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Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

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Title: 

Enhancing resilience and equity: Insights from the Southern African Resilience Academy

Abstract:

This webinar presents the outcomes of the “Southern African Resilience Academy” (SARA), an innovative working group initiative coordinated by the Centre for Sustainability Transitions at Stellenbosch University. SARA brought together research and practice experts from the region over a period of two years to engage in a knowledge co-production process under the theme of “building resilience and equity in southern Africa”. From protected areas to cities and disaster risk to metacoupling, working groups engaged with a diverse set of contexts and topics to develop practice- and policy-relevant insights for sustainable development in the region and beyond. This webinar presents an overview of SARA, the outcomes of the working groups, as well as reflections on the SARA initiative and lessons learned for similar processes of translating knowledge into action.

Bio: 

Dr Maike Hamann is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Geography & Environmental Science (CGES). Maike uses a social-ecological systems lens to understand how nature contributes to and enhances human well-being, especially in the context of Global South cities. She has a particular interest in the impact of socio-economic inequalities on people-nature relationships, and in applying creative futuring methods to explore transformations towards more just and sustainable trajectories. Before joining CGES, Maike was based at the Centre for Sustainability Transitions at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, where she coordinated the Southern African Resilience Academy for the Global Resilience Partnership. Maike completed a PhD in Sustainability Science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher with the Natural Capital Project at the University of Minnesota in the United States. 

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.

Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Title: 

Blue justice: a review of emerging scholarship and resistance movements

Abstract:

Coastal communities, Indigenous peoples, and small-scale fishers are intimately connected with the ocean. Yet, these historically and structurally marginalized groups often bear a disproportionate distribution of coastal and marine harms and are often excluded from marine decision-making. In response, calls for blue justice are emerging. Here, we review key perspectives, new developments, and gaps in the emerging blue justice scholarship. We also synthesize existing case studies of blue injustices and review some of the many successful examples of grassroots resistance efforts to help define what blue justice entails. We aim to help center the knowledge, strength, and agency of coastal communities responding to blue injustices. Ultimately, concerted efforts are needed by all to support and empower coastal communities to reject blue injustices and to achieve their diverse aspirations for blue justice.

Bio: 

Jessica Blythe is an Associate Professor at Brock University. Jessica’s research focuses on how communities experience environmental change and what explains their differential capacities for adaptation and transformation. She is particularly interested in building the resilience of local communities to climate change, securing sustainable small-scale fisheries, and equitable collaborative forms of marine resource governance.  Her empirical work has been based in Eastern Africa, Melanesia, Australia, and most recently in southern Ontario.

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.

Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Title: 

Learning, participation, and power in the case of the Arizona Housing Supply Study Committee

Abstract:

Many governance challenges facing our cities and states are complex, with no clear best solution. Legislative bodies, nevertheless, must assess the issues and solutions to inform public policy. The collective learning framework, developed by Heikkila and Gerlak, examines how groups acquire, translate, and disseminate knowledge within the policy process. We build on the framework by investigating how the learning process is shaped by participation and power. We investigate whether the number of stakeholders and how they participate corresponds with their focal topics appearing in the process output, a report. We analyze participation in collective learning using the case of housing supply legislation in Arizona. Specifically, we examine the transcripts of the 2022 Arizona Housing Supply Study Committee, a legislative committee that met with multi-level, multi-sector stakeholders for six months in 2022 to describe the housing supply challenges in Arizona and identify potential solutions. The process included developers, public officials, landlords, realtors, funders, and non-profits at city, county, state, and national jurisdictional levels. Our results indicate that while participation may be one factor influencing the outcomes of a collective learning process, there are likely other factors. Contrary to what we expected to find, our findings suggest that the committee members did not use their positional influence to include their focal topics. Our results and methods are an initial step toward explaining how power and participation shape learning in the policy process.

Bio: 

Eve is an experienced researcher, facilitator, network coordinator, and program manager passionate about the governance of complex systems undergoing change. Her research examines how power shapes learning in complex governance systems. She has developed qualitative and quantitative methodologies to analyze power as a functional aspect of governance systems. Her research explores urban and rural cases, including lake and watershed management in the north-central U.S. and housing supply and allocation in Arizona, U.S. She has recently earned her PhD in Sustainability from Arizona State University and is looking for a postdoctoral research position to build on this research by developing a theory of power as a functional dynamic in governance transformations of multi-scale, multi-sector systems towards equity and sustainability.

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.

Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Title: Empathy: using cognition to enhance collaboration for sustainability

Abstract: Effective collaboration and cooperation across difference are at the heart of present and future sustainability challenges and solutions.  Collaboration among social groups (intragenerational), across time (intergenerational), and across species (interspecies) is each central to achieving sustainability transitions in the 21st century.  In practice, there are three types of differences that limit collaboration and cooperation toward sustainability outcomes: differences among social groups, differences across time, and differences across species.  Each of these differences have corresponding cognitive biases that challenge collaboration.  Social cognitive biases challenge collaboration among social groups; temporal cognitive biases challenge collaboration across time; and anthropocentric cognitive biases challenge collaboration across species.  In this work, I present three correctives to collaboration challenges spanning the social, temporal, and species cognitive biases through intervention-specific methods that build beyond traditional framings of empathy, toward social, futures, and ecological empathy.  By re-theorizing empathy across these domains, I seek to construct a multidimensional theory of empathy for sustainability, and suggest methods to build it, to bridge differences among people, time horizons, and species for sustainability practice.  

