John N. Parker

Learning in Support of Governance: Theories, Methods, and a Framework to Assess How Bridging Organizations Contribute to Adaptive Resource Governance

Humanity faces increasingly intractable environmental problems characterized by high uncertainty, complexity, and swift change. Natural resource governance must therefore involve continuous product ...

Food and Green Space in Cities : A Resilience Lens on Gardens and Urban Environmental Movements

This article examines the role played by urban gardens during historical collapses in urban food supply lines and identifies the social processes required to protect two critical elements of urban food production during times of crisis—open green spaces and the collective memory of how to grow food. Advanced communication and transport technologies allow food sequestration from the farthest reaches of the planet, but have markedly increasing urban dependence on global food systems over the past 50 years. Simultaneously, such advances have eroded collective memory of food production, while suitable spaces for urban gardening have been lost. These factors combine to heighten the potential for food shortages when—as occurred in the 20th century—major economic, political or environmental crises sever supply lines to urban areas. This paper considers how to govern urban areas sustainably in order to ensure food security in times of crisis by: evincing the effectiveness of urban gardening during crises; showing how allotment gardens serve as conduits for transmitting collective social-ecological memories of food production; and, discussing roles and strategies of urban environmental movements for protecting urban green space. Urban gardening and urban social movements can build local ecological and social response capacity against major collapses in urban food supplies. Hence, they should be incorporated as central elements of sustainable urban development. Urban governance for resilience should be historically informed about major food crises and allow for redundant food production solutions as a response to uncertain futures.

Hot Spots and Hot Moments in Scientific Collaborations and Social Movements

Emotions are essential but little understood components of research; they catalyze and sustain creative scientific work and fuel the scientific and intellectual social movements (SIMs) that propel scientific change. Adopting a micro-sociological focus, we examine how emotions shape two intellectual processes central to all scientific work: conceiving creative ideas and managing skepticism. We illustrate these processes through a longitudinal study of the Resilience Alliance, a tightly networked coherent group collaborating at the center of a burgeoning scientific social movement in the environmental sciences. We show how emotions structured and were structured by the group’s growth and development, and how socio-emotive processes facilitated the rapid production of highly creative science and helped overcome skepticism by outsiders. Hot spots and hot moments—that is, brief but intense periods of collaboration undertaken in remote and isolated settings—fueled the group’s scientific performance and drove the SIM. Paradoxically, however, the same socio-emotive processes that ignited and sustained creative scientific research also made skepticism more likely to occur and more difficult to manage. Similarly, emotions and social bonding were essential for the group’s growth and development, but increased size and diversity have the potential to erode the affective culture that generated initial successes.

On Being all Things to all People: Boundary Organizations and the Contemporary Research University

This article examines the challenges and tensions that inhere in university-based boundary organizations. We begin by reconceptualizing the theory of boundary organizations, bringing it into greater alignment with the realities of the current university environment. Using in-depth interviews, documentary analysis and ethnographic field work, this framework is applied to a university-based boundary organization attempting to reconcile the needs of water policymakers, university administrators, university departments, and funding agencies. These stakeholders place diverse, conflicting demands on the boundary organization. Those demands create four sets of enduring tensions requiring ongoing management by the boundary organization. However, the ability to manage these tensions is structured by constituents’ relative levels of power, legitimacy, and saliency. We show the importance of adaptive boundary management for managing these enduring tensions, while also concluding that the demands of some stakeholders may be incommensurable. The article closes with a number of concrete suggestions for enhancing the efficacy of university-based boundary organizations.

Network Determinants of Knowledge Utilization Preliminary Lessons From a Boundary Organization

This study examines the socio-organizational model of science-policy knowledge transfer. Using social network analysis, the authors study how interactions between researchers-policy makers affect utilization of research by policy makers in a boundary organization designed to mediate between research and policy communities. Two types of social interactions with independent effects on utilization are identified. Policy makers with more direct contacts with researchers are more likely to utilize research. Policy makers interacting more with other policy makers regarding research are also more likely to utilize it. This indicates the importance of policy makers’ embeddedness in social networks and the importance of external reputation of boundary organizations for successful knowledge transfer.

