To reduce the rate of global warming the EU has implemented the European Union EmissionTrading Scheme (EU ETS) as the world’s largest Cap and Trade system in an ambitiousattempt to reduce greenhouse gases with high cost-effectiveness. However, Cap and Tradetheory stipulates that transaction costs should be low for a Cap and Trade system to workeffectively. There is a possibility that small actors producing district heating and electricitypay too large a part of their costs in transaction cost, thereby making the EU ETS fail in itseffort to reduce emissions in the most cost effective way. To research this, interviews withrepresentatives from ten small producers of district heating and electricity in Sweden whereconducted. This study details their time and cost necessary to administrate the EU ETS. Theresults showed that transaction costs where high at around 50%. The cause for the hightransaction costs are the administrative requirements necessary to fulfill the legal obligationsin the EU ETS, a system that requires a little less than a week to administrate. Despite thehigh transaction costs the EU ETS does not lower the energy producers CO2 emissions, sincebio-fuel is already the preferred fuel. It is recommended is that the Swedish government usesthe possibility stipulated in the EU legislation to opt-out small emitters from the EU ETS.

Genuine advancement towards sustainable development requires broad-based popular supportfor prioritising the environment in our pursuit of social and economic progress. Since citieshave become the dominant human habitat of the century, it is especially critical that urbanpopulations adopt such sentiments. Yet, rapid urbanisation is severing perceived andexperienced links between people and nature, engendering an ‘extinction-of-experience’ asmodern life-styles are adopted and we cease to depend on local resources.Interdisciplinary perspectives on social learning suggest that communities that practicallyengage with nature constitute key forums for the creation and storage of knowledge andexperiences.This study goes further by investigating social learning and practice in locally managed greenareas which are also open to the public, in order to explore their capacity to nurtureexperienced based learning among wider sets of urban citizens. Extensive participatoryobservation and in-depth interviews have been conducted in a number of community gardensin Berlin over a period of 6 months.Findings show that community gardens support institutionally diverse sets of locally anchoredcommunities-of-practice where experienced based learning about nature is generated andstored.. Interestingly, local practice also nurtured experienced based learning about social,political and economic dimensions of life in the city.It is suggested that such open and experimental form of green area management hold promisefor tackling extinction-of-experience among the distinctively heterogeneous urbanpopulations of today. It also contends that community gardens foster progress towardssustainability on the local level through intertwining ecological and social concerns inlearning and practice on the ground.

No description available.

Climate change and a changing flood pattern create urgent issues for low-lying land suchas the Vietnamese Mekong delta. Harmful levels of flooding, drought and extreme weatherconditions are increasingly striking rural communities in the delta. Millions of peopleliving in the area are very poor and the vulnerability is high to a change in the floodingpattern. Political incentives, programs and policies have been introduced in order to adaptto the changes but the complex issues are hard to tackle.This study tries to understand the impact that flooding pattern has in the Mekong delta areaand what the communities do to adopt do their new situation, both on a top downperspective and local coping strategies within the communities. The SRL (SustainableRural Livelihood) approach has been used to analyze the conditions. It gives a holisticperspective on societies and highlights that there are several dimensions to a problem. Anumber of interviews with women and men working on different levels within the field ofclimate adaption, climate change, rural development, environment and migration werecompleted.The findings show that the Vietnamese Government has tried to solve the situation throughlaws and policies but this method has shown not to be enough. The communities haveorganized ways of dealing with their own problems but issues are severe and the regionalco-operations need to be dealt with seriously. When conditions worsen, what is being donetoday is not enough to save The Mekong delta or its people.

This study uses sense of place and adaptive co-management theories to present acomparative analysis of co-management arrangements at Macassar Dunes Nature Reserve, CapeTown, and to broadly investigate the role of ‘place’ in ‘co-management’. Methods involved in-depthinterviews with members of the main co-management body, the Macassar Dunes Co-managementAuthority, to determine their perceptions of ‘bridges’ and ‘barriers’ to co-management, and ‘placemeanings’. Open-coding of these perceptions was based on analytical frameworks taken from the‘faces’ of co-management (Berkes, 2009), and from sense of place theory, including place-making andpolitics of place. This comparative analyses show adaptive co-management relates more to comanagementof processes and sense of place theory inherently relates to co-management of- and inplace.I conclude adaptive co-management theory problematically incorporates ‘place’ into comanagementunderstandings, and thus greater incorporation of place meanings in theory andpractice could inform increased understanding of conflict in co-management arrangements, such asthose presented at Macassar Dunes.

