Felix Rauschmayer

• Dr.
• Head of Department at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research

This article contributes to an understanding of the nature of sustainability transformation experiments. We compare these experiments with classical experiments in the natural and social sciences along three central dimensions: 1) aims related to knowledge production, 2) roles of experimenters and participants, and 3) unpredictability of outcomes....

Scientific activities which are targeted to engage and enact on societal problems – and governance of sustainability transition itself is one such activity – are necessarily prescriptive endeavours, have to recognize the fundamental normativity of sustainable development, need to be based on a thick description of the issues to change, and should e...

Zusammenfassung Die deutsche Bevölkerung steht Energiegenossenschaften (EG) positiv gegenüber und schreibt ihnen erhebliche Potentiale zur Unterstützung der Energiewende zu. Dies konnte in einer repräsentativen Fragebogenstudie von Nichtmitgliedern erhoben werden. Finanzielle Motive scheinen für ein Engagement in EG keine überragende Rolle zu spiel...

European societies are faced with amalgamated crises: ecological degradation and loss of ecosystem functions, trembling welfare systems that retreat from providing services needed to fulfill basic societal needs and maintain social security, and the resurfacing of dichotomies in societies as effects of gentrification and fear of loss and change. In...

This paper summarises discussions in a workshop entitled “exploring uncertainties in biodiversity science, policy and management”. It draws together experiences gained by scientists and scholars when encountering and coping with different types of uncertainty in their work in the field of biodiversity protection. The discussion covers all main phas...

Sustainability transitions require altered individual behaviors. Policies aimed at changing people's consumption be-havior are designed according to efficiency, consistency, and sufficiency principles. Taking into account shortcomings of the first two principles, this paper specifically addresses the sufficiency principle. Sufficiency policies are...

The idea of intergenerational justice has practical consequences, not least because it is linked to the politically influential, wide-ranging concept of sustainable development. It also bears on several philosophical puzzles arising in the context of intergenerational justice. They need to be solved in order to establish a case for intergenerationa...

Using the capability approach, we analyse a recent environmental conflict in the city of Leipzig, Germany. Following its concept of flood protection, a state authority felled thousands of trees in a highly popular nature protection area, which culminated in public protests and lawsuits. In analysing this conflict, we pursue a twofold aim: (1) to be...

This study presents the first assessment of how an approach based on meeting fundamental human needs can assist regional planning. It uses the Human-scale Development methodology, based on fundamental human needs as a theoretical and methodological framework for scenario building. It offers a structured approach on how non-monetary values and pract...

This study presents the first assessment of how an approach based on meeting fundamental human needs can assist regional planning. It uses the Human-scale Development methodology, based on fundamental human needs as a theoretical and methodological framework for scenario building. It offers a structured approach on how non-monetary values and pract...

Policies for sustainability transitions necessarily have three main characteristics: they are prescriptive with regard to dynamic societal processes, linked to the normativity of sustainable development, and are able to interlink both the societal and the individual levels. Taking transition management as a starting point, the paper elaborates that...

A major strength of the ecosystem services (ESS) concept is that it allows a succinct description of how human well-being depends on nature, showing that the neglect of such dependencies has negative consequences on human well-being and the economy. As ESS refer to human needs and interests, values are to be considered when dealing with the concept...

International aid projects in post-communist countries were meant to support environmental protection during the transition period and to introduce new standards of environmental governance. While the outcomes of the World Bank biodiversity project in the Belavezhskaya Pushcha National Park in Belarus were evaluated positively after its delayed com...

The book presents a structured procedure covering ecological and legal, economic, and social aspects of the wildlife conflicts. This book is about conflicts between different stakeholder groups triggered by protected species that compete with humans for natural resources. It presents key ecological features of typical conflict species and mitigati...

The basis and first step of an efficient conflict reconciliation and management is a proper screening study. Screening aims at yielding the best picture achievable through collecting existing information on key aspects without going deeply into own investigations. The outcome of the screening phase provides information on how to proceed with, where...

Human-wildlife conflicts are necessarily linked to stakeholders. Resolving these conflicts requires multilateral interaction. Participatory developed decisions promise to have a better information base, include all actors with relevant knowledge and implementation power, be based on mutual trust and understanding and, finally, reduce overall costs....

