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Mediating Policy Competition

Over the past decades, governments have switched from a managerial to an entrepreneurial style of governance in the strengthening of certain places at the expense of others. This coevolved with an increase in inter-urban and inter-regional competition for resources, also called ‘policy competition’. The issue for regional governments is how they balance their wish to strengthen their economic structure, without creating conflicts of unfair competition in the designation of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. This paper addresses this balancing act in the Dutch Province of Limburg, where a multinational threatened to leave the region. The case is analysed with the help of actor-network-theory and follows the translations through which an innovative policy tool was constructed that allowed the Province to invest in real estate. Through the innovative ‘campus’ concept, the Province could comfort the vested interests of the multinational, while balancing out the interests of other economic cores in the region.

Kooij, H. J. (2017). Mediating Policy Competition Through Campus Development in Dutch Limburg. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie.

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Performing and orchestrating governance learning for systemic transformation in practice for climate change adaptation

Barriers to climate change adaptation might not lie so much in ‘gaps’ in scientific or technical understandings but rather in the complexities of social, institutional and cultural transitions in climate change governance. Effective responses to complex environmental issues seem to require ‘co-learning for systemic governance transformations’. However, this process remains poorly understood. This article analyses the performance and orchestration of governance learning for systemic transformation in practice, drawing on examples from the international climate change adaptation and water governance (CADWAGO) project. We show that in these examples the interplay of ‘separating’ and ‘connecting’ is central to transforming governance in the European water management landscape. The article concludes that an orientation to boundary work and co-production of knowledge contributes to scientific narratives that can inspire meaningful connective action and move complex socioecological systems into a more sustainable trajectory.

van Bommel, S., Blackmore, C., Foster, N., & de Vries, J. (2016). Performing and orchestrating governance learning for systemic transformation in practice for climate change adaptation. Outlook on Agriculture, 45(4), 231-237.

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Analysing institutional change in environmental governance: exploring the concept of ‘institutional work’

Understanding how institutions change is critical to improving environmental governance at all scales. In this paper we explore the concept of ‘institutional work’ within broader theorising about institutional change and evolving governance. Institutional work focuses on the role of actors in creating, maintaining, or disrupting institutional frameworks (Lawrence et al., 2009. It is a concept that has been proposed in the organisational studies literature, and offers promising opportunities for pushing forward thinking on institutional change, which remains one of the most pertinent but challenging topics for strengthening environmental governance in a complex and rapidly changing world. In this paper, we rethink and redefine institutional work to make it fit for use in the context of multi-actor, multi-level environmental governance. We survey key theories about institutional change in the literature, and argue that institutional work should have a central place within this theorising. Drawing on these insights, we argue that institutional work should involve both the actions taken by actors, as well as the resulting effects. We identify a critical need for attention to the multi-actor nature of institutional work in environmental governance, including its fundamentally political character, the cumulative effects of action taken by multiple actors, and communicative and discursive dimensions. More attention also needs to be given to the temporal dimensions of institutional work such as the recurring and sequential order of actions. Overall, the concept of institutional work opens up new possibilities for tackling the longstanding challenge of institutional change in environmental governance.

The paper is published in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management

Beunen, R. & Patterson, J.J.  (2017) Institutional Change in Environmental Governance: Exploring the Concept of ‘Institutional Work’. Journal of  Environmental Planning and Management. Online first: DOI:10.1080/09640568.2016.1257423

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Practising environmental policy evaluation under co-existing evaluation imaginaries

This article examines what the co-existence of different evaluation imaginaries – understandings of what environmental policy evaluation ‘is’ and ‘should do’ – means for everyday evaluation practice. We present a case study in which we show how these different understandings influence the evaluation process as they are mobilized interchangeably. Though co-existing evaluation imaginaries broaden the repertoire and potential for innovation, practitioners also experience tensions as innovative ambitions conflict with institutionalized practices. We hypothesize that practitioners deal with these inconsistencies by decoupling approaches, intentions and outcomes from each other. In this way, innovation occurs in parts of the evaluation process while other parts follow a more traditional approach. For evaluation theory we argue the need to further explore how decoupling enables practitioners to deal with co-existing imaginaries. For evaluation practice we stress that articulation of societal expectations is indispensable to ensure the legitimacy of policy evaluation.

Kunseler, E. M., & Vasileiadou, E. (2016). Practising environmental policy evaluation under co-existing evaluation imaginaries. Evaluation, 22(4), 451-469.

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A Co-evolutionary Perspective on the Adoption of Sustainable Land Uses

This paper examines constraints and opportunities to enhance adoption of agroforestry for ecosystem and livelihood improvement in post-Soviet economies, using Central Asian countries as examples. Using a coevolutionary socio-ecological systems framework, it describes how development efforts, especially agricultural policies, under centrally planned regimes and under transition to market economies have changed environmental conditions, and how they affect peoples’ welfare. The paper then discuss agroforestry as a sustainable land use practice to address these issues. It present regional-specific and -suitable agroforestry practices, and discusses their potential. It founds that legacies from the previous period of central planning shape current land uses, institutions, infrastructure and decisions of farmers, and constrain development of agroforestry. By identifying opportunities and constraints of agroforestry, it provides recommendations for enhancing the use of agroforestry in Central Asia.

