Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at ...universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: (1) in the allocation of platform resources, (2) in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, (3) in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding.
Projects are often praised for their efficiency, responsiveness to local context, and capacity to spur innovation, especially in comparison to more permanent organizations. Projects – cross-cutting ...organizational forms chartered to advance well-defined objectives during a specified period of time – have been a staple organizational form in the private sector, but only recently have scholars started to evaluate their relevance to governance within developed economies. In this paper, we explore projectification – i.e. expanded reliance on temporally bounded organizations – as a conceptual frame to advance understanding of environmental governance and as an empirical vehicle to incorporate temporal scales into a literature that has largely been focused on questions of spatial scale and levels of social organization. Through a case study of the United States Department of Agriculture’s recently created Regional Conservation Partnership Program, we critically assess the concept of projectification. Based on interviews with key policy analysts and administrators and a review of policy documents, we critically evaluate prospects for project forms to empower local actors, produce new knowledge, and disrupt the policy field.
Addressing the temporal fit of institutions Rosenschöld, Johan Munck af; Honkela, Nina; Hukkinen, Janne I.
Ecology and society,
12/2014, Volume:
19, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The concept of temporal fit between biophysical systems and institutions has lately received great attention by scholars interested in environmental governance. Although we agree that the concept of ...temporal fit is a valuable approach for highlighting the temporal challenges of governance systems, we argue that the concept is currently lacking precision with regard to temporal complexity. We build on Barbara Adam’s work on “timescapes” to offer a more nuanced account of temporal fit and misfit. We illustrate the analytical usefulness of our approach by examining the regulation of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) within European Union’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), a case with amplified temporal challenges. We suggest that, when addressing temporal fit, two points require greater attention. First, similar to time, temporal misfits are complex. In REACH the temporal misfit is linked to four temporal features, time frame, sequence, tempo, and timing, contributing to the insufficiency of EDC regulation. Second, the temporal features are interlinked and feed back into each other, which strengthens the temporal misfit further. In conclusion, we propose that environmental impact assessment could be used as a tool to circumvent the regulatory paralysis of EDC regulation in Europe.
Social-ecological fit has been a popular approach to assessing the connectedness between social and ecological systems in environmental governance. However, the role of projects in social-ecological ...fit has yet to be explicitly problematized and conceptualized. Given the centrality of projects - i.e. temporally limited organizations that bring various actors into collaboration to pursue clearly defined goals and tasks - in environmental governance, this is a serious shortcoming in the literature. In this paper, we fill this gap by drawing on the hitherto unconnected literatures on projectified environmental governance and social-ecological fit. We then assess the extent to which fit can be achieved in projectified environmental governance. To do this, we develop a novel framework for assessing the vertical and horizontal dimensions of social, spatial, and temporal fit and conduct an empirical study of the European Union’s LIFE Program and environmental projects funded by the program in Estonia. Our results suggest that the spatial and temporal fit of projects is contingent on social fit, i.e., the alignment of interests and needs of project-related actors. Frictions between various levels of decision-making also condition the possibilities of achieving fit horizontally across stakeholder groups and ecological systems as well as of sustaining project results over time.
•Socio-ecological fit is a widely debated topic in environmental governance.•A critical analysis of the role of projects in social-ecological fit is currently lacking.•We explore social-ecological fit of Estonian EU LIFE projects.•The interconnectedness between different forms of fit needs to be addressed.•Pursuing socio-ecological fit is a multi-scale and multi-level effort.
The study of short-term projects in policy implementation has lately gained ground among scholars of environmental governance and public administration. The increasing reliance on and prevalence of ...projects, or 'projectification', has spurred critical debates on the ability of projects to contribute to long-term goals, including sustainability, as well as institutional change. Yet, the literature on projectification lacks specificity in terms of how projects are understood, how the relationship between projects and permanent organizations looks like, and how projects can influence institutional orders. The aim of this paper is to systematize the literature in order to uncover the processes of transforming project outputs into institutional change. Three models of projectified governance - mechanistic, organic, and adaptive - is presented, providing a conceptual apparatus that advances the study of projects in environmental policy and governance. The paper argues that the adaptive model, with its reliance on multi-scalar networks for the coordination of project activities and knowledge, shows most promise in achieving institutional change to address complex environmental problems.
