Final Activity Report Summary - ALIVE (Accountability and legitimacy of governance institutions that support viable environments)
The ALIVE research conducted an empirical investigation of collaborations taking place at the boundary zone between environmental science and environmental politics. The broad aim of the work has been to help develop a better picture of the relationships between various scientific and non-scientific perspectives that contribute to local, regional, national and EU level environmental governance in Europe. The empirical data for the ALIVE research was eight cases: seven cases are interdisciplinary, participatory, environmental policy oriented research projects based at the UFZ (these projects were concerned with land use change and rehabilitation in the lignite mining and carbon chemical manufacture regions of Saxony and Saxon-Anhalt in Germany, and with the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive in eastern Germany) and one case study was a reflexive ethnography study of the UFZ social science research department, where the ALIVE research itself was based. This eighth case study was not originally part of the ALIVE research plan but eventually became integral to the project's methodology.
Data collection methods for the ALIVE research included semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, non-participant and participant observation, reflexive ethnography and political science discourse analysis. A data encoding system that combines an epistemic taxonomy (based on the developmental psychology theory of Multiple Intelligences) with conventional political science institutional theory was designed to identify the multi-level governance positioning and epistemological perspectives of the actors, institutions and decisions found in the ALIVE case studies.
Initial results indicate that the institutionally tagged, epistemological profiles developed in the ALIVE research can be used to trace synergies and conflicts between the interventions made by actors coming from different sides of the science / policy interface. The results suggest that there may indeed be epistemological pressures at play in the projects studied, which may disadvantage some actors by pushing them to use ways of knowing that are not familiar or comfortable for them and which may advantage other actors whose epistemological strengths and comfort zones are more compatible with the ways of knowing used in project work and discussions. Further analysis of the ALIVE data is now being conducted and separate publications reporting on both the epistemological profile and the reflexive ethnography results of the research are in preparation.
Longer term work supported by these data and results is expected to include interpretation of their implications for (1) the development of transdisciplinary sustainability science methodology and (2) for the improvement of institutional structures of European multi-level environmental governance, including reflections on how they might inform improvements to the much contested Draft EU Constitutional Treaty.
Data collection methods for the ALIVE research included semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, non-participant and participant observation, reflexive ethnography and political science discourse analysis. A data encoding system that combines an epistemic taxonomy (based on the developmental psychology theory of Multiple Intelligences) with conventional political science institutional theory was designed to identify the multi-level governance positioning and epistemological perspectives of the actors, institutions and decisions found in the ALIVE case studies.
Initial results indicate that the institutionally tagged, epistemological profiles developed in the ALIVE research can be used to trace synergies and conflicts between the interventions made by actors coming from different sides of the science / policy interface. The results suggest that there may indeed be epistemological pressures at play in the projects studied, which may disadvantage some actors by pushing them to use ways of knowing that are not familiar or comfortable for them and which may advantage other actors whose epistemological strengths and comfort zones are more compatible with the ways of knowing used in project work and discussions. Further analysis of the ALIVE data is now being conducted and separate publications reporting on both the epistemological profile and the reflexive ethnography results of the research are in preparation.
Longer term work supported by these data and results is expected to include interpretation of their implications for (1) the development of transdisciplinary sustainability science methodology and (2) for the improvement of institutional structures of European multi-level environmental governance, including reflections on how they might inform improvements to the much contested Draft EU Constitutional Treaty.