Art Dewulf

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Public Administration and Policy Group

While cross-sector partnerships are sometimes depicted as a pragmatic problem solving arrangements devoid of politics and power, they are often characterized by power dynamics. Asymmetries in power can have a range of undesirable consequences as low-power actors may be co-opted, ignored, over-ruled, or excluded by dominant parties. As of yet, there...

Governing complex environmental issues involves intensive interaction between public and private actors. These governance processes are fraught with uncertainties about, for example, the current state of environmental affairs, the relevant set of decision alternatives, the reactions of other actors to proposed solutions or the future developments l...

Researchers, stakeholders and funding organizations have embraced co-production of knowledge to solve sustainability problems. Research focusing on the practice of co-production can help us understand what works in what contexts and how to avoid potentially undesirable outcomes.

Since the early work on defining and analyzing resilience in domains such as engineering, ecology and psychology, the concept has gained significant traction in many fields of research and practice. It has also become a very powerful justification for various policy goals in the water sector, evident in terms like flood resilience, river resilience...

Environmental knowledge is a crucial input for public and private decision-making, yet often useful environmental knowledge appears to be unusable for decision-makers. To better understand how usable knowledge can be produced, we need to build on a better understanding of decision-making processes. We distinguish three different logics of decision-...

The federal government of Ethiopia set a national target to restore 15 million hectares of degraded and deforested lands by 2030. While forest and landscape restoration governance is intended to be a multi-actor process through which various land uses are coordinated, in practice it turns out to be difficult to bring specialised government agencies...

Adaptation has become a priority in global climate change governance since the adoption of the Cancun Adaptation Framework and the Paris Agreement. Adaptation to climate change has been increasingly recognized as a multi-level governance challenge in both the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) regime and academic literature...

Climate change requires forward-looking policy responses. Developing such responses can be challenging for governments and, therefore, specific long-term institutions have been proposed for overcoming short-termism. However, the impacts of such institutions have been underexplored. In this paper, we analyze the influence of a long-term institution,...

In collaborative water governance, the variety of frames that actors bring to the dis- cussion constitutes an important challenge. In this study, we analyse the fragmentation and connection of frames in collaborative water governance projects in the Paute catchment and its sub-catchment Tabacay in the Southern Andes of Ecuador. We rely on frame ana...

Ethiopia’s federal government has committed to one of the most ambitious forest and landscape restoration targets as part of the Bonn Challenge. To achieve the targets, actors at multiple governance levels aim to influence relevant ecological processes, drawing particular attention to the governance processes that are used to translate national res...

In northeast Brazil, fight-against-drought and cope-with-drought have been identified as two different drought policy paradigms. This article aims to examine the persistence, coexistence, intertwining, and evolution of these drought policy paradigms by studying how they inform national policy responses in human-water systems. The questions guiding...

Drought management is currently informed by a variety of approaches, mostly responding to drought crisis when it happens. Toward more effective and integrated drought management, we introduce a conceptual drought diagnosis framework inspired by diagnostic concepts from the field of medicine. This framework comprises five steps: 1. Initial diagnosti...

Water funds are task-specific organisations that conserve and restore watersheds. The funds provide sustained finance and a collaborative space for actors at different levels to improve the water regulation functions of upstream ecosystems, safeguard water quality, and establish ecological connectivity with the aim of ensuring downstream water quan...

Building on different bodies of the governance literature, we propose a conceptual framework specifying nine scale-sensitive governance arrangements that aim to (1) create cross-scale fit between the governance and ecological scales, and/or (2) foster cross-level alignment between different governance levels. To understand how scale-sensitive gover...

The imperative of project sustainability has become explicit policy within development. This is especially true for technology transfer: 'development objects' are to be used by prospective beneficiaries long after the project's closure. We argue that the link between project sustainability, technology and 'success' requires deeper scrutiny. We inve...

The Paris Agreement encourages countries to monitor and regularly report on progress in responding to the impacts of climate change. So far, discussions on adaptation tracking have focused on the technocratic reasons for limited progress on adaptation tracking, for example, financial, methodological, and technical capacity gaps. Substantial variati...

The provision of weather information services (WIS) has become increasingly relevant for smallholder farmers in developing countries to manage the risks and opportunities arising from climate change and variability. However, gaps exist between what information providers understand as useful information and what users recognise as usable WIS, leadin...

The next Cross-Sector Social Interactions (CSSI) Symposium on “Partnering for Resilience and Transformation” is planned to take place online and at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, 22-24 June 2022.

With digital agriculture as a path to transforming the agricultural sector in the Global South, there has been a rise in digital service provision. To counteract potentially negative ethical, social justice, and environmental impacts of digital agriculture, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has been offered as a possible solution. There are...

With digital agriculture as a path to transforming the agricultural sector in the Global South, there has been a rise in digital service provision. To counteract potentially negative ethical, social justice, and environmental impacts of digital agriculture, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has been offered as a possible solution. There are...

