General Summary
InnoForESt seeks to spark a transformation of the European forest sector by stimulating innovations for the sustainable supply and financing of forest ecosystem services.
European forests provide a broad range of ecosystem goods and services vital to society, however their sustainable provision remain challenging. InnoForESt is a European project funded by the Horizon 2020-Innovation Action to further explore the delivery of forest ecosystem services and foster the development of innovative policy, management, and business solutions. The project brings together a consortium of five European universities, seven environmental and forestry agencies, seven NGOs and a variety of SMEs, forest owners and networks.
InnoForESt will support the governance of viable innovations and a multi-actor network by building on pioneer policy tools and business models, by establishing new alliances, and by involving key stakeholders from forest and forest-related policy, administration and business.
The project is based on six representative case studies. They focus on successful policy and business initiatives as pioneer innovations and represent a range of biogeographical regions of European forests. This cases are used to develop similar innovations, building on and simultaneously upscaling existing innovations. This will lead to the more coordinated, efficient and sustainable governance and financing of forest ecosystem services in Europe.
STePS contribution
Content
STePS contributes knowledge and expertise on innovation studies, governance, policy analysis and Constructive Technology Assessment. The latter is reconceptualized as Constructive Innovation Assessment to fit a broader application to governance innovations related to forest ecosystem services. Peter Stegmaier and Ewert Aukes actively support and pro-actively stimulate project partners associated with the six case studies to flex their socio-technical muscle. Advising and giving feedback on innovation work as well as joining and participating actively in Constructive Innovation Assessment workshops, Peter and Ewert play a role in developing future scenarios of governance innovations and discussing these. The results of these workshops not only contribute to furthering the innovations on the ground, but also help the development of Constructive Innovation Assessment thinking and transversal analysis of innovations.
Deliverable and task contribution
STePS staff is involved in five of the six work packages to different degrees and with different tasks:
WP1 “Project management and Coordination” (2PMs): Peter Stegmaier has a seat in the Project Steering Committee that meets frequently to discuss overarching matters of coordination and alignment between work packages, as well as general conceptual issues.
WP2 “Mapping and assessing forest ecosystem services and institutional frameworks” (3PMs): Both Peter and Ewert contributed conceptual reflection for the mapping exercises which serve as the quantitative data basis for the project. Ewert has also contributed empirical data about forest legislation in the Netherlands.
WP3 “Smart ecosystem services governance innovations” (4PMs): In this work package, STePS collaborates with project partners from the Slovakian Centre for Transdisciplinary Studies (CETIP) on the development of innovation prototypes based on an analysis of which factors are crucial in innovation development related to forest ecosystem services. In addition, Peter and Ewert contribute conceptual reflection on the theory development carried out within this work package, which integrates different strands of literature into a Socio-Ecological-Technical Forest Innovation System framework.
WP4 “Innovation platforms for policy and business (5PMs): This work package contains one of the deliverables that STePS is primarily responsible for. We develop and compile a set of reports about the various Constructive Innovation Assessment workshops as they have been carried out by partners in the innovation regions. In this context Peter and Ewert also travel to the workshops to serve as support and consultation.
WP5 “Innovation process integration” (12PMs): Two more STePS deliverables belong to this work package. First, Peter and Ewert construct an ecosystem services governance navigator which serves as a guide and manual for other innovations to use and implement the InnoForESt approach. It also includes a preliminary transversal socio-technical analysis of the case studies. Second, a synthesis report on the Constructive Innovation Assessment workshops will be written that translates the lessons from the governance innovations into valuable knowledge for the Constructive Innovation Assessment literature.
For more information please visit the InnoForEst website.
See also: https://cta-toolbox.nl/tools/Constructive-innovation-assessment/
Who’s working on this project?
