Lara Lundsgaard-Hansen’s research while affiliated with University of Bern and other places

The construction of large infrastructure for rapid and efficient means of transportation or green energy production from large wind or solar farms is often tied to hopes of development and prosperity for local communities. However, often, such developments do not meet these expectations, because local communities are excluded from the decision-making process and lose access to their resource base, their living space and livelihood opportunities. Co-determination is an essential prerequisite for local sustainable development through infrastructure projects. Such a process ensures that due consideration is given to different impacts and consequences, perspectives, power dynamics as well as opportunities for participation. Research is necessary to better understand these important dimensions and how to enable, facilitate and implement effective and equitable co-determination.

Unlabelled: Transdisciplinary research (TDR) has been developed to generate knowledge that effectively fosters the capabilities of various societal actors to realize sustainability transformations. The development of TDR theories, principles, and methods has been largely governed by researchers from the global North and has reflected their contextual conditions. To enable more context-sensitive TDR framing, we sought to identify which contextual characteristics affect the design and implementation of TDR in six case studies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and what this means for TDR as a scientific approach. To this end, we distinguished four TDR process elements and identified several associated context dimensions that appeared to influence them. Our analysis showed that contextual characteristics prevalent in many Southern research sites-such as highly volatile socio-political situations and relatively weak support infrastructure-can make TDR a challenging endeavour. However, we also observed a high degree of variation in the contextual characteristics of our sites in the global South, including regarding group deliberation, research freedom, and dominant perceptions of the appropriate relationship between science, society, and policy. We argue that TDR in these contexts requires pragmatic adaptations as well as more fundamental reflection on underlying epistemological concepts around what it means to conduct "good science", as certain contextual characteristics may influence core epistemological values of TDR. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01201-3.

Oil palm landscapes are often characterised by land conflicts. Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSP) may be a promising means to contribute to conflict resolution. However, the merits of MSPs are limited in contexts with strong power imbalances and entrenched conflict histories. This study analyses an MSP from Myanmar. We developed an analytical framework based on literature on MSPs and social learning and used qualitative methods such as participatory observation and interviews. The study investigates how the MSP was designed and governed and whether it was effective in addressing the land conflicts around oil palm concessions. The study discusses several promising factors of the MSP for being effective, such as adequate inclusion of stakeholders, secured resources, or effective facilitation. However, the analysis also reveals how hindering factors such as lack of a clear mandate, goal, and decision-making competences of the MSP, insufficient communication, or lack of legal and land governance expertise contributed to only limited effectiveness of the MSP. Further, we discuss whether the MSP was a suitable approach in the given context of nontransparent land governance mechanisms, persisting power disparities, and longstanding conflict history. We conclude that designing and governing an MSP in such a context needs to be done very cautiously—if at all—and recommend paying special attention to ten specific points.

We were used to organizing co-creation and learning processes for inter-and trans-disciplinary research in face-to-face settings. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic and changed the way we did things-from social distancing and quarantining to working from home. But this disruption has also offered a unique opportunity to explore new options by challenging stable structures and shifting education and research into a liminal state, where innovations are possible. The present guidelines aim to help you make the most of these new opportunities for co-creation in digital settings.

During a civil war and its aftermath, rival powerholders frequently engage in decision-making over land use, for example, via land acquisitions or legal reforms. This paper explores how powerholders influence land use decision-making and what their engagement implies for territorial control. We analyse three cases of land use changes in Myanmar’s south between 1990 and 2015, where the Myanmar state and an ethnic minority organization fought over territorial control. We gathered qualitative data with a mix of methods and visualised actor networks and institutions. Our analysis reveals that the state managed to increasingly control decision-making over local land use from a distance by employing actor alliances and institutions such as laws and incentives, whereas the ethnic organization lost influence. We conclude that engaging in land use decision-making plays a crucial role in influencing the outcomes of a civil war and that it represents a form of war- and state-making.

Competition over land is at the core of many sustainable development challenges in Myanmar: villagers, companies, governments, ethnic minority groups, civil society organisations and non-governmental organisations from local to the international level claim access to and decision-making power over the use of land. Therefore, this article investigates the actor interactions influencing land-use changes and their impacts on the supply of ecosystem services and human well-being. We utilise a transdisciplinary mixed-methods approach and the analytical lens of the social-ecological systems framework. Results reveal that the links between land-use changes, ecosystem services and human well-being are multifaceted; For example ecosystem services can decline, while human well-being increases. We explain this finding through three different pathways to impact (changes in the resource systems, the governance systems or the broader social, economic and political context). We conclude with implications of these results for future sustainable land governance.