Approaches to address climate change as part of a larger strategy where climate benefitsare only a part of a larger set of other benefits, like sustainable development benefits, arelimited to mitigation. The need for “[a] structured but flexible approach to adaptation”sought by developing countries requires a similar consideration in order to realize whatelements of adaptation could be ‘structured’ and what elements ‘flexible.’ Applyingprogram theory, this work explores ways in which adaptation to climate change mayemerge as a consequence of development policies. This is applied to the experience ofagriculture in Mozambique to model policy implementation in response to the 2007 foodcrisis using concepts from programme and strategy theory to examine how a chain ofactivities obtain results not initially targeted, exemplifying how adaptation to climatechange can emerge as a co-benefit of development polices. The case study indicates thatadaptation and development interact better when policies are designed to integratedifferent needs and are sustained not just by those directly implementing them, and thatgenerating adaptation co-benefits will be different according to the scales and level inwhich policies apply. The study concludes with suggestions for multilevel mechanismfor integrating adaptation through policy instruments containing policies that throughstrategic rearrangement can achieve different results. Future research should furtherconsider the implications of applying current international adaptation instruments towider portfolios to assess the possibilities of creating a mechanism for mainstreamingadaptation within the current political constrains.

The global urbanization process occurs at an ever-increasing rate, appropriating ecosystemservices (ESS) from areas often several hundred times larger than the actualurban areas themselves. Such notions further press the needs of attaining sustainableurban development. According to recent research, an important element of such a developmentis to incorporate knowledge on ESS and ecosystem function into urbanspatial planning. This study investigates 1) how different sustainability aspects areaddressed by Stockholm’s urban planning organizations and 2) organizational barriersand opportunities towards better including urban ESS in the planning. The focal pointwas set to three environmentally profiled districts in Stockholm – empirical data wascollected through interviews with individuals within urban planning organizations andenvironmental urban planning documents. These data were analyzed through organizationallearning theory and an ESS analysis framework. It showed that in the twobiggest projects, the economic sustainability aspect is perceived as the slow driver; inthe third project, this was not as apparent. Further, there were two time aspects involvedin the learning process – a long-term process of evaluating and revising, and ajuncture-associated timing-aspect. Many interviewees experienced lack of commonsustainability strategies, which is partly related to the ambivalence and complexity ofthe sustainability concept. Even if interviewees understand greater sustainability implications,there is a need to translate it into pragmatic solutions. Thus, there is knowledgeaccumulation on ESS but it is currently held in the individuals, risking deteriorationif/when key individuals leave the organizations. Single-loop and double-looplearning is simultaneously occurring with symbiotic functions, however a doublelearning-loop on the full significance of urban ESS is yet to be completed. In terms oftriple-loop learning, there is currently a paradox in the requirements for it to occurthat the contemporary governance framework of Stockholm does not seem able to resolve.

No description available.

This thesis studies symbolic power within Uruguay’s agricultural regime shiftbetween 2000 and 2010. This socio-ecological system (SES) has been changing froman agricultural-livestock farming system to one dominated by intensive cropagriculture. The aim is to understand the role of a natural resource managementprogram (NRMP) within the processes that are leading to a different state. The mainresearch method is a discursive analysis of actors’ position-taking regarding thechange in agriculture.The main results indicate that: 1) an interacting regime shift took place in Uruguaywhere a new type of agricultural producer was the main driver that generated multipledomain and scale effects; 2) soil erosion as technological and neutral problememerges as a consequence of the struggle between actors’ interpretations of theagricultural changes; 3) a reorganization cycle takes place in natural resourcemanagement program (NRMP); 4) NRMP promotes a further reorganization ofresources: development of new scientific research problems and 5) a regime shift isobservable in natural resource management: ecological knowledge is based on powerrelations rather than on historical experience.The study concludes that symbolic relations of power during a regime shift are ofgreat importance to understand how a society institutionalizes a management programand develops ecological knowledge. In turn, NRMP plays a fundamental role duringthat system reorganization phase, as it sustains certain exploitation of the naturalresources through the promotion of new ecological knowledge. The recommendation for RS theory is to situate natural resource management and ecological knowledge asparts of the dynamics of a social-ecological system.

The Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) is a forage fish species that is increasing inimportance for Southern Ocean fisheries and world aquaculture production. However, thisspecies also has a fundamental role in the Scotia Sea food-web and is the main conservationtarget for the region’s natural resource management organization - the Commission for theConservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). The aim of this thesis istherefore to examine the inter-relationship between CCAMLR, krill fishery and the Scotia Seaecosystem in the Southern Ocean, as well as broader socio-economical and ecological settingssince 1970s and measure system resilience. The premise here is that the current krill-regime inthe Scotia Sea must be understood as a complex adaptive system (CAS) of social, ecologicaland economical attributes that operates over different temporal and spatial scales. Thus, byapplying the framework of a social-ecological system (SES), together with the adaptive cycleheuristic model, both quantitative and qualitative data is revised and integrated. Two alternatemanagement states are identified within the krill-regime; an early krill fishery state (1972 –1991), and an ecosystem based governance state (1991 - 2010). Resilience is however fadingin the Scotia Sea due to a combination of cross-scale attributes, in a range from low krilldensity (n/m¯²), increased competition for marine resources between predators and krillfishery, to elevated demand and global market prices of non-food commodities by theaquaculture sector in Asia, thus, moving the Scotia Sea towards an unknown fish-regime.Although such future regime is still retained by the region’s slow changing physical variablessuch as sea ice and seasonality, as well as the adaptive management capacity of CCAMLR,the sudden appearance of an undesirable regime in the Scotia Sea would probably havecomprehensive socio-ecological consequences if reached.