The great cormorant has fully recovered from an endangered status in the 1980s and is now present throughout Europe. Eating fish, this recovery is perceived as a danger by fishermen and anglers. The existing national or regional action or management plans are mostly ineffective due to the high mobility and numbers of the bird. At first sight astoni...

Wildlife captures the imagination of humans. The image of wildlife and human-wildlife conflicts differs among people. Therefore, it is essential in a book that addresses human-wildlife conflicts to first clarify what we understand by “wildlife” and “human-wildlife conflicts”. In the broadest sense, all wild, undomesticated animals and plants belong...

Attempts to reconcile human-wildlife conflicts are usually developed on a case-by-case approach. A generic framework can offer help in the reconciliation of such conflicts by building on common elements and the experience gained in case studies. Here we introduce the concept and structure of such a generic framework that is based on the experience...

Seriously engaging with the needs, hardships, and aspirations of future generations is an emotional experience as much as an intellectual endeavor. In this essay we describe a guided visualization exercise used to overcome the emotional barriers that often prevent us from dealing effectively with intergenerational decisions. The meditation and drea...

The main motivation for sustainable development, as defined in the Brundtland report, is to care for other humans – for the world’s poor and for unborn people. Traditional economic models use the motivation to increase one’s own well-being as the main motivation for action. Efficiency-improvements, as the main focus of the economics-based models ha...

Current conceptual debates on the impacts of ecosystem services (ESS) on human well-being often boil down to discussing the application and limitations of monetisation approaches. Meanwhile we argue that ESS can be understood in a richer and more nuanced way if we revisit the human well-being dimension of the ESS concept, going beyond the widely ci...

This paper sketches a re-conceptualisation of sustainable development (SD) on the basis of the capability approach (CA). The notion sustainable development was developed as a compromise in a political process and has been re-interpreted (some say: diluted) again and again in the last 20 years. When modelling the notion through the lenses of the cap...

Die zentrale Frage des Forschungsprojektes ist: Was brauchen Menschen, um nachhaltig zu leben? Das Forschungsprojekt InContext identifiziert die Rahmenbedingungen, die einen gesellschaftlichen Übergang zu einer ökologisch verträglichen, wirtschaftlich erfolgreichen und kulturell diversen Zukunft möglich macht. Im Zentrum des Projektes steht dabei d...

The politically influential idea of sustainable development is closely tied to the concept of inter- and intragenerational justice without clarifying these concepts and their relationship. In developing an account of human development, the capability approach conceptualizes parts of intragenerational justice, but not intergenerational justice. Afte...

This report is part of the theoretical framework of the EU FP7 project InContext - Supportive Environments for Sustainable Living. The common approach developed here is meant to form an orienting framework, which allows the partnering research institutes to make reference to and to make use of. Its focus is rather theoretical in contrast to the pr...

This article extends the Human-scale Development methodology to include non-humans. We found this wider approach to be helpful in analysing the conflict of interest between fish farming and otter protection in the Natural Reserve of the Sado River estuary in Portugal. Our analysis of this environmental conflict goes beyond the anthropocentric view...

SCIENTIFIC REPORT 1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY From June 1 st to June 3 rd 2011, 17 participants from 8 countries took part at the ESF Exploratory Workshop "Below The Waterline. How To Integrate Needs, Values, Emotions Into Societal Processes Towards Sustainable Development" which was held at the Berghotel Tulbingerkogel, close to Vienna, Austria. The meet...

Conceptual discussions on the impacts of ecosystem services (ESS) on human well-being have largely been boiled down to limits and applications of their monetisation. Therefore, in practice, the use of the ESS concept has been to a large extent boiled down to payment-for-ecosystem-services schemes. In this paper we argue that the human well-being di...

‘Sustainable development is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ (WCED 1987) Sustainable Development (SD) is most prominently defined with respect to the needs of current and future generations. Political and scientific discussion, though, refrains from...

Participation is said to improve decisions on environmental conflicts. When investigating 16 case studies of participatory processes in European Water and Biodiversity Governance, which necessarily is multi-level, the picture becomes blurred: many different forms of participation can be observed, only few of them are well-defined and well organised...

International aid projects in post-communist countries were meant to support environmental protection during the transition period and to introduce new standards of environmental governance. While the outcomes of the World Bank biodiversity project in the Belavezhskaya Pushcha National Park in Belarus were evaluated positively after its delayed com...

