ALBERT

Description: ‘Transgovernance: Advancing Sustainability Governance’ analyses what implications recent and ongoing changes in the relations between politics, science and media – together characterized as the emergence of a knowledge democracy – may have for governance for sustainable development, on global and other levels of societal decision making, and vice versa: How can the discussion on sustainable development contribute to a knowledge democracy? How can concepts such as second modernity, reflexivity, configuration theory, (meta)governance theory and cultural theory contribute to a ‘transgovernance’ approach which goes beyond mainstream sustainability governance? This volume presents contributions from various angles: international relations, governance and metagovernance theory, (environmental) economics and innovation science. It offers challenging insights regarding institutions and transformation processes, and into the paradigms behind contemporary sustainability governance. This book gives the sustainability governance debate a new context. It transforms classical questions into new options for societal decision making and identifies starting points and strategies aimed at effective governance of transitions to sustainability.

Description: The concept of boundary work has been put forward as an analytical approach towards the study of interactions between science and policy. While the concept has been useful as a case-study approach, there are several weaknesses and constraints when using the concept in a more systemic analysis of the interactions between knowledge production and sustainable development decision-making at the international level, such as its inability to capture the diversity of institutions involved in such boundary work. Another inability involves a lack of conceptualisation of the impacts of the specific conditions of intergovernmental decision-making, such as rules for representation and the mode of negotiation. This chapter suggests complementing the concept of boundary work with a configuration approach based on a two-dimensional conceptualisation of the boundary space in international decision-making that allows the positioning of institutions with regard to their degree of politicisation and their position in terms of national and regional representation. Such an approach could be a useful guide in the further conceptualisation and application of the boundary concept.

Description: The recognition of soils and their functions by the public and, in particular, the planning community isgenerally poor. However, conversion of soils to urban uses is occurring at an unprecedented rate dueto an increasing share of the population living in urban areas and changing lifestyles. Urban planners,developers and planning agencies allocate urban lands to varying uses but land use decisions aregenerally not based on soil information as urban growth is managed predominantly for economicdevelopment. However, urban areas must also deal with challenges such as demographic change,urban densification, climate change and infrastructure provision. Thus, managing urban sustainabilityhas to include ecological aside economic, cultural, and political dimensions. Urban developmentneeds to be managed to minimize negative impacts and maximize environmental quality. Policydecisions towards maximizing short-term economic benefits must be balanced by decisions towardssustainable use and management of urban soils as urban land use has long-term consequences. Therecognition of soils by the planning community can particularly be improved by highlighting the valueof urban soil functions for the well-being of urban dwellers. This approach was recommended at thedialogue session ’Urbanization: Challenges to Soil Management‘ during the first Global Soil Week2012 in Berlin, Germany. Further suggestions how to raise the awareness about urban soils and howto deal with challenges regarding their management will be presented.

Description: Sustainable development is all over the place. The concept is broad and vague. The vagueness of the concept has a Janus face. It has been called a unifying concept because its vagueness breeds a consensus that might be utilised later on. Vagueness is an asset if it triggers action. On the other hand, if sustainable development is everything, maybe it is nothing… Although – or maybe because – the concept is vague, it has overwhelming appeal on political agendas, programmes and dialogues. The precautionary principle is the nucleus of a powerful moral imperative. The multidimensional nature of the concept, covering ecological, economic and social aspects of change relates to our needs for integration. Sustainable development as a concept bears a persuasive character. Actors of all kinds may contribute to it, citizens, enterprises, NGOs, governments et cetera. Thinking about the governance of sustainable development leads us to the recognition of a multi-level, multi-scale, multi-disciplinary character of the problematique. Moreover, the term development refers to change, to transitions and transformations. Governance of sustainable development therefore has to cope with complex dynamics. This chapter deals with the specific consequences of sustainability governance inside knowledge democracies. The concept of knowledge democracy sheds new light on the emerging relationships between politics, media and science. It shows how the emergence of participatory democracy besides representative democracy, the revolutionary rise of social media besides corporate media, the emergence of transdisciplinary trajectories besides classical disciplinary science lead to explosions of complex interactions. We will digress upon the variety of possible future variants of knowledge democracies, quiet and turbulent ones, in relation to the quest for sustainable development. Our main conclusion will be that strategies for sustainability may vary with the types of knowledge democracies around.

Description: STORY HIGHLIGHTSA little bit more than a year ago, delegates of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD or Rio+20) agreed that they would “strive to achieve a land-degradation-neutral world in the context of sustainable development.”

Description: Solar radiation management(SRM), a subset of approaches to climate engineering, aims to manipulate the global climate on a large scale. It includes techniques like spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere or brightening marine clouds to reflect more sunlight back into space. In an attempt to examine the socio-political context of SRM, research frequently starts from model projections of physi cal changes in the environment. But assessing socio-political matters is complex, and while model projections may help, experiences from research on CO2-induced climate change reveal many blind spots and some unique challenges.