Characterizing a scientific elite: the social characteristics of the most highly cited scientists in environmental science and ecology

In science, a relatively small pool of researchers garners a disproportionally large number of citations. Still, very little is known about the social characteristics of highly cited scientists. This is unfortunate as these researchers wield a disproportional impact on their fields, and the study of highly cited scientists can enhance our understanding of the conditions which foster highly cited work, the systematic social inequalities which exist in science, and scientific careers more generally. This study provides information on this understudied subject by examining the social characteristics and opinions of the 0.1% most cited environmental scientists and ecologists. Overall, the social characteristics of these researchers tend to reflect broader patterns of inequality in the global scientific community. However, while the social characteristics of these researchers mirror those of other scientific elites in important ways, they differ in others, revealing findings which are both novel and surprising, perhaps indicating multiple pathways to becoming highly cited.

Characterizing a scientific elite (B): publication and citation patterns of the most highly cited scientists in environmental science and ecology

Science is principally driven by the efforts of a vanishingly small fraction of researchers publishing the majority of scientific research and garnering the majority of citations. Despite this well-established trend, knowledge of exactly how many articles these researchers publish, how highly they are cited, and how they achieved their distinctive accomplishments is meager. This article examines the publication and citation patterns of the world’s most highly cited environmental scientists and ecologists, inquiring into their levels of scientific productivity and visibility, examining relationships between scientific productivity and quality within their research programs, and considering how different publication strategies contribute to these distinctive successes. Generally speaking, highly cited researchers are also highly productive, publishing on average well over 100 articles each. Furthermore, articles published by this group are more highly cited on average than articles published in premier generalist journal like Nature and Science, and their citation to publication ratios are more equitably distributed than is typical. Research specialization and primacy of authorship are important determinants of citation frequency, while geographic differences and collaborative propensity matter less. The article closes with a set of suggestions for those wishing to increase the use of their research by the scientific community.

Nurturing communities of practice for transdisciplinary research

Transdisciplinary research practice has become a core element of global sustainability science. Transdisciplinary research brings with it an expectation that people with different backgrounds and interests will learn together through collective problem solving and innovation. Here we introduce the concept of “transdisciplinary communities of practice, ” and draw on both situated learning theory and transdisciplinary practice to identify three key lessons for people working in, managing, or funding such groups. (1) Opportunities need to be purposefully created for outsiders to observe activities in the core group. (2) Communities of practice cannot be artificially created, but they can be nurtured. (3) Power matters in transdisciplinary communities of practice. These insights challenge thinking about how groups of people come together in pursuit of transdisciplinary outcomes, and call for greater attention to be paid to the social processes of learning that are at the heart of our aspirations for global sustainability science.

Understanding life together: a brief history of collaboration in biology

The history of science shows a shift from single-investigator ‘little science’ to increasingly large, expensive, multinational, interdisciplinary and interdependent ‘big science’. In physics and allied fields this shift has been well documented, but the rise of collaboration in the life sciences and its effect on scientific work and knowledge has received little attention. Research in biology exhibits different historical trajectories and organisation of collaboration in field and laboratory – differences still visible in contemporary collaborations such as the Census of Marine Life and the Human Genome Project. We employ these case studies as strategic exemplars, supplemented with existing research on collaboration in biology, to expose the different motives, organisational forms and social dynamics underpinning contemporary large-scale collaborations in biology and their relations to historical patterns of collaboration in the life sciences. We find the interaction between research subject, research approach as well as research organisation influencing collaboration patterns and the work of scientists.

Urban Gardens: Pockets of Social-Ecological Memory

It is well known that urban allotment gardens provide important ecosystem services. Their potential to act as sources of local resilience during times of crisis is less appreciated, despite the role they have played as areas of food security during times of crisis in history. Their ability to provide such relief, however, requires that the skills and knowledge needed for effective gardening can be transmitted over time and across social groups. In short, some portion of urban society must remember how to grow food. This chapter proposes that collectively managed gardens function as ‘pockets’ of social-ecological memory in urban landscapes by storing the knowledge and experience required to grow food. Allotment gardeners operate as ‘communities of practice’ with ecosystem stewardship reflecting long-term, dynamic interactions between community members and gardening sites. Social-ecological memories about food production and past crises are retained and transmitted through habits, traditions, informal institutions, artifacts and the physical structure of the gardens themselves. Allotment gardens thus serve as incubators of social-ecological knowledge with experiences that can be accessed and transferred to other land uses in times of crisis, contributing to urban resilience. Conversely, failure to protect these pockets of social-ecological memory could result in a collective ‘forgetting’ of important social-ecological knowledge and reduce social-ecological resilience.