Public and stakeholder participation has been shown to have the potential to enhance the quality and the public legitimacy of decisions. It also has the potential to motivate a potentially diverse range of participants to learn from each other, and can even simplify the implementation of public policies. Our focus in this policy briefing is to outl...

This paper develops the idea that following rules of good OR practice is necessary, but not sufficient for ethical OR. Several challenges of introducing ethical aspects into OR are discussed, evidencing difficulties and ambiguities in the relationship to be established between the OR practitioner and his/her clients, decision-makers or stakeholders...

This paper discusses the practical contribution of operations research (OR) techniques to modelling decision-making problems with ethical dimensions. Such problems are frequent in the global world: they frequently appear today in sustainability issues, e.g., in conflicts in the triangle of society, economy and environment. We show that the prerequi...

Effectively evaluating the governance of natural resources is a precondition for its improvement in contexts of change. In order to do so, one can use methods for evaluating (1) the outcome of a governance process or (2) the governance process itself. Outcome‐oriented and process‐oriented approaches have different strengths and weaknesses. This pap...

Policy markers are looking at two different directions for guidance when addressing the challenges of multi-level environmental governance in the face of global environmental change. First, they are seeking scientific advice to find solutions to policy problems. Second, they are emphasizing participation of the public and/or stakeholders to enhance...

We explore the theory and practice of participation in EU biodiversity governance, focusing on the implementation of the Birds and Habitat directives and Natura 2000 at the EU and member-state levels in the cases of France and Germany. We identify three shifts in EU biodiversity governance which potentially lead to intensifying participatory proces...

International aid projects in post-communist countries were meant to support the existing systems of environmental protection during the transition period and also to introduce new standards of environmental governance. This paper looks at the role project evaluations can play in fulfilling these goals. While the outcomes of the World Bank project...

Stakeholder analysis as a specific tool in social science can be used to explain why environmental conflicts arise or persist and identify steps to resolve these. This paper considers the conflict over the great cormorant, a fish-foraging bird with a rapidly growing population, a conflict previously treated only at a local, subnational or national...

In this synthesis article, we claim that institutional innovation is required for ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management (EBAFM), and that such innovation can best be achieved by engaging in a delicate process of societal decision making. Current instances of participation in fisheries shed light on the societal processes required for s...

This paper is an introduction to the special issue on a role of participation in dealing with the interactions between environment and fisheries. In this introduction, we explore the recent discussion on the ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management (EBAFM) and extract important points for implementation of EBAFM from the social science lite...

Successful species conservation typically results in conflicts between wildlife protection and economic uses of natural resources as in fisheries and aquaculture. This article shows why managing these conflicts require a more comprehensive approach than currently pursued by endangered species conservation programmes. Against the background of sever...

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is currently the most detailed study on the status and trends of the ecosystems of the world. The assessment is based on the concept of ecosystem services. It thus focuses not only on the consequences of changes for ecosystems themselves, but also for human wellbeing on Earth. Although there is some controve...

The combination of deliberative and analytical methods is supposed to have a high potential for the resolution of environmental conflicts. But selecting methods and tools for a specific case often remains nebulous. In this article, we evaluate different deliberative and analytical methods according to characteristics defined by Wittmer et al. (2004...

This editorial shows that environmental conflicts are characterised by the combination of two types of complexities, ecological and societal. Decisions to resolve these conflicts have often been oriented to efficiency improvements and/or cost-effectiveness, and instruments to reach the decisions have been arranged accordingly. Both criteria do not...

Invasive species are one of the main reasons for the loss of biodiversity. According to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) national strategies have to be developed to deal with biological invasions. Economic evaluation studies of biological invasions and of measures against them can be used to support the decision process as a tool of pol...

Invasive species are one of the main reasons for the loss of biodiversity. According to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) national strategies have to be developed to deal with biological invasions. Economic evaluation studies of biological invasions and of measures against them can be used to support the decision process as a tool of pol...

Public participation in environmental decisionmaking has become an accepted part of Western societies over the last three decades. Whereas on a simple level every democratic process based on aggregating individual preferences contains an element of public participation, the literature on discursive democracy emphasises instead a more subtle, rich,...

Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is now adopted as a formal procedure in various organisations. Nevertheless, the question of how to choose the most suitable SEA participatory approach for a given situation is far from being resolved. To shed light on this question, we briefly describe several participatory approaches used in environmental...