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Publications
Publications (90)
Impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise and changes in annual precipitation, are becoming increasingly visible around the world and within Germany, thus increasing pressures to adapt. Forces of stability and change within established policy fields greatly determine the extent to which governance systems can adapt to worsening existing ris...
Rapid and transformational actions are ever more urgently needed to achieve a just, resilient, and ecologically sustainable global society, as envisioned and supported by the Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, dynamic governance approaches are vital for addressing changing and uncertain conditions. At many levels, governance needs to be respo...
Rapid and transformational actions are ever more urgently needed to achieve a just, resilient, and ecologically sustainable global society, as envisioned and supported by the Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, dynamic governance approaches are vital for addressing changing and uncertain conditions. At many levels, governance needs to be respo...
The Earth System is being transformed by human activities. The complex societal, technological, and environmental changes underway require governance systems that can anticipate, manage, and help steer these changes along more sustainable trajectories. A decade ago the Earth System Governance (ESG) project proposed that adaptiveness is one of the k...
This chapter concludes the edited volume and its quest to harvest findings on the conceptual development of adaptiveness, as proposed by the Earth System Governance (ESG) Project. Adaptiveness is both a key attribute and goal of governance to anticipate, manage, and help steer complex societal, technological, and environmental changes towards more...
Rapid and transformational actions are ever more urgently needed to achieve a just, resilient, and ecologically sustainable global society, as envisioned and supported by the Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, dynamic governance approaches are vital for addressing changing and uncertain conditions. At many levels, governance needs to be respo...
The inter-and transdisciplinary research project EGON (2017-19) gives scientific support to the development of organic fruit varieties in the project Apfel:gut. Genetic diversity of heirloom and/or underutilized apple and pear varieties is used in a community of breeders and farmers in this project. The breeding approach is conceptualized as 'commo...
Open Access at http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/6/976
While most climate change vulnerability assessments focus on regional or city-levels, this paper studies villages and their different forms of vulnerability vis-à-vis climate change. In the African context, the village level proves to be central for land-use related decision-making given the tra...
Die vorliegende integrierte Roadmap of Change vereinigt die Ergebnisse von nordwest2050 aus fünf Jahren Projektarbeit zu einer übergeordneten Strategie. Dieses Dokument ist als ein Fahrplan zur Klimaanpassung zu verstehen, der Strategien und Handlungsoptionen beinhaltet, die geeignet sein können, die Metropolregion Bremen-Oldenburg im Nordwesten »f...
Several case studies show that social factors like institutions, perceptions and social capital strongly affect social capacities to adapt to climate change. Together with economic and technological development they are important for building social capacities.
However, there are almost no methodologies for the systematic assessment of social facto...
Several case studies show that "soft social factors" (e.g. institutions,
perceptions, social capital) strongly affect social capacities to adapt to
climate change. Many soft social factors can probably be changed faster than
"hard social factors" (e.g. economic and technological development) and are
therefore particularly important for building soc...
Reflexive governance refers to a new practice of governance that can address long-term, highly complex and highly uncertain societal problems. We regard three areas of behavior as crucial for reflexive governance: interaction (participatory goal formulation and strategy development among various societal actors), deliberation (transdisciplinary lea...
Die Anforderungen einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung werden zunehmend im Rahmen von offenen Innovationsprozessen aufgegriffen. Die Nutzerintegration in solche Innovationsprozesse ist eine Möglichkeit, Produkte und Dienstleistungen nachhaltiger zu gestalten und zu vermarkten. Wie können Methoden der Nutzerintegration das Nachhaltigkeitsmanagementstärken...
The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop “strategies for Earth System management”. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent...
The article introduces the notion of adaptiveness and discusses the role of social learning in it. Adaptiveness refers to
the capacity of a social actor or social–ecological system to adapt in response to, or in anticipation of, changes in the
environment. We explore arguments both from a theoretical perspective and through illustrations from case...
Im Frühjahr 2009 ist das Vorhaben „nordwest2050: Perspektiven für klimaangepasste Innovationsprozesse in der Metropolregion Bremen-Oldenburg im Nordwesten“ gestartet. Ziel der vorliegende Studie ist und war es, innerhalb des ersten Projektjahres einen gemeinsamen Forschungsbezugsrahmen und die konzeptionellen Grundlagen zu erarbeiten, die ein gemei...
