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Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (18)
Large scale research programmes and networks are an increasingly prominent feature of global change and sustainability research. They aim to bring together researchers with different topical, disciplinary and geographical backgrounds around common issues of concern. Significant human and financial resources are invested in global research programme...
In the context of complex and unprecedented issues of global change, calls for new modes of knowledge production that are better equipped to address urgent challenges of global sustainability are increasingly frequent. This paper presents a case study of the new major research programme “Future Earth”, which aims to bring ‘research for global susta...
Over the past decades, numerous science institutions have evolved around issues of global sustainability, aiming to inform and shape societal transformations towards sustainability. While these science-based initiatives seem to take on an ever growing active role in governance for sustainable development, the question arises how they can claim any...
Over the past decade, scientists and journalists have prominently utilized the metaphor of a tipping point for drastic, irreversible and dangerous climate change. This paper shows how the tipping point metaphor became a multi-purpose bridge between science and the news media, describing how its meaning and use developed and diversified in interacti...
Without doubt, scientific knowledge is of utmost importance for understanding and addressing sustainability challenges. And yet, views differ on the ways in which scientific knowledge and societal decision-making on sustainability can and should relate to each other. In this chapter, we unpack these perspectives, turning to debates surrounding the...
Global environmental assessments are widely considered to play a prominent role in environmental governance. However, they are also criticised for a lack of effectiveness in informing policy and decision-making. In response, GEAs have adopted a number of strategies to bolster their effectiveness, including by orienting themselves towards solutions...
Expert organizations in sustainability governance increasingly adopt participatory strategies to strengthen their knowledge claims. We introduce the notion of knowledge platforms for sustainability to conceptualize expert organizations that not only rhetorically embrace but also actively attempt to institutionalize the norm of stakeholder participa...
Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when ‘co-produced’ by academics and non-academics. Co-production promises to address the complex nature of contemporary sustainability challenges better than more traditional scientific approache...
The modern era is facing unprecedented governance challenges in striving to achieve long-term sustainability goals and to limit human impacts on the Earth system. This volume synthesizes a decade of multidisciplinary research into how diverse actors exercise authority in environmental decision making, and their capacity to deliver effective, legiti...
The modern era is facing unprecedented governance challenges in striving to achieve long-term sustainability goals and to limit human impacts on the Earth system. This volume synthesizes a decade of multidisciplinary research into how diverse actors exercise authority in environmental decision making, and their capacity to deliver effective, legiti...
This chapter unpacks the complex relationship between knowledge and agency in environmental governance by assessing the scholarship produced by members of the Earth System Governance (ESG) project over the past ten years.
Findings include:
-ESG–Agency scholars focus on the question of how knowledge can be a source of authority for a diverse set o...
This poster gives an overview of my PhD project at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University. Title of the project: ”New science for global sustainability? The impact, implementation and implications of new design principles for global change research”
The notion of ‘transformations towards sustainability’ takes an increasingly central position in global sustainability research and policy discourse in recent years. Governance and politics are central to understanding and analysing transformations towards sustainability. However, despite receiving growing attention in recent years, the governance...
The 'Anthropocene' is now being used as a conceptual frame by different communities and in a variety of contexts to understand the evolving human-environment relationship. However, as we argue in this paper, the notion of an Anthropos, or 'humanity', as global, unified 'geological force' threatens to mask the diversity and differences in the actual...
Poster summarizing recent publication on knowledge co-production in Future Earth (van der Hel, S. (2016). New science for global sustainability? The institutionalisation of knowledge co-production in Future Earth. Environmental Science & Policy, 61, 165–175.)
