Final Activity Report Summary - ALIVE (Accountability and legitimacy of governance institutions that support viable environments)
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.