We describe and present initial results from the citizen science in schools (CSIS) initiative, which had its genesis in the Landslide EVO project, a four-year effort to build community-level resilience to landslides and flooding in mountainous western Nepal. We first determined the primacy of local secondary schools as a gateway to the local commun...

This study investigates the hybrid informational governance arrangements involved in the provision of ICT-enabled Weather Information Services (WIS) for farming in Ghana. Farmers and organizations providing WIS were interviewed. Findings show that multiple technologies are used by combinations of government, business, and civil society organization...

Participatory water valuation workshops are useful for their valuation outcomes, but can they also foster social learning? Social learning involves changes in understanding through social interactions between actors, which go beyond the individual to become situated within wider social units. Participatory water valuation workshops involve dialogui...

Local knowledge about weather conditions is often crucial to farming practices in developing countries. It is potentially valuable when combined with scientific knowledge. Citizen science approaches rely on participatory environmental monitoring to source knowledge and information from citizens. The study examined the opportunities and challenges f...

We introduce a case-study agnostic framework for the application of citizen science in a sustainable development context. This framework is tested against an activity in two secondary schools in western Nepal. While the purpose of this activity is to generate locally relevant knowledge on the physical processes behind natural hazards, we concentrat...

Rice farmers in Northern Ghana are susceptible to climate variability and change with its effects in the form of drought, water scarcity, erratic rainfall and high temperatures. In response, farmers resort to weather and seasonal forecast to manage uncertainties in decision-making. However, there is limited empirical research on how forecast lead t...

Mountains are dynamic landscapes that are home to rich natural and human heritage. However, climatic variability, globalisation and increasing ecomomic integration are making these landscapes more fragile with implications for present and future development. Using a pathways lens, we examine development trajectories in mountains and relate these to...

This article aims to explain various disaster governance paradigms that have emerged and currently exists in Nepal. A disaster governance paradigm is a comprehensive set of prevailing and institutionalized ideas that shape disaster plans and policies that eventually are implemented on-the-ground. Nepal has prepared various disaster plans and polici...

Despite the increasing need to address long-term challenges, public sector organizations are incentivized to focus on short-term results. This article uses an ethnographic approach to analyse how members of a regional water authority understand and deal with long-term policy problems as part of their everyday practices. It reveals three specific di...

While increasingly more is known about how to reframe the relevance of climate change, much less is known about how people deal with situations in which they are confronted with frames that are incompatible with their own frames. The current research conducts an interactional framing analysis to investigate how users in climate change blog comments...

The efforts of Bolivia’s water sector to adapt to climate change include the mainstreaming of adaptation in water policy instruments and broad capacity building processes supported by climate funds and international cooperation. These sector-wide adaptation experiences in the country present important learning challenges across different governance...

The forest and landscape restoration (FLR) targets set as part of the Bonn Challenge draw attention to the governance arrangements required to translate national FLR targets into local action. To achieve the targets, actors at multiple levels of the governance scale aim to influence relevant processes on the ecological scale. In this article, we fo...

This article shares findings from a participatory assessment study of a community‐based environmental monitoring project in the Peruvian Andes. The objective of the project was to generate evidence to support sustainable livelihoods through participatory knowledge generation. With the use of narrative framing, the study retrospectively reconstructs...

Farming in Ghana's Volta delta is increasingly affected by variability in rainfall conditions and changes in land-use patterns. Under such socio-ecological conditions, little is known about farmers' decision-making in response to uncertainties in uncertain rainfall conditions. To fill this gap and add to the literature on adaptive decision-making,...

Farming in Ghana's Volta delta is increasingly affected by variability in rainfall conditions and changes in land-use patterns. Under such socio-ecological conditions, little is known about farmers' decision-making in response to uncertainties in uncertain rainfall conditions. To fill this gap and add to the literature on adaptive decision-making,...

Effective communication and knowledge sharing across stakeholder groups (e.g. science, government, business, civil society, farmers, the general public) are essential for more informed water resource management. Visualizations and graphics are powerful tools to engage diverse groups with unfamiliar information. Despite this potential, the design of...

Polarization and group formation processes on social media networks have received ample academic attention, but few studies have looked into the discursive interactions on social media through which intergroup conflicts develop. In this comparative case study, we analyzed two social media conflicts between farmers and animal right advocates to unde...

Landslides disrupt livelihoods, cause loss of human lives and damages to property and infrastructure. In the case of Nepal, the destructive impact of landslides has been steadily increasing as a result of the rising occupation of marginal land and extreme weather events caused by climate change. In particular, the impacts of seasonal, shallow lands...

Climate change has often been presented in a biased way in traditional media outlets, due to journalists’ adherence to the norm of balanced reporting. More generally, journalistic norms shape the selection and composition of news and thereby influence how climate change is covered in traditional media. Climate change coverage is also prominent in n...

The governance of adaptation to climate change is an emerging multi-level challenge, and learning is a central governance factor in such a new empirical field. We analyze, through a literature review, how learning is addressed in both the general multi-level governance literature and the governance of adaptation to climate change literature. We exp...

