Participation as Relational Space: A Critical Approach to Analysing Participation in Sustainability Research

Public engagement for inclusive and sustainable governance of climate interventions

The need for public engagement is increasingly evident as discussions intensify around emerging methods for carbon dioxide removal and controversial proposals around solar geoengineering. Based on 44 focus groups in 22 countries across the Global North and Global South (N = 323 participants), this article traces public preferences for a variety of bottom-up and top-down engagement practices ranging from information recipient to broad decision authority. Here, we show that engagement practices need to be responsive to local political cultures and socio-technical environments, while attending to the global dimensions and interconnectedness of the issues at stake. Establishing public engagement as a cornerstone of inclusive and sustainable governance of climate-intervention technologies requires (i) recognizing the diversity of forms and intensities of engaging, (ii) considering national contexts and modes of engagement, (iii) tailoring to technological idiosyncrasies, (iv) adopting power-sensitive practices, (v) accounting for publics' prior experience, (vi) establishing trust and procedural legitimacy and (vii) engaging with tensions and value disagreements.

Spaces of participation: Exploring the characteristics of conducive environments for citizen participation in a community-based health promotion initiative in a disadvantaged neighborhood

Research has shown that community participation in health programmes is vital to ensure positive health outcomes and sustainable solutions. This is often challenged by difficulties to engage socially disadvantaged population groups. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a community initiative in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Denmark, we explored which factors contributed to a conducive environment for participation. Data material consists of observation notes taken during fieldwork in a community hub from January 2020 until August 2021 and 19 semi-structured interviews with professional stakeholders and participants. We applied the analytical concept of space to elucidate how the organizational, social, and physical environments played important roles in ensuring possibilities for participation. We termed these environments Spaces of Participation. Our results highlight the importance of ensuring spaces that are flexible, informal, and responsive when engaging those who are hard to reach.

Contradictory or complementary? Stakeholders' perceptions of a circular economy for single-use plastics

Single-use plastics (SUPs) represent one of the largest and rapidly growing segments of the plastics industry. The strategies to mitigate plastic hazards has become more difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic; SUPs have gained positive health-related attributes among consumers and remain the preferred packaging material. One of the most promising strategies to tackle the SUPs problem is a worldwide transition towards a circular economy (CE) for plastics. Here, we propose the reconceptualization of a CE for SUPs based on an analysis of the perceptions of stakeholders and the public from social, psychological, and communication-related perspectives. Our study utilized focus groups with primary and secondary stakeholders - differing in their power regarding SUP CE governance - and general consumers to identify their perceptions regarding challenges to and solutions for a CE for SUPs, thereby unveiling the potential for trustworthy knowledge co-creation. Our findings demonstrate that trustworthy knowledge-in-action is the primary driver for achieving sustainability transitions across stakeholders and suggest a significant discrepancy between young consumers and producers. Furthermore, we argue that exploring diversified approaches to knowledge co-creation necessitates various disciplinary entry points, ranging from different perspectives (challenges vs. solutions, individual vs. systemic levels, diversity in agenda-setting) to innovative attempts to understand knowledge production behaviour, especially for policymakers. Perceiving scientists as science communicators who can effectively inform involved stakeholders and general consumers and engage them in SUP crisis mitigation actions, the results of our study (jointly created manifest followed by a series of posters) are subject to further research and proposals for policy decisions.

Negotiating Ethics-in-Action in a Long-term Research Relationship with a Young Child

This article continues the discussions of relational ethics put forward in Human Arenas in “Arena of Ethics” (Hilppö et al., 2019). Our aim in this article is to explore and discuss relational ethics, as ethics-in-action, in a long-term research relationship with a child. Our question is: How is ethics-in-action negotiated during critical incidents in the construction of a research space that involves a long-term research relationship with a young child? This article is based on a research project that focused on children’s transitions in early childhood education and care (ECEC). These transitions include the transition from home care to ECEC as well as transitions from child groups or settings to other ECEC groups or settings, and the transition to pre-primary education. We apply a particular lens to the corpus of data, analyzing and reflecting critical incidents vis-à-vis a negotiation of ethics-in-action during the construction of our research space, which involved a long-term research relationship with a child. Our results show that critical incidents in our study’s negotiation of ethics-in-action included (a) the focus child’s spontaneous contributions to the study’s interviews, (b) interdependencies between the child and diverse researchers, and (c) the child’s evolving expertise in data collection, which restructured our study’s research space. We conclude that ethical questions cannot be separated from the mutually constituted relationships or socio-spatial context in where they emerge; thus, they are relationally and spatially embedded.

