Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Last call for papers for the MOPAN 2012 conference!


MOPAN 2012 Conference
Last call for papers
(submission deadline extended until February 3)
19th Annual Conference on Multi-Organisational Partnerships,
Alliances and Networks
“Multi-actor collaboration in an uncertain and ambiguous world”
July 2-4, 2012, Wageningen, the Netherlands

Confirmed keynote speakers
Prof. Barbara Gray, Pennsylvania State University
Prof. Rob van Tulder, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Dr. Steve Waddell, NetworkingAction/Bocconi University

Call for papers

The MOPAN conference series focusses on partnerships, alliances and networks between any combination of business actors, civil society actors and governmental actors. We invite papers and other contributions (symposia, workshops, games, videos, …) related to the conference theme or one of the thematic tracks outlined below. Please outline your contribution in an abstract of maximum 500 words and send it to mopan2012@wur.nl, indicating whether you submit it to the general conference or to one of the thematic tracks.


Track 1. Dealing with frame diversity in collaborative water governance 

Track 2. Towards Version 2.0 of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives: Rethinking business-NGO- government relationships in governing sustainable production of global commodities 
Track 3. Power in multi-stakeholder processes for development 
Track 4. Facilitating resilience in multi-actor collaboration 
Track 5. Innovation networks: self-organization and adaptive management 
Track 6. Stakeholder involvement in the United Nations 
Track 7. Network dynamics 
Track 8. Complexity leadership and sustainable development 
Track 9. Multi-actor pilot projects and policy experiments 
Track 10. Global Action Networks
Track 11. Still Joining up? Health partnerships, collaborations, networks and integrations

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Web-based environmental simulation: bridging the gap between scientific modelling and decision-making

This "just accepted" article results from an interdisciplinary project led by Wouter Buytaert. The project was funded by the NERC Environmental Services for Poverty Alleviation scheme and explores the potential of Virtual Observatories for local resource management. One of the key question is how to make environmental information and simulations useful for resource management and local decision making in Ecuador (Yasuni park) and Peru (Huaraz and Iquitos). The two other co-authors are from the local project partner CONDESAN.

Web-based environmental simulation: bridging the gap between scientific modelling and decision-making

Web technologies offer the potential to re-configure how environmental models are developed and used, breaking models out of their scientific environment and make them available for ubiquitous processing and analysis of environmental information. This will not be straightforward. Several technical and scientific challenges have to be overcome to ensure that models provide the right data for decision-making, and that model outputs are interpreted correctly and used in an appropriate context.

The article can be found at the journals website (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es2031278, open access after free registration) or below.