The concept of wicked problems has served as an inspiration for research in a variety of research fields but has also contributed to conceptual confusion through the various ways in which it has been defined and used. In this special issue, a number of ontological, theoretical and methodological issues are discussed. First, while its use as a buzzw...

Historically, flood resilience in large river deltas has been strongly tied to institutional and infrastructural interventions to manage flood risk (such as building of embankments and drainage structures). However, the introduction of infrastructural works has inevitably brought unforeseen, major consequences, such as biodiversity and accelerated...

This article uses the lens of the Multiple Streams Approach to explore whether the agendas set by political actors in Vietnam converged with the agenda set in the Mekong Delta Plan (MDP). The MDP presents policy choices for the development of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. The plan offers economically attractive, climate adaptive and environmentally...

Municipalities worldwide are confronted with the need to take long-term decisions about ageing water infrastructure in the face of unpredictable future developments. Previous studies on long-term decision making have proposed solutions targeted at the domain of either politics or planning. This study combines insights from the domains of policy, po...

Scale framing makes an important difference to how complex environmental policy issues are defined and understood by different groups of actors. Increasing urban water demand and uncertain future climatic conditions in the Andes present major water governance challenges for the coastal regions of Peru. An understudied dimension of Peruvian water go...

Multi-actor governance, in which a broad mix of actors collaborates to deal with complex societal problems, requires a leadership approach that can take into account the dynamic interdependencies between the involved actors. A relational approach to leadership, focusing on processes and practices, is more adequate for that purpose than approaches f...

A key issue in implementing adaptation strategies at the landscape level is that landowners take measures on their land collectively. We explored the role of information in collective decision-making in a landscape planning process in the Baakse Beek region, the Netherlands. Information was provided on (a) the degree to which measures contribute to...

Hydro-climatic information has a potential to improve agricultural productivity under climate variability. Recent developments in information sharing platforms (Environmental Virtual Observatories, EVOs) could make information provisioning more actionable. Here we present the results of a diagnostic study for the development of a hydro-climatic EVO...

The evaluation of policy strategies to tackle wicked policy problems inevitably involves a paradox of trying to judge solutions for problems that have no solutions and for which additional efforts might increase the chances of finding better responses. This paper analyzes how the concept of small wins can contribute to evaluating progress in wicked...

Climate variability has consequences on water availability in rice farming systems. In Ghana, rice farmers in the Northern Savannah are amongst the most vulnerable to long periods of drought and erratic rainfall conditions. Within the Kumbungu district, farmers engaged in both rain-fed and irrigated rice farming are no exception. Coping with uncert...

Climate change, (a) biotic stresses and environmental degradation are adversely affecting the sustenance of farming communities in Africa. Addressing such challenges requires effective collective action and coordination among stakeholders, which often prove difficult to achieve. Timely and context-specific information on relevant environmental dyna...

Rural communities in Africa are facing numerous challenges related to human health, agricultural production, water scarcity and service delivery. Addressing such challenges requires effective collective action and coordination among stakeholders, which often prove difficult to achieve. Against the background of the increased availability of informa...

Climate variability has consequences on water availability in rice farming systems. In Ghana, rice farmers in the Northern Savannah are amongst the most vulnerable to long periods of drought and erratic rainfall conditions. Within the Kumbungu district, farmers engaged in both rain-fed and irrigated rice farming are no exception. Coping with uncert...

Events and controversies in the agro-food domain frequently generate peak selective activity on social media. These social media hypes are a concern to stakeholders because they can affect public opinion and policy, and are almost impossible to predict. This study develops a model for analysing social media hypes and builds a typology to provide in...

Much of the global research on the interface between ecosystem services and sustainable development is driven by the need for a better scientific evidence base to support decision making and policy. In many developing regions in particular, the natural processes that determine the magnitude and spatiotemporal dynamics of ecosystem services are stil...

Long-term investments challenge decision makers to look into the far future. Existing future studies often build upon a rational idea of decision making that does not help to explain why decision makers anticipate the future. In addition, existing studies do not provide a clear definition of what is considered as “forward looking”. This article pro...

Long-term investments challenge decision makers to look into the far future. Existing future studies often build upon a rational idea of decision making that does not help to explain why decision makers anticipate the future. In addition, existing studies do not provide a clear definition of what is considered as “forward looking”. This article pro...

Information systems have been estimated to contribute to information provision and actionable knowledge creation for decision-making in rice farming systems. This, however, has been questioned within literature; suggesting not much impact on actionable knowledge creation for decision-making in rice farming systems. The study launches a probe into w...

In disaster risk management (DRM), an emerging shift has been noted from broad-scale, top-down assessments toward more participatory, community-based, bottom-up approaches. Arguably, nonscientist local stakeholders have always played an important role in knowledge risk management and resilience building within a hydrological context, such as flood...

Despite growing interest in resilience, there is still significant scope for increasing its conceptual clarity and practical relevance in socio-hydrological contexts: specifically, questions of how socio-hydrological systems respond to and cope with perturbations and how these connect to resilience remain unanswered. In this opinion paper, we propo...