Manuel Gottschick

Reflexive Capacity in Local Networks for Sustainable Development: Integrating Conflict and Understanding into a Multi-Level Perspective Transition Framework

ABSTRACT One core element of reflexive governance is the reflexive capacity-building of actors involved in governance networks. A wider range of actors have to be empowered to understand and improve governance arrangements in order to create second-order reflexivity. As a contribution to this challenge, a heuristic framework is developed from two complementary approaches to reflexive governance: the multi-level perspective (MLP) and the conflict-orientated understanding (COU) approach. The new framework is applied to two case studies – water management and long-term climate adaptation – where it has helped to develop a participatory process to analyse and reflect on local networks and multi-stakeholder arenas. The two contrasting processes are analysed and their contribution to reflexive capacity building is assessed. Building on the findings, further advancements of MLP, COU, and the concept of reflexive governance are recommended.

How stakeholders handle uncertainty in a local climate adaptation governance network

Uncertainty is a debated issue in climate research, in research on the governance of climate adaptation, and in research on the social limits to adaptation. As a contribution to this debate, a constructivist discourse research approach is chosen to analyse and interpret how stakeholders handle uncertainty related to climate change knowledge. Four diverse conceptualisations of how uncertainty is handled serve as the discourse analysis framework: rational discourse, no-regret discourse, blissful discourse, and formative discourse. This framework is applied to analyse and interpret interviews of diverse stakeholder groups from a local governance adaptation network. In this network, conflicts between irrigation farmers, water authorities and nature conservation are negotiated. For most interviewees, uncertainty about climate change knowledge is not judged as problematic. This paper elaborates on why this is so and provides tentative assessments for each discourse type.

One Metaphor—Several Meanings: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainable Development

This paper presents reflections on how sustainable development (SD) is defined as a research topic and on differences in references to SD in research. The paper argues that the reference of SD as a research topic must expand to include a broader range of research subjects. During two years of methodical discussions and workshops conducted through the interdisciplinary postdoctoral research group Sustainable Future at the Universitat Hamburg (Germany), the authors have observed that SD has played a major role in natural sciences (i.e. environmental and earth system sciences) and engineering, and a far lesser role in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). This imbalance in the discourse on SD in research impedes a full understanding of the diverse tasks and challenges that must be addressed in SD. An integrated approach is suggested to unite perspectives from natural sciences, engineering and SSH. The authors therefore encourage a more explicit notion of the concept of SD in SSH research, which builds upon and goes beyond current approaches to SD in SSH. The paper presents some illustrative examples which investigate the implications of expanding or restricting the disciplinary boundaries of sustainability research. The examples advocate an inclusive approach for which the authors describe and clarify several methods for expanding research towards cross-disciplinary methods. To this end, the authors present some practical recommendations for the integration of sustainability into the design and implementation of research academic practice. The paper closes up with an argument that all disciplines should expand their definition of sustainability in order to hasten research outcomes from all the diverse sectors of sustainability research.Part 1 - Curriculum Innovation.- Preparing teachers for sustainable development in higher education.- A Minor Programme on Sustainability for the Engineering Curriculum at the University of Chile.- Food for Thought: A University-wide Approach to Stimulate Curricular and Extracurricular ESD Activity.- Part 2 - Best Practice.- Embedding environmental sustainable development within social enterprise at the University of Northampton.- Improvements for a sustainable distance education with the new UNED on-site system for virtualization of exams: Malaga region (Andalucia, Spain) as case study.- Overview of the sustainability in Brazilian Information and Communications Technology market.

Sustainable Internationalization? Measuring the Diversity of Internationalization at Higher Education Institutions

Sustainability and internationalization are considered to be core values of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), but their relationship is rarely investigated. The current study develops a framework to create a sustainable internationalization policy for an HEI; it analyzes how to measure the sustainability of an internationalization policy in two steps. First, this study presents a theoretical framework for a cost-benefit analysis of HEIs’ sustainable internationalization policies using three sustainability pillars (economic, ecological, and social), each with examples for their own measurable indicators. Second, this research operationalizes the economic pillar of the framework to enable a specific measurement of the economic sustainability of internationalization. The empirical analysis identifies the distribution of funding for internationalization as a promising indicator. To demonstrate the implementation of this part of the framework, this study analyzes how German HEIs distribute their monetary investments in internationalization activities to countries worldwide. Using data from the German academic exchange service (DAAD), this research investigates the distribution using descriptive statistics. In a second step, the methodology of the Lorenz curve is empirically applied to the distribution of funding. Universitat Hamburg is used as a case study to visualize the different funding tendencies among German HEIs. The findings suggest that the distribution of resources for internationalization says more about the sustainable character of an HEI than the absolute amount of invested resources. To evaluate the sustainability of an HEI’s internationalization strategy, it is therefore necessary to look at the distribution of target countries in addition to the mere absolute level of funding.

Partizipative Modellierung – Wie lehrt man einen Paradigmenwechsel?

Dem Artikel liegt die These zu Grunde, dass bei der Lehre von Technikfolgenabschatzung (TA) in technischen Studiengangen es notwendig ist, bei den Studierenden einen Paradigmenwechsel herbeizufuhren. Vereinfacht ausgedruckt geht es darum, das fachlich begrundete, eher mechanistische Weltbild der Studierenden um ein komplexes Weltbild (mode 2 science) zu erganzen. Angewendete Technikfolgenabschatzung muss unserer Erfahrung nach regelmasig mit Pluralitat, Ambivalenz, Ambiguitat, Konflikten und Machtverhaltnissen umgehen konnen. Wird diese Notwendigkeit von den Studierenden verstanden und werden ihnen zu diesen Herausforderungen auch angemessene Methoden und Instrumente an die Hand gegeben, dann ist damit ein wichtiger Grundstein fur ein verantwortungsvolles Berufsleben gelegt. Wir fuhren aus, wie die Methodologie der partizipativen Modellierung geeignet ist, dieses Lernziel zu befordern.