Bio: Lauren Lambert, Ph.D. is a research fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute where she is presently working to build out her theoretical and practical empathy model for sustainability. She has over 15 years of experience in global risk assessment, sustainability, responsible innovation, organizational development and governance. As a futurist and social scientist, she specializes in designing appropriate learning environments that foster meaningful sustainability transformations in organizations, governments and on small teams. Her work over the last decade includes working with the World Resources Institute, International Tropical Timber Organization, National Institutes of Health, National Academies of Sciences, Arizona State University, School for the Future of Innovation & Society, and the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Cognition and Learning, alongside multiple local and regionally based community sustainability and policy research initiatives across the globe.  

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.

Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Title 

Title: Can Collaboration Save the Colorado River?

Abstract: Collaborative governance has become a ubiquitous approach to water management given its core goal of convening diverse policy actors to collectively manage common problems than span sectors and jurisdictions. However, as watersheds face dynamic socio-environmental stressors, collaborative processes cannot remain static — they must evolve over time in order to meet their goals under changing conditions. Understanding how collaborative processes and their policy outputs evolve is therefore critical for assessing the effectiveness of collaboration as a water governance strategy. In this seminar, I will utilize the Colorado River Basin, located in arid western North America, as a case study to examine the evolution of collaborative governance. Despite a history of deep conflict, the Colorado River Basin has been praised for growing increasingly collaborative over the last quarter century; however, multiple decades of drought and trends toward permanent aridification continuously threaten its water sustainability, forcing ongoing governance evolution. Moreover, the Basin is currently in a critical moment for redefining how actors can collaborate to better manage its water resources in the coming decades, making such an assessment of past governance particularly timely. Drawing on findings from several studies using multiple data collection and analysis methods, I suggest how collaboration has influenced the Basin’s ability to solve collective water sustainability problems, where it has fallen short, and how it can be better leveraged to address system-level challenges going forward. This analysis provides initial insight into how and why collaborative governance processes evolve and with what effects on socio-environmental outcomes at several scales. 

Bio: Elizabeth A. Koebele, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Koebele holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as B.A.s in English and Education from Arizona State University. She researches and teaches about water policy and management in the western United States, with a particular focus on understanding the systemic impacts of collaborative decision-making processes on Colorado River Basin governance. Dr. Koebele’s work has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, among others, and she has published her findings widely in both public policy and interdisciplinary environmental science journals. She also co-edits the scholarly journal Policy & Politics.

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.

Hi All,

Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Title 

The Political Ecology of Jurisdiction

Bio

Libby Lunstrum is a Professor of Environmental Studies and the Research Director of Boise State University’s School of Public Service. A Geographer and Political Ecologist by training, her work examines the human dimensions of biodiversity conservation including the illegal wildlife trade, green militarization, the impact of conservation on local and Indigenous communities, and Indigenous-led conservation. She has conducted extensive work across the Mozambique-South Africa borderlands. Her current research supports Blackfoot-led buffalo restoration across the US-Canada border in Blackfoot Territory and post-war ecological restoration in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park.

Elizabeth Havice is Bowman and Gordan Gray Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She uses the lens of governance to explore distributional outcomes in marine spaces, food systems, and global value chains. She is a cofounder of the Digital Oceans Governance Lab that explores intersections of data technologies and oceans governance and has recently co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography. In addition to academic research and teaching, she works in advisory roles for Pacific Island country governments and other not-for-profit groups interested in marine resources, value chain analysis, and economy–environment intersections more broadly.

Abstract

Recent scholarship has forged exciting connections across legal geography and political ecology, examining for instance how ecological processes are key to understanding how law and place co-constitute one another. In this presentation, we focus on an understudied aspect of these relations – the concept of jurisdiction – to build a political ecology of jurisdiction. We understand jurisdiction as the power to make decisions over defined spaces and more broadly the space of legal power. We draw from this and our work on rhino protection in Southern Africa, Tribal and state buffalo conservation in North America, and tuna and turtle management in the oceans to advance this new line of study. We ground this by examining: 

·       how ecological processes and more-than-human actors disrupt, complicate and embody jurisdiction, especially as they refuse jurisdictional confinement

·       how mobile more-than-human actors (and efforts to protect and surveille them) embody legal protections/exclusions that change from one jurisdiction to the next 

·       how the fragmentation of authority and decision-making capacity into discrete jurisdictional units interacts with and disrupts ecological processes, and related implications for ecological restoration and Indigenous-led involvement

·       how more-than-human actors and ecological processes are strategically deployed to challenge spatial-political fragmentation including across international borders

We build from here to suggest that geographic scholarship should elevate jurisdiction in its spatial analyses. We also invite audience participation to think through what a political ecology of jurisdiction might entail and what is at stake in its formation.

