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence‐informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global surve...
Despite the increased attention, which has been given to the issue of involving knowledge and experts from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) into the products and works of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), little is known on what the expectations towards the involvement of SSH in IP...
FIGURE S1 Flow diagram illustrating the survey methodology
FIGURE S2 Ranking of barriers by role according to Human Development Index
FIGURE S3 Proportion of different roles (Red: Policy position, Yellow: practitioners, Blue: Policy position) experiencing the barriers
FIGURE S4 Proportion of male and female respondents to the online survey by ro...
Scientific knowledge is considered to be an important factor (alongside others) in environmental policy-making. However, the opportunity for environmentalists to influence policy can often occur within short, discrete time windows. Therefore, a piece of research may have a negligible or transformative policy influence depending on when it is presen...
The aim of this article is to develop a framework within which the role and social construction of knowledge in International Relations can be understood and theoretically underpinned. In order to do so, the article discusses post-structuralist and neo-Gramscian answers to the structure–agency debate and argues that the role of knowledge remains ra...
The economic valuation of biodiversity and related market-based policy instruments are
increasingly being referred to in the international politics of biodiversity and related
Multilateral Environmental Agreements. They are both the subject of diverging interests,
hence leading to conflict and critique, and an impetus for compromise on the way towa...
The establishment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) points to the crucial role attributed to science and knowledge for the successful implementation of biodiversity politics by both scientists and policy-makers. With the increased importance of biodiversity in international politics, and in part inspir...
This article addresses the intertwined and contentious relationship between knowledge production and policy-making inside the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). We develop the argument that international biodiversity politics is constituted by epistemic selectivities, in which a set of favoured concepts establishes its own institutionalisati...
Dieser Beitrag zielt auf die Beschreibung und Analyse
der Rolle von Wissen und Wissenschaft im Institutionalisierungsprozess von IPBES.
Theoretisch wird die Analyse vom Ansatz der „Epistemischen Selektivität“ angeleitet,
der im Rahmen des Artikels sowohl vorgestellt als auch anhand des empirischen
Gegenstandes verständlich gemacht werden soll. Der...
Technological developments brought about new approaches to and new insight into the functioning of the brain and neurological disorders. More specifically, advancement in the areas of neuroimaging, genomic technologies and molecular biology is conceived as a pathway to more differentiated diagnosis and appropriate treatment. In this regard, the con...
This paper is interested in raising the question to which extent the epistemological implications of the Mode 3 concept coincide with the respective knowledge understanding. The argumentation focuses on the article from David F. J. Campbell and Elias G. “Mode 3†and “Quadruple Helixâ€: Toward a 21st Century Fractal Innovation Ecosystem (2009)...
This paper is interested in raising the question to which extent the epistemological implications of the Mode 3 concept coincide with the respective knowledge understanding. The argumentation focuses on the article from David F. J. Campbell and Elias G. “Mode 3” and “Quadruple Helix”: Toward a 21st Century Fractal Innovation Ecosystem (2009) and ai...
IN THEIR POLICY FORUM “THE BIODIVERsity
and ecosystem services science-policy
interface” (4 March, p. 1139), C. Perrings
et al. frame the new Intergovernmental
Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Services (IPBES) as a body responsible
primarily for assessment. They consistently
base their elaboration of the work of
IPBES on the experiences of pa...
This article examines the intensification of development cooperation in the field of biogenetic fuels, in particular bioethanol, in light of increasing knowledge on the positive and negative impacts of biofuel production and use. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, biofuels made from biomass have become an important alternative nonfoss...
