Person:

Clark, William

We developed a “continual engagement” model to better integrate knowledge from policy makers, communities, and researchers with the goal of promoting more effective action to balance poverty alleviation and wildlife conservation in 4 pastoral ecosystems of East Africa. The model involved the creation of a core boundary-spanning team, including community facilitators, a policy facilitator, and transdisciplinary researchers, responsible for linking with a wide range of actors from local to global scales. Collaborative researcher–facilitator community teams integrated local and scientific knowledge to help communities and policy makers improve herd quality and health, expand biodiversity payment schemes, develop land-use plans, and fully engage together in pastoral and wildlife policy development. This model focused on the creation of hybrid scientific–local knowledge highly relevant to community and policy maker needs. The facilitation team learned to be more effective by focusing on noncontroversial livelihood issues before addressing more difficult wildlife issues, using strategic and periodic engagement with most partners instead of continual engagement, and reducing costs by providing new scientific information only when deemed essential. We conclude by examining the role of facilitation in redressing asymmetries in power in researcher–community–policy maker teams, the role of individual values and character in establishing trust, and how to sustain knowledge-action links when project funding ends.

The goal of the workshop was to build a more strategic and integrated perspective on the threats and opportunities latent in the food / climate issue, and to discuss the hard challenges of moving forward toward common goals in a private, off-the-record setting. An executive session convened by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Venice International University on June 6-9, 2010, attracted more than 25 of the world's leading experts from the fields of policy, science, and business to San Servolo Island for an intensive three- day session (see text for a list of the participants). The discussions were off-the-record, with each participant present in his or her own capacity, rather than representing an organization. The session was one in a series on Grand Challenges of the Sustainability Transition organized by the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University with the generous support of the Italy’s Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea. This particular session was held in cooperation with the new Mega Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security being developed by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Earth System Science Partnership. This summary report of the session is our synthesis of the main points and arguments that emerged from the discussions. It does not represent a consensus document, since no effort was made at the session to arrive at a single consensus view. Rather, we report here on what we heard to be the major themes discussed at the session. Any errors or misrepresentations remain solely our responsibility.

The article discusses the changing quality of global health institutions. It cites the factors that affect the change including variety of civil society, nongovernmental organizations, and private firms, changing relationships of health ministries, and new partnership of organizations. It also mentions that the global-level transformation is the biggest challenge of the global health institutions.

This report presents an overview of research horizons in sustainability science. Its motivation is to help harness science and technology to foster a transition toward sustainability – toward patterns of development that promote human well-being while conserving the life-support systems of the planet. It builds on but does not explicitly address the vast range of relevant sector-specific and cross-sectoral problem-solving work now underway in fields ranging from green technologies in energy and manufacturing to urban design to agriculture and natural resources. It focuses on the narrower but essential task of characterizing the needs for fundamental work on the core concepts, methods, models, and measurements that, if successful, would support work across all of those sectoral applications by advancing fundamental understanding of the science of sustainability. The report sets forth the workshop’s findings and recommendations on six fundamental questions now facing scholars seeking to harness science and technology to foster sustainability: 1. What are the principal tradeoffs between human well-being and the natural environment, and how are those tradeoffs mediated by the ways in which people use nature? 2. What determines the adaptability of coupled human-environment systems and, more broadly, their vulnerability and robustness/resilience in the face of external shocks and internal dynamics? 3. What shapes the long term trends and transitions that set the stage on which humanenvironment interactions are played out? 4. How can theory and models be formulated that better account for the variation in types or trends of human-environment interactions? 5. How can society most effectively guide or manage human-environment systems toward a sustainability transition? 6. How can the “sustainability” of alternative trajectories of human-environment interactions be usefully and rigorously evaluated?

This paper investigates the conditions under which firms are able to develop and implement innovations with sustainable development benefits. In particular, we examine “green chemistry” innovations in the United States. Via interviews with green chemistry leaders from industry, academia, nongovernmental institutions (NGOs), and government, we identified six major categories of challenges commonly confronted by innovators: (1) economic and financial, (2) regulatory, (3) technical, (4) organizational, (5) cultural, and (6) definition and metrics. Further analysis of these barriers shows that in the United States, two elements of these that are particular to the implementation of green chemistry innovations are the absence of clear definitions and metrics for use by researchers and decision makers, as well as the interdisciplinary demands of these innovations on researchers and management. Finally, we conclude with some of the strategies that have been successful thus far in overcoming these barriers, and the types of policies which could have positive impacts moving forward.

I would like to give you an overview of basic ecological modeling and analysis problems by discussing three things. First, I will try to explain the general attitude of systems-oriented ecologists towards their subject matter. This is a different perspective from that of many here, and we will almost certainly fail to understand each other if you imagine us to be, say, economists with an interest in animals. Second, I will review those structural characteristics of ecological systems which have made their analysis particularly difficult. We like to think that it is at least in part these difficulties which have kept us rather behind the rest of you in a number of methods-related areas. Finally, I'll give a brief picture of the kinds of dynamic and stability behavior which we encounter in real and model ecological systems, using as examples cases presently under investigation at IIASA and' available for study at this workshop.