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.

Hi All,

Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Title 

The Role of Collaboration in Rural Revitalisation

Bio

Theresa Lorenzo Bajaj is a Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Civil Society and Governance in the University of Hong Kong, where she was also a Postdoctoral Fellow. She holds a Master of Science in Natural Resource Sciences (specialization in Hydrological Sciences) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and received a Ph.D in Biology, with a concentration in Biology and Society, from Arizona State University.

Theresa’s broad research interests lie in collaborative governance and resource management to ensure sustainable development, particularly in developing countries. At present, her research focuses on governance of different commons across the rural-urban spectrum in both Hong Kong and neighbouring jurisdictions, and how collaboration across the same spectrum strengthens rural and peri-urban sustainability and revitalisation.

Abstract

Rural revitalisation aims to address historical inequalities between urban and rural areas through the transformation and innovation of rural systems, including agriculture, economic structure, and governance. Strengthening connections across the urban-rural spectrum is a significant boost for rural revitalisation, which can then benefit stakeholders across the spectrum. I will focus first on lessons learned from the Centre for Civil Society and Governance’s experience in facilitating collaborative rural revitalisation in Hong Kong. From 2013-2023, the Centre spearheaded a programme on rural revitalisation and sustainability centered around Lai Chi Wo village in northeast Hong Kong. The programme was built on a collaborative model, partnering with NGOs, government agencies, private business, other academic departments, and working closely with local villagers. Its main aim was to develop a sustainable model for rural revitalisation for Hong Kong and beyond. I will also share our current work on analyzing the role of collaborations in rural revitalisation in four Asia-Pacific jurisdictions (Hong Kong, Mainland China, Thailand, and Taiwan) through case study collection.

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.

Hi All,

Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Title 

A Miracle? Conservation-Compatible Livelihoods on Mt. Kilimanjaro

Abstract

We examine the relationship between use and preservation of natural resources by using both remote sensing and field surveys on the ground. In sharp contrast to the traditional view that the trade-off between use and preservation is inevitable, remote sensing analysis finds that vegetation in the “buffer forest” zone surrounding Kilimanjaro National Park has been sustained, despite the fact that the indigenous communities have historically been using it as their scarce source of resources. Field surveys observe that many indigenous communities perceive no trade-off between use and preservation, indicating a significant perception gap with the traditional view. Also, the surveys reveal a substantial level of diversity amongst the indigenous communities in terms of culture, economy, and geography, suggesting that analyses should reflect such diversities to understand the mechanism that enables the possible absence of a trade-off between use and preservation. 

Bio

Mieko is a Ph.D. student at The University of Tokyo and a Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellow for Young Scientists. In her work on Mt. Kilimanjaro (2009 to date), Mieko challenges visualising the indigenous population’s (Chagga) relationship to nature and working together with multiple actors concerning Kilimanjaro National Park. Her GIS project focusing on Chagga’s tree plantings helped a local NGO obtain the best environmental award in Tanzania (in 2012). She assisted in achieving the first multi-stakeholder dialogues amongst UNESCO, the government, and indigenous groups on Mt. Kilimanjaro (2015-2017). She was involved in UNESCO’s research project, “Documentation of Chagga intangible cultural heritage”(2016-2017). She has a BA from Keio University and MSc from The University of East Anglia. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mieko-inoue-miyazawa-b7262aab/

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.

Hi All,

Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Title 

Critical institutionalism and institutional bricolage

Abstract

This presentation talks about the development of critical institutional thinking and the concept of institutional bricolage during my research. Critical institutionalism (CI) is a contemporary body of thought that explores how institutions dynamically mediate relationships between people, natural resources and society. Critical institutional approaches have potentially much to offer natural resource governance studies, particularly through the explanatory power of the concept of bricolage for better understanding institutional change. Together with Frances Cleaver, I have been working with and working on critical institutional thinking in research in Papua New Guinea, the Bolivian and Ecuadorian Amazon and the Netherlands. This presentation defines key themes of critical institutionalism, outline the concept of institutional bricolage and identity some key challenges facing this school of thought.

Bio

I am a lecturer at Van Hall Larenstein in Leeuwarden. I teach policy issues related to marine management. My work focusses on local governance processes related to issues of natural resources, sustainability and climate change. I look at how policies impact people, their daily practices and their place. How policies “travel” from their institute to the daily reality and how they are transformed in the process. In others, I am interested in these dynamic processes where policy can lead to unexpected outcomes and governance is fluid. I have studied these issues related to forest management in the Amazon of Bolivia and Ecuador, nature governance in Europe, ecotourism in Papua New Guinea and at global policy platforms such as the climate change conventions. See my research projects for an overview of that work. Recently, I am looking at coastal communities and how they manage themselves in relation to climate change and marine policies. I hold a PhD. on forest governance in the Amazon (Wageningen University, 2010). I have a MSc. in policy and organization (Utrecht University, 2006) and a BSc and MSc in rural development sociology (Wageningen University, 2001). In my free time, I love to be outdoors: walking, running and sailing.

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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.