Climate scientists and policy analysts alike have repeatedly called for urgent mitigating action to avoid the most adverse effects of climate change. However, within the political arena this action ...is largely lacking. To understand this discrepancy, we consider the institutions in climate change policy to be of central importance. Renewed interest in institutions has been generated to a great extent by ‘new institutionalism’, a field of research combining economics, political science, and sociology, and which has become increasingly popular since the 1980s. The tendency of institutions to resist change and thereby stabilize policy can be understood by using the concept of institutional inertia. Our review of the new institutionalist literature on climate change identifies five main mechanisms that generate institutional inertia: costs, uncertainty, path dependence, power, and legitimacy. Means of addressing these mechanisms are proposed by referring to the literature on institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work. A focus on the mechanisms that generate and regenerate institutional inertia is beneficial for future research on institutions and climate change, as it can be used to study bottlenecks for action and address more clearly the urgency of necessary policy interventions. WIREs Clim Change 2014, 5:639–648. doi: 10.1002/wcc.292
This article is categorized under:
Climate Economics > Iterative Risk‐Management Policy Portfolios
Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance
Abstract
Flood risks worldwide are increasing due to climate change. Managing these risks is ever more necessary. Although flood risk management (FRM) is often understood as a technical challenge, it ...also involves decisions about the distribution of resources and risks in floods, which can be inherently unfair. People are disparately affected by floods due to their location. Because of their various socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, they also differ in their capacity to deal with floods. These differences need to be recognised in FRM to prevent disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities. However, at present, a knowledge gap exists on how to make FRM more inclusive and just, and discussions on recognition justice in the context of FRM are scarce. This article therefore examines recognition of differences in the capacity of people to deal with floods in FRM in England (United Kingdom), Finland, Flanders (Belgium) and France. We analyse if, and how, these differences are recognised in FRM policy and practice and through decision‐making procedures, drawing on examples from the implementation of five FRM strategies in each country (flood risk prevention, flood defence, flood risk mitigation, flood preparation and flood recovery). Furthermore, we aim to highlight opportunity spaces to strengthen recognition justice in future FRM.
The concept of temporal fit between biophysical systems and institutions has lately received great attention by scholars interested in environmental governance. Although we agree that the concept of ...temporal fit is a valuable approach for highlighting the temporal challenges of governance systems, we argue that the concept is currently lacking precision with regard to temporal complexity. We build on Barbara Adam's work on "timescapes" to offer a more nuanced account of temporal fit and misfit. We illustrate the analytical usefulness of our approach by examining the regulation of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) within European Union's Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), a case with amplified temporal challenges. We suggest that, when addressing temporal fit, two points require greater attention. First, similar to time, temporal misfits are complex. In REACH the temporal misfit is linked to four temporal features, time frame, sequence, tempo, and timing, contributing to the insufficiency of EDC regulation. Second, the temporal features are interlinked and feed back into each other, which strengthens the temporal misfit further. In conclusion, we propose that environmental impact assessment could be used as a tool to circumvent the regulatory paralysis of EDC regulation in Europe.
Leader and Local Democracy Andersson, Kjell; Granberg, Leo
Evaluating the European Approach to Rural Development,
2015, 2016
Book Chapter
European Union's LEADER is often regarded as one of the central tools for bottom-up rural development (Ray 2000). As the notions of locality and interlinking of actors from various sectors and areas ...are in the limelight of LEADER (c.f. Saraceno 1999, 443), participation and social inclusion become critical issues. In this empirical chapter we will evaluate the democratic characteristics of LEADER on the local level in Finland
1
and the United Kingdom. We will here treat LEADER as consisting of Local Action Groups (LAGs), individual LEADER projects and the regulatory bodies controlling LEADER. Thus, we use the concept of a 'local LEADER system' to reflect the relationship between these three groups of organisations. By using this concept, we emphasise that in order to gain a wider understanding of the democratic characteristics of LEADER we need to broaden the scope beyond Local Action Groups and also study how they operate together with LEADER projects and regulatory bodies on the local level.
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