Elisa Kochskämper

Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space | IRS · Institutional Change and Regional Public Goods

All governance systems are polycentric to some extent in that they comprise multiple actors with varying degrees of autonomy. However, there has been limited theorization as to how we might measure polycentricity, even though this could help us unpack networks and understand governance arrangements better. We present three dimensions of governance...

The Resilient Cities Network, formerly known as the 100 Resilient Cities, supports the development of local resilience policies in partaking cities from around the globe. Various policies in the network are an example of an upcoming trend where experiments are increasingly conducted in the urban space to shape governance. Experiments in this contex...

In Deutschland sind Klimaschutz und Klimaanpassung freiwillige Aufgaben der Kommunen. Das Aktivitätsniveau variiert daher sehr stark. Während einige wenige Städte schon Anfang der 1990er Jahre zu Vorreitern avancierten und sich ehrgeizige Ziele setzten, ist die Mehrheit vor allem der kleinen Kommunen in Deutschland erst sehr viel später oder no...

Participation and collaboration of citizens and organized stakeholders in public decision-making is widely believed to improve environmental governance outputs. However, empirical evidence on the benefits of participatory governance is largely scattered across small-N case studies. To synthesize the available case-based evidence, we conducted a bro...

Meta-analytical methods face particular challenges in research fields such as social and political research, where studies often rest primarily on qualitative and case study research. In such contexts, where research findings are less standardized and amenable to structured synthesis, the case survey method has been proposed as a means of data gene...

The EDGE/SCAPE database (available in two separate documents) contains 305 coded cases of public environmental decision-making from North America, Europe and Australia / New Zealand. This table contains the (larger) qualitative text fields. A description of all variables can be found in the document EDGE_SCAPE_Variable_list_2021-06-30. One tab cont...

Adaptive management has been proliferating since the 1970s as a policy approach for dealing with uncertainty in environmental governance through learning. Learning takes place through a cyclical approach of experimentation and (possible) adjustment. However, few empirical studies exist that cover full iterations of adaptive management cycles. We re...

In environmental governance, participatory modes of political decision-making and planning are becoming more prevalent. A rationalist model of governance would assume that instrumental rationales prevail in choosing participatory process designs. Some argue, however, that public policy-makers also follow administrative or governance ‘culture’. The...

Citizen and stakeholder participation are often expected to improve the outcomes of public governance. Little attention has been paid so far to whether and under what circumstances the outputs of participatory processes are actually taken up by policy decisions and get implemented. This study reports on findings from a case survey meta-analysis of...

Efforts to collaboratively manage the risk of flooding are ultimately based on individuals learning about risks, the decision process, and the effectiveness of decisions made in prior situations. This article argues that much can be learned about a governance setting by explicitly evaluating the relationships through which influential individuals a...

The 2000 EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) set a turning point in European water governance: mandated participatory planning substituted conventional top-down approaches, the ecology of aquatic environments became the WFD’s focal point, and the river-basin scale was institutionalized as the central governance unit. In 2007, the Floods Directive –...

The participation of societal groups and of the broader public has been a key feature in implementing the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). Non-state actor participation in the drafting of river basin management plans was expected to help achieve the directive’s environmental goals, but the recent literature leaves us doubtful whether this...

There is much enthusiasm among scholars and public administrators for participatory and collaborative modes of governance as a means to tackle contemporary environmental problems. Participatory and collaborative approaches are expected to both enhance the environmental standard of the outputs of decision-making processes and improve the implementat...

Theory on participatory and collaborative governance maintains that learning is essential to achieve good environmental outcomes. Empirical research has mostly produced individual case studies, and reliable evidence on both antecedents and environmental outcomes of learning remains sparse. Given conceptual ambiguities in the literature, we define g...

Does participation in environmental governance benefit the environment? While it is widely assumed that it does, the expectation that participation helps to solve environmental problems remains largely unsubstantiated, and widely disputed. This volume seeks to move a step further in tracing causality between participation and environmental outcomes...

Many have advocated for collaborative governance and the participation of citizens and stakeholders on the basis that it can improve the environmental outcomes of public decision making, as compared to traditional, top-down decision making. Others, however, point to the potential negative effects of participation and collaboration on environmental...

Current European Union (EU) policies require policy-makers on different levels of government to engage with new forms of governance such as participatory planning, aiming to improve environmental policy delivery. We address the central issue of how policy-makers learn about the appropriateness of different modes of governance. By way of example, we...

Effectiveness of participation in environmental governance is a proliferating assertion in literature that is also reflected in European legislation, such as the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). The Directive mandates participatory river basin management planning across the EU aiming at the delivery of better policy outputs and enhanced im...

The European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires EU member states to produce and implement river basin management plans, which are to be designed and updated via participatory processes that inform, consult with, and actively involve all interested stakeholders. The assumption of the European Commission is that stakeholder participa...

Supplementary Materials: Transforming European Water Governance? Participation and River Basin Management under the EU Water Framework Directive in 13 Member States. The supporting information provides the variable descriptions and a detailed account of the data aggregation procedures employed during the analysis, as well as a list of literature so...

The importance of designing suitable participatory governance processes is generally acknowledged. However, less emphasis has been put on how decision-makers design such processes, and how they learn about doing so. While the policy learning literature has tended to focus on the substance of policy, little research is available on learning about th...

We examine the roles and functions of non-state actor participation in implementing the EU Floods Directive of 2007 (FD). We draw on experiences with participation under the Water Framework Directive (WFD), because of important links between the two directives. Comparing the legal basis and the different functions for participation, we observe the...