Research meeting of the Department Science, Technology and Policy Studies, University of Twente with guest speaker Dr. Christian Schleyer.
Dr. Schleyer will give a 30 minute presentation followed by questions and discussion.
You are welcome!
abstract
Despite various comprehensive policy frameworks setting out to improve the status of water quality, such as the EU Water Framework Directive or the EU Nitrates Directive, diffuse pollution of groundwater and rivers due to nitrate and pesticide leaching remains a major agriculture-induced environmental problem in Europe and worldwide. In this talk, I conceptualize agrarian cultural landscapes as social-ecological-technical systems and show how taking an institutional economics and governance perspective as well as an ecosystem services perspective can help better understanding complex, dynamic, and sometimes even ‘wicked’ problems like diffuse pollution, and thus can foster developing policies mitigating them.
An institutional economics approach highlights the role and importance of formal and informal institutions (e.g., property rights on land) as well as (nature-related) transactions and transaction costs for explaining, for example, the emergence, change, and performance of policy instruments and other forms of governance affecting land-use decisions. The ecosystem services approach adds to the institutional economics perspective by conceptualising more clearly the links between human well-being and the state of ecosystems as well as by accounting for trade-offs between various services provided by agrarian systems. It further serves as a boundary concept between different scientific disciplines and between science and society.
Finally, I argue that both concepts and their combination underline the importance of – and actually call for – inter- and transdisciplinary research designs for investigating comprehensively the dynamics in complex social-ecological-technical agrarian systems as well as for designing cost-effective and stakeholder-accepted agricultural, environmental, and rural policies. Using the example of diffuse pollution, I address challenges and opportunities of initiating and guiding policy-making processes that systematically involve stakeholders by means of inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches, designs, and methods.
Christian Schleyer, Department of Geography, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Photo by Daniel X. O'Neil on Flickr.com (some rights reserved)
