•Transformative approaches will be needed to address adaptation to global change.•Transformative approaches require new ways to make decisions about adaptation.•The TARA approach (Transformative ...Adaptation Research Alliance) does this.
Transformative adaptation will be increasingly important to effectively address the impacts of climate change and other global drivers on social-ecological systems. Enabling transformative adaptation requires new ways to evaluate and adaptively manage trade-offs between maintaining desirable aspects of current social-ecological systems and adapting to major biophysical changes to those systems. We outline such an approach, based on three elements developed by the Transformative Adaptation Research Alliance (TARA): (1) the benefits of adaptation services; that sub-set of ecosystem services that help people adapt to environmental change; (2) The values-rules-knowledge perspective (vrk) for identifying those aspects of societal decision-making contexts that enable or constrain adaptation and (3) the adaptation pathways approach for implementing adaptation, that builds on and integrates adaptation services and the vrk perspective. Together, these elements provide a future-oriented approach to evaluation and use of ecosystem services, a dynamic, grounded understanding of governance and decision-making and a logical, sequential approach that connects decisions over time. The TARA approach represents a means for achieving changes in institutions and governance needed to support transformative adaptation.
Smart cities refer to place-specific collaborative systems where multiple actors collaborate to collectively address public problems. However, smart city initiatives regularly frame citizens as the ...weakest link, as passive consumers rather than active creative agents. This article argues that power imbalances between citizens and other organisational participants structurally mute citizens' voices, ultimately compromising smart cities' aims. Living laboratories are a popular smart city intervention that have the potential to address this power imbalance and empower citizens to influence smart city development. This research theoretically and empirically explores this role of living labs through a multiple-case study of urban living labs in the region of Catalonia. The findings uncover a ‘power banking’ mechanism which, coupled with other critical factors, facilitates the effectiveness of such initiatives. The considerable efforts required to engage citizens at a fairly basic level suggest that incorporating citizens into smart city models is more challenging than simplistic Quadruple Helix discourses convey.
Drawing upon an in-depth analysis of two bio-tech annual conferences in Israel, we explicate the exertion of power in convening. Event organization involves three narrative mechanisms: (1) telling ...stories which construct the field, and enacting them through different genres that channel participants to perform these stories in the unfolding of the event; (2) setting the stage and a space of possibilities for certain stories to be told in certain ways, and limiting others; and (3) grounding the stories in meta-narratives that confer plausibility on some of them over others. Our contribution lies in explicating how diverse narrative mechanisms allow organizers to exert various faces of power in organizing an event, how organizers use power to construct their own and others’ resources, and how power is used not only through words, but also through space and embodiment. Taken together, self-serving constructions of the field are turned into a taken-for-granted reality, while constraining participants’ ability to negotiate or refute it.
Discourse in a Material World Hardy, Cynthia; Thomas, Robyn
Journal of management studies,
July 2015, Volume:
52, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We challenge recent assertions that discourse studies cannot de facto address materiality. We demonstrate how a Foucauldian theorization of discourse provides a way to analyse the co‐constitutive ...nature of discursive and material processes, as well as explore the power relations implicated in these relationships. To illustrate our argument, we identify exemplary studies that have effectively combined a study of discourse and different aspects of materiality – bodies, objects, spaces, and practices. In doing so, we show how discourse scholars are able to study both materiality and power relations.
This study focuses on how important it is to apply politeness in speaking with someone from the perspective of English Education students. To do this research, researchers used qualitative methods. ...One of the techniques that researchers use in this study is the non-interactive technique that is the questionnaire. This questionnaire was chosen to explore deeper information about the opinions of English Education Students at State Islamic University of North Sumatera Medan starting from the 2nd – 8th Semester (participants or respondents) on the importance of expressing politeness. Researchers chose the questionnaire technique in order to shorten the time and got more participants rather than had to conduct interviews. This study reports the choice of being polite for people is influenced by differences in power relations, such as notion of status, age, gender, and social distance. This study emphasizes that politeness is needed to be implemented since rudeness creates conflict between one to another person.
This paper presents about the religious politics carried out by the Bobby-Aulia couple in winning the Medan City Election. Data was collected by interviewing the informants consisting of the ...Bobby-Aulia pair's success/winning team. From the interviews conducted, it was found that the political religious communication strategy carried out by the Bobby-Aulia couple in winning the Pilkada was by building and strengthening power relations in religious organizations by packaging political messages promising not to be nepotism in the election of officials, and to collaborate between religious communities and make a plural society as a force in the development of the city of Medan. Using campaign jargon with religious language, namely 'Medan Berkah' to show emotional closeness to Islamic groups as the majority voters. In addition, political communication through the pulpit of da'wah by consolidating the clerics who are indirectly involved in the winning machine.
Co-production of knowledge is a promising approach to promote more just and sustainable development outcomes. However, co-production covers many approaches, with a cleavage between those focusing on ...outcomes and the production of actionable knowledge; and those focusing on process and inclusion of multiple voices. There is not always dedicated commitment to identify and confront the embodied power relations nor the hegemonic knowledge systems among the participants in the process. Yet, the politics of configuring knowledge cannot be ignored. I argue that learning from the experiences and pitfalls of participatory development is essential if co-production is to meet its transformative potential.
In this report, I review the concept of community-based adaptation, showing how it morphed from a participatory development-informed approach centred around agency and empowerment to one which is ...often externally driven, focusing on a spatial, rather than social, definition of community. I then highlight how locally-led adaptation is attempting to re-focus attention on agency, whilst also managing a conceptualisation of ‘local’ that is not limited to the community-level. Since the concept of locally-led adaptation is emerging, it is critical to learn from participatory development and the critiques of community-based adaptation to ensure that it is not also diluted from its intentions.
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