Book published on "Transitions towards Sustainable Agriculture"

A new book on Transitions towards Sustainable Agriculture, co-edited by Katrien Termeer, has just been published and presented to the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV). The book brings together insights on a range of transition experiments in food production.

Together with my colleagues at the Public Administration and Policy Group, I wrote an introductory theoretical chapter, comparing transition management theory with an number of other theoretical approaches to change and intervention (including organizational change theories, multi-actor collaboration, network governance, adaptive management, social learning and policy agenda setting theory).
The chapter is entitled "Transition management for sustainability: towards a multiple theory approach". In the conclusion, we argue that a broad base of different (and partially overlapping) theories is needed to address the thorny sustainability challenges, such that multipe insights can be generated and that different approaches can suggest new intervention options where one approach to change runs into trouble.

Here are the details of the book.

Transitions towards sustainable agriculture, food chains and peri-urban areas

Krijn J. Poppe, Katrien Termeer and Maja Slingerland (Eds.)
2009, 392 pages, hardback

Agriculture is changing rapidly. The greatest current challenge to the agricultural sector is for it to become sustainable in all three of the dimensions profit, people and planet. This is certainly the case in highly urbanized countries like the Netherlands, where agriculture is confronted with high land prices, rising consumer concerns for issues like animal welfare and negative environmental effects but also with new demands from the city for recreation, health care and local food products. These are some of the developments in our society that are forcing agriculture to change. The government, farmers, the agri-food industry and the retail sector struggle to meet this challenge and find new forms of governance. In the Netherlands, the government has called for a 'transition towards sustainable agriculture' and it is investing in this programme with its research and education policy. Similar trends have been observed in other countries.

This book presents the expertise that has been accrued from at least five years of Dutch research in this area. The aim is to collate the results of the experiments, to learn from them, to confront them with existing theory and to share them with a larger audience in order to foster learning about transition. Given the leading position of the Netherlands in global agriculture, in a highly urbanized setting, and its leading position in the study of transition theory this should be of significant interest to students and researchers of the transitions in agriculture.

Download table of contents of the book 'Transitions towards sustainable agriculture, food chains and peri-urban areas'. (PDF file)

The book can be ordered on the website of Wageningen Academic Publishers

"The Art of Research" Web Clips

I've been cleaning up both my real and virtual desktop over the summer vacation and one of the results can be seen in the right hand column of this blog. I've rearranged and tagged the research notes I share publicly through Evernote.

These notes refer to upcoming conferences, interesting publications, blogs or websites. The most recent items appear in the blog column, but clicking through gives access to the whole archive of research notes. These are viewable as thumbnails or as a list (icons on the right), can be searched (search box in the top right corner) and filtered using tags (column on the left). When viewing a note, clicking on "Go to source" brings you to the original webpage.

Enjoy!

Barriers to new modes of horizontal governance

Recently, an article on barriers to new modes of horizontal governance, by my colleague Katrien Termeer, was published in Public Management Review.

She discusses barriers public managers encounter when implementing new modes of horizontal governance (like partnerships or network governance). Using a sensemaking perspective, three cases in the field of sustainable agriculture are analysed.

This is a quote from the conclusions:

"We revealed five main groups of barriers caused by: (1) conflicting convictions concerning good policy making; (2) stereotyping potential partners (as ideological, incompetent or old-fashioned); (3) the framing of the situation (as a crisis, a race to reach a deadline or an experiment for a selective group); (4) fear (of undermining existing policy, relapsing into old politics or not reaching governmental targets); and (5) cover-up strategies (not showing doubts, hiding internal struggles or not being willing to face disappointments). Barriers cannot be viewed as isolated obstacles to horizontal modes of governance because they reinforce each other. Possibilities for breaking open these barriers were found in organizing reflections, creating new
contexts and recognizing small wins."

To download the article click here

MOPAN Conference program available

The program for the 16th Annual Conference on Multi-Organisational Partnerships, Alliances and Networks (MOPAN, NUI Maynooth, June 17th - 20th 2009) is available at the the conference website: http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/news/mopan_conference/programme/index.shtml

Together with the network for research and facilitation of multi-actor collaboration 'Cycloop' I'm organizing a Symposium “Competing claims on space – Framing interests in multi-actor collaboration”. The symposium is planned for Friday and consists of three sessions.

Registration for the MOPAN Conference is still possible at http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/news/mopan_conference/mopan_registration.shtml

Assessing Framing of Uncertainties in Water Management Practice

Another result of the fruitful cooperation between Osnabrück, Leuven and Wageningen in the context of the NeWater project has just been published on-line as an article in Water Resources Management. This paper was led by Nicola Isendahl as part of her PhD project at USF Osnabrück.

This is the abstract:

Dealing with uncertainties in water management is an important issue and is one which will only increase in light of global changes, particularly climate change. So far, uncertainties in water management have mostly been assessed from a scientific point of view, and in quantitative terms. In this paper, we focus on the perspectives from water management practice, adopting a qualitative approach. We consider it important to know how uncertainties are framed in water management practice in order to develop practice relevant strategies for dealing with uncertainties. Framing refers to how people make sense of the world. With the aim of identifying what are important parameters for the framing of uncertainties in water management practice, in this paper we analyze uncertainty situations described by decision-makers in water management. The analysis builds on a series of “Uncertainty Dialogues” carried out within the NeWater project with water managers in the Rhine, Elbe and Guadiana basins in 2006. During these dialogues, representatives of these river basins were asked what uncertainties they encountered in their professional work life and how they confronted them. Analysing these dialogues we identified several important parameters of how uncertainties get framed. Our assumption is that making framing of uncertainty explicit for water managers will allow for better dealing with the respective uncertainty situations.

The reference is :

Isendahl, N., Dewulf, A., Brugnach, M., Francois, G., Moellenkamp, S.and Pahl-Wostl, C. (2009) Assessing Framing of Uncertainties in Water Management Practice. Water Resources Management, On-line First.

The paper can be downloaded on this blog or at Springerlink