Knowledge Network for Sustainable Local Development

This article aims to build a network for the exchange of knowledge between the government and production, community and university sectors for sustainable local development. To achieve this, the authors relied on the concepts of sustainable local development, social capital, the relationship between sectors or intersectorality, networks and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge. Regarding the methodology, the abductive method was used. Under a documentary design, the research techniques were a content analysis of theoretical documents and the deductive inference technique. The construction of a knowledge exchange network for sustainable local development stands out as the result. It is concluded that knowledge networks for sustainable local development have positive implications in the establishment of alliances and links between the sectors that make up society.

The Role of Intermediaries in Supporting Collaboration for Sustainability: A Model of Commissioning Intervention in the Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration for Sustainable Territorial Development

The intervention of intermediaries in supporting collaboration for sustainability is considered an effective way to address the challenges faced by all parties involved in this type of commitment. Our paper includes several less frequently approached perspectives in this field of research and refers to the intervention of commissioning in supporting collaborative relationships with multiple stakeholders for sustainable territorial development. This paper proposes a model of structural and systemic development of commissioning at the national level, by specific geographical regions and development domains, and analyzes how commissioning structures intermediate the connection between multiple stakeholders, public authorities, and other relevant actors from different sectors of society, which mobilize resources to solve sustainability issues. The results show that the intervention of commissioning adds value to sustainability collaboration by providing stakeholders with an accessible and updated database specialized in development domains, where demands and offers for development resources can be managed safely, and the identification of the appropriate offer is carried out operatively through fast and secure computer systems able to create efficient and prompt connections. We believe that the model presented in the paper can be extended internationally to support global collaboration for sustainability, and we suggest further research in this direction.

Participation and Goal Achievement of Multiparty Collaborative Systems Dealing with Complex Problems: A Natural Experiment

Multiparty collaborative systems often deal with wicked sustainability challenges. Previous research has emphasized the important role of stakeholder representation and participation in comprehensive sustainability decisions. We report the results of an empirical test of the effect of stakeholder participation on systemic goal achievement and on multiparty dynamics in a natural experiment, using the results obtained through two simulations in which 44 professionals participated. In one of the simulations a ‘party exclusion dynamic’ evolved. As the two simulations had a similar baseline, the same number of participants distributed in a similar manner among seven stakeholder parties in each simulation, we could test the effect of stakeholder participation on goal achievement and systemic dynamics, using the other simulation as a comparison. Our results show that stakeholder exclusion prevents systemic goal achievement, disrupts collaboration and induces systemic powerlessness.

Testing Analytical Frameworks in Transdisciplinary Research for Sustainable Development

This article discusses the concept and the practice of transdisciplinary research, including how it is conceived and implemented through the cooperation of different actors involved. With transdisciplinarity gaining recognition as an approach to addressing sustainable development challenges, the successful integration of various disciplines and actors in the process of knowledge generation becomes essential. Through the Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV), the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has promoted transdisciplinary research by proposing a space where North–South partnerships integrating academic and non-academic actors enable the expansion of appropriate technologies and innovations adapted to local societal contexts. This study examines five collaborative research projects conducted at the EPFL. By using an analytical framework consisting of design principles for ideal transdisciplinary research, we conducted semi-structured interviews with academic and non-academic members of the research projects to assess the degree of transdisciplinarity. This framework proved to be a useful tool for exploring transdisciplinary dynamics and assessing the effectiveness of joint knowledge generation. We found that the transdisciplinary cooperation involving different actors is not a linear process, as it depends on the social context in which the project is carried out and on the internal and the external organizational structure established for its implementation. We provide recommendations on how transdisciplinarity could be expanded through institutional support and its results could be effectively transferred into science and practice and discuss the implications for further studies in the conclusions.