Three Types of Institutional Innovations Show How to Represent Future Generations in Political Decision-Making Today By Michael Rose The choices we make in politics today, whether regarding biodiversity loss, climate change, or social security systems, hold significant repercussions for the well-being of future (i.e., yet unborn) generations. The fact that future generations have no voice today may contribute to the governance failures prevalent in these realms and others. From a democratic perspective, the interests of all affected by political decisions should be considered in their formulat ..read more

By Shahana Bilalova As researchers, we often find ourselves on a quest for knowledge, diving deep into the realms of scientific literature to find answers to our questions. Recently, I conducted a case survey, which is a kind of meta-analysis that synthesizes qualitative case narratives in published literature. During this process, coping with missing data became both a challenging and insightful journey, prompting me to adopt a strategic approach. Focused on understanding the performance of water governance systems in addressing different water-related problems, my objective was clear: to gat ..read more

We (Michael Rose, Jens Newig and Sina Leipold) welcome contributions to a planned Special Issue in the journal Environmental Policy and Governance. Environmental governance research has generated a vast body of knowledge in recent years, reflecting the immense challenges associated with governing the various sustainability issue confronting humanity. However, scholars are increasingly raising concerns about whether the growing number of publications on environmental governance truly contributes to the urgently needed scientific progress (Newig and Rose 2020). Do the numerous individual scholar ..read more

By Jens Newig Governance systems are facing challenges to foster land-use strategies that support climate protection, social well-being and biodiversity conservation. The new EU-funded project “PLUS Change” involves 23 partner organizations across the European Union to provide robust evidence on and improve land-use decision-making for addressing climate change and biodiversity conservation. PLUS Change is co-ordinated by the Czech Globe research institute (see here for their introduction to the project). Using a transdisciplinary research approach, the project consortium is working with 11 pl ..read more

By Johanna Coenen, Gabi Sonderegger, Jens Newig, Patrick Meyfroidt, Edward Challies, Simon L. Bager, Louise M. Busck-Lumholt, Esteve Corbera, Cecilie Friis, Anna Frohn Pedersen, Perrine C.S.J. Laroche, Claudia Parra Paitan, Siyu Qin, Nicolas Roux, Julie G. Zaehringer  In today’s interconnected world, local sustainability issues such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, agri-chemical pollution and food insecurity are increasingly shaped by global commodity flows and the actions of distant actors. The demand for commodities such as soy, palm oil, cocoa, rubber and meat can have adverse ..read more

By Johanna Coenen In this blog post I reflect on some lessons learned of writing a manuscript with 14 co-authors, submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The paper aims to synthesize the results of an interdisciplinary research project, involving 15 individual PhD projects based at 8 different European universities. Here I share my experiences of leading such a collaborative endeavour. This blogpost is targeted at any (potential) lead author, but it can also be insightful to co-authors because it highlights common challenges when working and writing in te ..read more

By Johanna Coenen, Jens Newig, Patrick Meyfroidt, Simon Bager and Edward Challies In the past months, we have tried to solve a case of plagiarism, but without success. The process has brought the sobering revelation that plagiarism is deliberately ignored in a high-ranking journal like the Journal of Cleaner Production, which is published by Elsevier. In August 2021, we noticed that a large text segment of the article entitled “Mapping socio-ecological resilience along the seven economic corridors of the Belt and Road Initiative”, published in the Journal of Cleaner Production (JCLP), has esse ..read more

By Jens Newig and Michael Rose We are proud and happy to announce the launch of ParticipationCaseScout: a new web-based tool to explore and analyse a database of public environmental decision processes, with a focus on participatory and collaborative governance in Western democratic states (project ‘EDGE’). With the goal of integrating and cumulating fragmented case-based knowledge, ‘EDGE’ has produced a database of 305 coded cases of public environmental governance, mainly to test the relationship between different forms of participatory and collaborative decision-making and environmental ou ..read more

By Jens Newig and Michael Rose For an Innovative Session on 9 September 2021 at the upcoming Earth System Governance Conference (Bratislava / vitual, 7-10 September), we are looking for junior and senior scholars who would like to give short inputs of 5-7 minutes on different aspects of knowledge cumulation in earth system governance research. Inputs may cover topics such as epistemic prerequisites and limits of knowledge cumulation; methods of knowledge cumulation; experiences and best practice examples of knowledge cumulation; policy makers’ perspectives on knowledge cumulation as evidence ..read more

By Johanna Coenen and Gabi Sonderegger Communicating our research results to fellow scientists, but also policy makers, practitioners, journalists and the general public, is a core task in science. It is particularly important if we aim to facilitate evidence-based decision-making and aspire to have a real-world impact with our research. Visualizations play a powerful role in science communication. They help to attract attention, summarize data and make information easily accessible (see also this blog post and recent publication about telecoupling visualizations). Animated ..read more