Einführung in das Schwerpunktthema
Municipal utilities are an essential constituent of the German power sector and currently strongly expanding their generation capacities. Multiple factors influence these investment decisions. Are these investments more sustainable than those of other power producers, and what could be done to make them greener?
Building on the on-going discussion about topical knowledge, social learning and sustainable development, this article discusses
the problem horizon of non-sustainable development in order to highlight the necessity of social learning processes and to
discuss the relevant conceptual approaches to social learning. It is argued that in order to meet...
Einführung in das Schwerpunktthema
This chapter outlines the conceptual framework for assessing and explaining the influence of international bureaucracies. It first conceptualizes international bureaucracies before elaborating the dependent variables and the concept of “influence” as used in the research, and then considers three clusters of factors that may explain variation in th...
International bureaucracies and their retinue of civil servants are considered important players in world politics, and yet, as exemplified by the United Nations (UN), others see them as an assembly of ineffective, inefficient, and unresponsive bureaucrats. This book explores the influence and dynamics of international bureaucracies in world politi...
The Global Governance Project is a joint research programme of eight European research institutions. It seeks to advance understanding of the new actors, institutions and mechanisms of global governance, especially in the field of sustainable development.
International bureaucracies--highly visible, far-reaching actors of global governance in areas that range from finance to the environment--are often derided as ineffective, inefficient, and unresponsive. Yet despite their prominence in many debates on world politics, little scholarly attention has been given to their actual influence in recent year...
In global environmental governance, numerous new international organizations have emerged from dozens of multilateral treaties signed over the last 30 years. This paper focuses on intergovernmental organizations in an organizational theory perspective with a particular focus on organizational learning processes. It explores where and when internati...
The Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has become the centre of heated debates concerning its function as the science–policy interface of the Convention. Based on explorations of the role, nature, and organisation of scientific advice mechanisms for multilateral...
Einführung in das Schwerpunktthema
Governance depends upon inputs from science. Whereas the conventional view portrays science as advisor of policy makers, more recent understandings see knowledge creation processes and decision processes as highly interrelated and intermingled. Against this background, we analyse the new research programme on socio-ecological research set up in Ger...
Combating global warming, safeguarding ecological support systems and reducing energy and resource use as well as maintaining functioning societies are key challenges for many businesses today and in the near future. These problems have been addressed under the integrating concept of sustainable development. Implementing sustainable development in...
Mainstream economics has not yet fully responded to the challenges of sustainable development. The interactions between socio-economic and ecological systems require a transdisciplinary and solution-oriented approach, which is significantly different practice for most economists. We introduce the concept of "socio-ecological transformations" and in...
http://www.metropolis-verlag.de/Gesellschaftliches-Lernen-und-Nachhaltigkeit/602/book.do
The concept of sustainable development implies the need for organizational learning in business corporations to find innovative solutions. In this context, the paper analyzes the requirements and options for environmental policy to induce sustainability-related learning processes in corporations. It discusses the impacts of different policy instrum...
Einführung in das Schwerpunktthema
The paper presents a case study analysing the effects of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity as an intergovernmental
organisation. Within the study, the effects of organisations are measured by their outcome, i.e. the influence on the behaviour
of other actors such as national governments. Three forms of outcomes are being dis...
Mainstream economics has not yet fully responded to the challenges
of sustainable development. The interactions between socio-economic
and ecological systems require a transdisciplinary and solutionoriented
approach, which is significantly different practice for most
economists.We introduce the concept of “socio-ecological transformations”
and inve...
Umweltschonende Konsum- und Produktionsmuster sind ein Kernpunkt einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung. Durch partizipative Produktentwicklung entstehen Lerneffekte, mit denen Verbraucher und Produzenten dieser Heraus- forderung besser gerecht werden können.
Einführung in das Schwerpunktthema
Unternehmen spielen bei Innovationen für nachhaltige Entwicklung in vielfaltiger Weise eine zentrale Rolle. Sie agieren zunehmend global und stellen durch Fusionen und Aufkäufe von anderen Unternehmen immer größere Machtzentren dar, welche nicht nur über ihre Produktionstätigkeit, sondern auch über ihren Einfluss auf Lebensstile und Konsummuster di...
Umfassende Innovationen sind Voraussetzung für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung. Hierzu zählen technische Innovationen zur ökologischen Optimierung von Prozessen und Produkten ebenso wie Dienstleistungsinnovationen und organisationale Innovationen zur Veränderung von Strukturen und Abläufen. Hinzu kommen institutionelle Innovationen zur Neugestaltung g...