Utkur Djanibekov, Grace B. Villamor, Klara Dzhakypbekova, James Chamberlain and Jianchu Xu (2016) Adoption of Sustainable Land Uses in Post-Soviet Central Asia: The Case for Agroforestry. Sustainability 2016, 8(10), 1030.

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Symposium on learning and innovation in resilient systems

Resilience has become a fashionable buzzword in recent years. The term is frequently found in many different discourses ranging from nature conservation (WWF’s adaptation and resilience program), sports psychology (teaching athletes about resilience), to development work (resilience in rural areas). It appears that everything (cities, companies, software) and everybody (managers, children, teachers) can and should be resilient. With our current knowledge of future challenges like climate change, globalisation and food security resilience can offer a way to develop strategies to cope with uncertainties.

The Dutch Open University organises a 2-days symposium on learning and innovations in resilient systems, on 23rd and 24th March 2017, in Heerlen, the Netherlands. The symposium offers an unique opportunity to discuss these topics, in an interdisciplinary environment. Focusing on (i) information and computer systems, (ii) organizational and management systems, and (iii) environmental systems.

We invite scientists from all disciplines to debate how and to what extent innovations and learning processes in various systems contribute to the transition towards (more) resilient systems, be it individuals, organisations, et cetera. We welcome theoretical papers, methodological papers, and empirical studies or combinations thereof; and invite abstracts that discuss and examine innovations and learning for resilience from various angles.

We are delighted that we can announce the following keynote speakers that will contribute to the symposium:

  • Prof. Dr. Ir. Carl Folke, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
  • Prof. Dr. Ir. Petra de Weerd-Nederhof, University of Twente
  • Prof. Dr. Ir. Yasmin Merali, University of Hull
  • Prof. Dr. Ir. Bart Jacobs, Radboud University Nijmegen

Practicalities and submission deadlines:

Interested participants/authors are encouraged to submit 250 word abstracts by 15th October 2016 as a first step towards full paper development. Please send your abstract to program.resilient2017@ou.nl.

Authors will be notified of acceptance/rejection by 15th December 2016; contributing authors are expected to submit a full first draft of their paper by 1st February 2017.

Finally, more information can be found on our website:

https://www.ou.nl/web/learning-and-innovations-in-resilient-systems

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Managing ups and downs in communities

Boom and Bust: A guide for managing ups and downs in communities is the result of a collective effort at the University of Alberta to better understand the dramatic ups and downs which too often characterize western Canadian communities. It offers community leaders, politicians, administrators, academics, students, and all active citizens helpful techniques to analyze the current state of their own community, understand how it got where it is today, and ultimately, identify possible ways forward. We encourage analysis of historical paths and policy contexts to better understand what strategies might work (or not) in a community.

The authors encourage readers to learn from local histories, a broad range of tested theories, and the experiences of other communities to develop a context-sensitive strategy of asset building, while at the same time taking on an informed understanding of what assets and resources could support long-term development planning for their communities. They demonstrate that assets become such within a context and within a narrative, forming a story about the past, present, and future of the community.

By showing the importance of reinvention and the dangers of rigid identity, the authors call on communities to re-evaluate their assets and their dependencies, and ultimately to reintroduce long-term perspectives within governance.
By acknowledging the difficulty of local control over local development in a global economy, the guide offers strategies to broaden perspectives and inspire local action, as well as to harness the power of informal relations, latent stories, silent assets, and diverse local identities to cultivate more varied and prosperous futures.

Read more about the book at the website of the University of Alberta or read the free online version of the guide via ISSUU.

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Tourism Destination Evolution

This book offers a novel, evolutionary, perspective on the dynamimcs of tourism and tourism destinations. It brings together different authors and experiences from all over the world. It reflects on well-known concepts such as the Tourism Area Life Cycle, and introduces new ones. Doing so it offers new ways of looking at tourism dynamics and interesting new approaches for analyzing and explaining the way in which the tourism sector co-evolves with other societal domains.

Brouder, P., Clavé, S. A., Gill, A., & Ioannides, D. (Eds.). (2016). Tourism Destination Evolution. Routledge.

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Sustainability objects as performative definitions of sustainability

This article introduces the notion of sustainability objects as a label for objects that come with a claim of promoting a more sustainable mode of living. The purpose is to show that organizations that develop such objects construct a performative definition of sustainability. A case study of the development of a facility for the pre-treatment of food-waste-based biogas and biofertilizers serves as an empirical example of the development of sustainability objects. The analysis demonstrates that this development and concomitant defining of sustainability have involved the contextualizing of biogas and biofertilizers, entangling them in nets of relationships and endowing them with an agency of their own. With sustainability objects embodying definitions of sustainability, their success or failure as objects derive from the success or failure of the performative definitions that they embody, and vice versa. Asking why sustainability objects gain or lose ground is therefore suggested as a way of understanding the character and evolution of sustainability transition.

Corvellec, H. (2016). Sustainability objects as performative definitions of sustainability: The case of food-waste-based biogas and biofertilizers. Journal of Material Culture, 1359183516632281.

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