Christian Stöhr

Stakeholder participation and sustainable fisheries: an integrative framework for assessing adaptive comanagement processes

Adaptive comanagement (ACM) has been suggested as the way to successfully achieve sustainable environmental governance. Despite excellent research, the field still suffers from underdeveloped frameworks of causality. To address this issue, we suggest a framework that integrates the structural frame of Plummer and Fitzgibbons’ “adaptive comanagement” with the specific process characteristics of Senecah’s “Trinity of Voice.” The resulting conceptual hybrid is used to guide the comparison of two cases of stakeholder participation in fisheries management—the Swedish Co-management Initiative and the Polish Fisheries Roundtable. We examine how different components of preconditions and the process led to the observed outcomes. The analysis shows that despite the different cultural and ecological contexts, the cases developed similar results. Triggered by a crisis, the participating stakeholders were successful in developing trust and better communication and enhanced learning. This can be traced back to a combination of respected leadership, skilled mediation, and a strong focus on deliberative approaches and the creation of respectful dialogue. We also discuss the difficulties of integrating outcomes of the work of such initiatives into the actual decision-making process. Finally, we specify the lessons learned for the cases and the benefits of applying our integrated framework.

The architecture and transformation of governance systems: Power, knowledge, and conflict

This article aims at contributing to governance conceptualization and its application to case study analyses. Two of the challenges which the theoretical and empirical work in the present article address concern a specification of universal dimensions of governance systems and an identification of selected mechanisms of governance formation and transformation – specifying a few key drivers that explain how governance systems are established, maintained or changed through power, knowledge, and contestation/conflict processes. These tools are applied to empirical cases of governance structures as well as cases of governance transformation.

Developing a MOOC at Chalmers: Motivation and first experiences from a teacher’s perspective

An increasing number of universities around the globe produce and conduct Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Chalmers has followed this trend by starting to develop two MOOCs in 2014. While some research has attempted to assess the learners’ motivations to participate in MOOCs (e.g. Kizilcec et al. 2013), little is known about motivations, opportunities and challenges for teachers engaging in MOOC development. In this presentation, we will reflect upon this question drawing on the Chalmers MOOC “Sustainability in Everyday Life”. The MOOC aims to increase the learners’ capacity to appreciate the complexity of sustainability issues and to apply systems thinking and critical reflection on the information flow in public media. The pedagogical approach attempts to emphasize interactivity between learners with a minimum of teacher involvement. After brief introduction to MOOCs in general and at Chalmers in particular, the aim of this presentation is twofold: 1) from the teacher’s perspective, we share first experiences of developing a MOOC aimed at the general informed public, and 2) we identify issues with importance to pedagogical design, developing material and assessment. This is a first step in an action research program, which will be used to evaluate the benefits and challenges of MOOCs for teachers at Chalmers.

From shouting matches to productive dialogue - establishing stakeholder participation in Polish fisheries governance

Environmental governance is increasingly turning away from classic top-down hierarchical governance regimes and experimenting with more collaborative forms of governance, e.g., analytic-deliberative participation of resource users. In this paper, we examine the role of the Polish Baltic Sea Fisheries Roundtable as a multi-stakeholder platform in Polish Baltic Sea fisheries governance. The fisheries sector within a country rapidly transitioning from a centrally planned system to (pseudo) market conditions provides an illustrative case in a very difficult context. Employing an action- and learning-based approach, we participated in the initiation and institutionalisation of a process of levelling the playing field and building trust within the fisheries sector in Poland. Using Adler and Birkhoffs collaborative process model for action planning and implementation, we evaluate the approach and outcomes of this project and discuss the results in relation to the existing literature.

Evaluation of a MOOC on “Sustainability in Everyday Life” - The teachers’ experiences

Universities all over the world have been developing Massive Online Open Courses, MOOCs. In this paper, we discuss our experiences during the production of and running the MOOC “Sustainability in everyday life”, that was developed at Chalmers University of Technology. The MOOC ran over a period of 7 weeks, from early June until late July, 2015 and attracted about 9000 participants. The purpose of this paper is (1) to describe and evaluate the further development and content production, and subsequent running of the course; and (2) to share our experiences of running a MOOC for the first time. An action research approach, that focuses on the experience of the teachers, was combined with information obtained from the course statistics, and from the course evaluations by the participants. This approach was used to identify the challenges that were met during the development of the course material and running the MOOC. The results show that, on the one hand, the major challenges were the planning of the content production process and the formulation of the assignments. On the other hand, although time consuming, the production of the video content was perceived as a nice activity. The course statistics and evaluations by the MOOC participants reflected the teachers’ experiences to some extent, and this information can be used to improve the MOOC. The role of MOOCs in higher education for sustainable development (HESD) is not yet clear. This paper demonstrates that developing a MOOC from scratch is a complex process, and adaptation of on-campus courses may be a feasible alternative, thus making already existing courses more widely available.