In a number of recent research projects, computer models have been included in participatory procedures to assess global environmental change. The intention was to support knowledge production and to help the involved non-scientists to develop a deeper understanding of the interactions between natural and social systems. This paper analyses the exp...
Institutional learning has been studied under different labels within different social science disciplines. In this paper, we will apply an integrated conceptual framework that starts out from a notion of boundedly rational actors. It builds on the literature on policy learning as well as on the field of organizational learning as it has been estab...
The concept of access and benefit-sharing (ABS) in genetic resources as maintained by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims at promoting the conservation of biodiversity and equity between the North and the South at the same time. Its implementation challenges various disciplines. First, from an economic point of view, designing efficie...
Die agentenbasierte Modellierung als Methode der Simulation komplexer Systeme ermöglicht die Analyse von Potentialen und Ursprüngen emergenter Eigenschaften, die nicht allein auf Basis des Verhaltens der Elemente des Systems erklärt werden können. Für agentenbasierte Modellansätze bieten sich insbesondere solche Probleme an, bei denen eine Vielzahl...
In 1988, the incoming head of one of the most prominent scientific assessment bodies, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), explained: "Right now, many countries, especially developing countries, simply do not trust assessments in which their scientists and policymakers have not participated." Since then, the international community...
Social learning in environmental contexts requires a strong knowledge base to allow societies to properly tackle environmental problems. Science can be seen as one of the crucial producers of this kind of knowledge and, therefore, the interface between science and political decision making is a crucial bottleneck for the exchange of scientific know...
Dieses Lexikon, verfasst von über hundert ausgewiesenen Fachleuten, informiert sachkundig und kritisch über allle zentralen Begriffe, Richtungen und Perspektiven der Ökologie.
Scientific assessments play a crucial role in advising and shaping political decisions particularly in the environmental domain. Therefore, this and the accompanying paper (Part 2) present two case studies of international environmental assessments with a perspective on internal learning processes. When carried out over a longer period of time, sci...
Building on the introduction of the conceptual framework and the case study of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Part 1, this paper presents a case study of the scientific assessments within the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air-Pollution (LRTAP). This case study will be analysed under the umbrella of same conceptual...
When carried out over a longer period of time with several recurrent processes, assessments provide an outstanding opportunity for learning from past experience and from other assessment experiences. Through learning, assessments could improve their procedures and enhance their effectiveness in regard to issue development. If assessments were perce...
The complex problems addressed under the concept of sustainable development necessitate better knowledge on the causes and solutions to ecological and social problems. Thus, the question addressed in this paper is how institutions can be designed that foster social learning towards sustainable development beyond mere government regulation. It there...
Resilience has been an often used term within the climate change debate recently. However, it is accused of being structurally conservative. A social learning perspective could respond to such criticism, since the inclusion of a learning perspective would allow for a more dynamic notion. There are already elements of knowledge and learning within e...
Climate change poses a significant threat to almost all humans. The combat against it and the provision of measures to ameliorate the most dramatic impacts from climate change contribute to the provision of a global public good. Its complexity implies manifold uncertainties from scientific as well as policy-making points of view. Nether do we exact...
Zugl.: Halle, Universiẗat, Diss., 2001.
Eine wachsende Zahl von Unternehmen nimmt sich der Herausforderung der Nachhaltigkeit an und versucht, ihre Unternehmensaktivitäten sowie ihre Innovationstätigkeit hierauf auszurichten. Das theoretische und praktische Interesse des Buches gilt den Fragen, warum und wie Unternehmen Lern- und Veränderungsprozesse in Richtung nachhaltiger Entwicklung...
Projects
Projects (6)
Preparing for and coping with the accelerating impacts of climate change requires adaptation in a wide range of policy areas. Yet, despite increasing calls for action, policy change to allow this is often slow. A range of counteracting forces and barriers can make it difficult to embed adaptation objectives into important policies and move them away from ‘business-as-usual’. However, deeper dynamics are also at play, where self-reinforcing mechanisms, feedbacks and path dependencies interact across different spatio-temporal scales and coalesce to establish policy lock-ins.
The aim of this interdisciplinary project is to uncover these lock-in dynamics and examine the extent to which they account for varying levels of climate change adaptation in Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. (England).
Partizipative Entwicklung eines energetischen Nachbarschaftsquartiers in Oldenburg.