Amid Myanmar’s political transition and despite its new government’s discourse of inclusion and dialogue, land conflicts have increased across the country’s ethnic-minority areas. We argue that land plays a central role in the complex interplay of state formation, armed conflict and international development in Myanmar’s contested borderlands and that land conflicts can provide an entry point to make sense of these dynamics. We use ethnographic data and a framework combining Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages with Foucault’s conception of power to provide a detailed analysis of a multi-stakeholder platform (MSP) addressing land disputes in Myanmar’s south-east. Analysing the platform’s discourses, practices and technologies, we argue that, despite its emphasis on inclusion, participation and dialogue, it is the operation of power that upholds this inherently conflictive assemblage. The platform opens spaces for agency for less-influential actors, but it equally produces de-politicising and exclusive effects. While scholars have typically used assemblage thinking to analyse how state authority is disassembled by the growing role of non-state actors, we aim to further post-structural reflections on state formation and international development by arguing that the central state in Myanmar actually expands its reach into the borderlands through assemblages such as the MSP. This happens at the expense of the authority of quasi-state formations of ethnic armed organisations. Thus, this process is reminiscent of how the Burmese state expanded its reach through assemblages of land and resource extraction during the ‘ceasefire capitalism’ before the transition.

Tropical forest landscapes are undergoing vast transformations. Myanmar was long an exception to this trend – until recent policy reforms put economic development at the forefront. Under ambiguous land rights, commercial agriculture has spread rapidly, causing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity-rich forest. In south-eastern Myanmar, where land tenure is highly contested due to several decades of conflict, scientific evidence on these complex social-ecological processes is lacking. In the absence of past satellite data, we applied a participatory mapping approach and co-produced annual land use information with local land users between 1990 and 2017 for two case study landscapes. Results show that both landscapes have undergone a land use regime shift from small-scale farmers’ shifting cultivation to plantations of rubber, betel nut, cashew, and oil palm. These changes are likely to have long-term impacts on land users’ livelihoods and the environment. We call for a reconsideration of land governance arrangements and concerted land use planning that respects the rights of local land users and strengthens their role as environmental stewards. Applied with careful facilitation, participatory mapping could be an important tool to engage communities in the highly challenging process of transforming land governance to achieve more sustainable outcomes in this post-conflict context.

How far have higher education institutions progressed towards integrating sustainable development at an institutional level and are they responding to the societal need for transformation? Can the pace of transformation be accelerated, given the urgency of the issues our world is facing? As a practice-oriented contribution to this broader debate — still open despite progress achieved during the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014) — this article discusses a mainstreaming strategy applied to teaching at a higher education institution in Switzerland, the University of Bern. We analyse the traps of institutionalizing sustainable development (SD) in a higher education institution and clarify the policies and approach to change management needed to navigate these traps, based on an analysis of our experience as an education for sustainable development team. We propose (1) using a combined top-down and bottom-up policy to increase motivation, (2) prioritizing and sequencing target groups and helping them to find the link between their discipline and SD, and (3) offering tools, support, and professional development to help lecturers to move towards a more competence-oriented form of teaching. Concrete support needs to take place at four levels: the level of formulating competences for SD; the level of shifting towards a learner-centred approach; the level of designing their learning environments; and the level of becoming a community of practice. An impact chain explains the logic from concrete activities (tools, courses, workshops, etc.) to the desired impact of helping lecturers and graduates to become agents of change capable of playing a key role in society and helping to shape our future.

Myanmar has experienced profound transformations of land use and land governance, often at the expense of smallholders. Empirical evidence on the agency of actors included and excluded in land use decision-making remains scarce. This study analyses who influences land use decision-making, how they do this, and under what circumstances smallholders are included. Comparing three land use trajectories in southern Myanmar, we analysed actors’ agency—conceived as the meanings and means behind (re)actions—in land use decision-making using data from focus groups and interviews. Results showed that uneven distribution of means can lead to unequal decision-making power, enabling actors with more means to exclude those with less means: smallholders. However, this only applies in the case of top-down interventions with mutually exclusive actor interests regarding use of the same land. Where interests are compatible or a mediator supports smallholders in negotiations, actors are likely to develop a collaboration despite unequal means, leading to smallholders’ inclusion in decision-making. Transformation of current land governance towards sustainable development could be promoted by providing mediators to actors with few means, ensuring equal access for all to formal land tenure, engaging with brokers in the land governance network, and improving access to knowledge and financial capital for actors with few means.