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Sustainable resource governance under pressure: How to govern trade-off situations under global change

Project description

Combatting climate change via sustainable trade-offs on resource governance

As climate change continues to take its toll as a ‘crisis multiplier’ worldwide, it is becoming more and more important for policymakers to act. There is a need for policies that protect the environment and mitigate damage while also striking a balance with other issues. This is even more important in the case of trade-offs where policymakers need to make decisions on competing resources with limited knowledge. The EU-funded GOVTROFF project aims to investigate and find methodologies that can assist policymakers with such trade-offs. They will develop a coherent methodology for deep diagnosis and assess the capabilities of governance arrangements during trade-off situations while also comparing multiple cases.

Objective

Despite near-global consensus on Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, unresolved and politically contentious trade-offs between sustainability, economic growth, and climate adaptation and mitigation have undermined implementation. The situation is particularly vexing for policy makers , who often have incomplete knowledge about specific threats, but still bear responsibility for managing trade-offs between competing resource uses and avoiding dangerous thresholds and irreversible impacts. Despite burgeoning research on sustainability and resource governance, scholars have not yet systematically investigated how trade-offs are managed in practice. GOVTROFF will fill this gap through three objectives: (1) Development of a coherent method, which enables ‘deep diagnosis’ of collective decision-making in complex governance systems facing trade-offs. (2) To assess the method’s feasibility and validity and to get new insights about governance arrangements for effective response to trade-off situations, the method will be applied to UNESCO World Heritage Sites. (3) To enable multi-case comparative studies, meta-analyses, and cumulative knowledge, GOVTROFF establishes an empirically operable analytical scheme. The scheme is complemented by an open research infrastructure. The long-term goal of this research is to provide policy makers with effective design principles for how complex trade-off situations in resource management can be governed sustainably to meet emergent 21st century environmental and social threats. The results will contribute to one of the European Union’s main objective to ensure ‘Stable and sustainable development’ and to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals as well as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The fellowship will provide the adoption of specific new skills and building the transferable strengths that will impact the employability and career prospects of the fellow significantly.

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET BERN
Net EU contribution
€ 278 840,64
Address
HOCHSCHULSTRASSE 6
3012 Bern
Switzerland

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Region
Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera Espace Mittelland Bern / Berne
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 278 840,64

Partners (1)