Socio-technical transitions and policy change - Advocacy coalitions in Swiss energy policy

Policies and politics are an integral part of socio-technical transitions but have not received much attention in the transitions literature so far. Drawing on the advocacy coalition framework, our paper addresses this gap with a study on actors and coalitions in Swiss energy policy. Our results show that advocacy coalitions in Switzerland have largely remained stable despite the Fukushima shock. However, heterogeneity of beliefs has increased and in 2013, even a majority of actors expressed their support for the energy transition – an indication that major policy change might be ahead. It seems that in socio-technical transitions, changes in the policy issue and in the actor base also work toward policy change, next to changes in core beliefs. We make suggestions how the advocacy coalition framework can inform analysis and theory building in transition studies. We also present first ideas about the interplay of socio-technical systems and policy systems.

Immediate Search in the IDE as an Example of Socio-Technical Congruence in Search-Driven Development

Search-driven development is mainly concerned with code reuse but also with code navigation and debugging. In this essay we look at search-driven navigation in the IDE. We consider Smalltalk-80 as an example of a programming system with search-driven navigation capabilities and explore its human factors. We present how immediate search results lead to a user experience of code browsing rather than one of waiting for and clicking through search results. We explore the socio-technical congruence of immediate search, ie unification of tasks and breakpoints with method calls, which leads to simpler and more extensible development tools. Eventually we conclude with remarks on the socio-technical congruence of search-driven development.

Holocene climatic change and the development of the lake-effect snowbelt in Michigan, USA

Lake-effect snow is an important constraint on ecological and socio-economic systems near the North American Great Lakes. Little is known about the Holocene history of lake-effect snowbelts, and it is difficult to decipher how lake-effect snowfall abundance affected ecosystem development. We conducted oxygen-isotope analysis of calcite in lake-sediment cores from northern Lower Michigan to infer Holocene climatic variation and assess snowbelt development. The two lakes experience the same synoptic-scale climatic systems, but only one of them (Huffman Lake) receives a significant amount of lake-effect snow. A 177-cm difference in annual snowfall causes groundwater inflow at Huffman Lake to be 18O-depleted by 2.3‰ relative to O'Brien Lake. To assess when the lake-effect snowbelt became established, we compared calcite-δ18O profiles of the last 11,500 years from these two sites. The chronologies are based on accelerator-mass-spectrometry 14C ages of 11 and 17 terrestrial-plant samples from Huffman and O'Brien lakes, respectively. The values of δ18O are low at both sites from 11,500 to 9500 cal yr BP when the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) exerted a dominant control over the regional climate and provided periodic pulses of meltwater to the Great Lakes basin. Carbonate δ18O increases by 2.6‰ at O'Brien Lake and by 1.4‰ at Huffman Lake between 9500 and 7000 cal yr BP, suggesting a regional decline in the proportion of runoff derived from winter precipitation. The Great Lakes snowbelt probably developed between 9500 and 5500 cal yr BP as inferred from the progressive 18O-depletion at Huffman Lake relative to O'Brien Lake, with the largest increase of lake-effect snow around 7000 cal yr BP. Lake-effect snow became possible at this time because of increasing contact between the Great Lakes and frigid arctic air. These changes resulted from enhanced westerly flow over the Great Lakes as the LIS collapsed, and from rapidly rising Great Lakes levels during the Nipissing Transgression. The δ18O difference between Huffman and O'Brien lakes declines after 5500 cal yr BP, probably because of a northward shift of the polar vortex that brought increasing winter precipitation to the entire region. However, δ18O remains depleted at Huffman Lake relative to O'Brien Lake because of the continued production of lake-effect snow.

At the Interface of Culture, Development, and Forests: Insights from Bolivia and Kenya

The first part summarises the origins, definitions and debates around the general notions of development, culture and associated more specific concepts such as identity, tradition, exogenous and endogenous knowledge, institutions, governance or territoriality. A second part highlights how culture and development got related to the debates around sustainable governance of natural resources and forests. The third part illustrates on the basis of a case study from Kenya and Bolivia how culture as a transversal element of forest governance is expressed in empirical terms. Moreover it is shown how the cultural dimension affects positively or negatively the outcomes of culturally shaped forest governance outcomes and the role these effects play in shaping the sustainability of the socio-ecological systems of forests in Africa and South America.

Carbon sequestration in community forests: trade-offs, multiple outcomes and institutional diversity in the Bolivian Amazon

Carbon sequestration in community forests presents a major challenge for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. This article uses a comparative analysis of the agricultural and forestry practices of indigenous peoples and settlers in the Bolivian Amazon to show how community-level institutions regulate the trade-offs between community livelihoods, forest species diversity, and carbon sequestration. The authors argue that REDD+ implementation in such areas runs the risk of: 1) reinforcing economic inequalities based on previous and potential land use impacts on ecosystems (baseline), depending on the socio-cultural groups targeted; 2) increasing pressure on land used for food production, possibly reducing food security and redirecting labour towards scarce off-farm income opportunities; 3) increasing dependence on external funding and carbon market fluctuations instead of local production strategies; and 4) further incentivising the privatization and commodification of land to avoid transaction costs associated with collective property rights. The article also advises against taking a strictly economic, market-based approach to carbon sequestration, arguing that such an approach could endanger fragile socio-ecological systems. REDD+ schemes should directly support existing efforts towards forest sustainability rather than simply compensating local land users for avoiding deforestation and forest degradation

Can the green economy enhance sustainable mountain development? The potential role of awareness building

Mountain socio-ecological systems produce valuable but complex ecosystem services resulting from biomes stratified by altitude and gravity. These systems are often managed and shaped by smallholders whose marginalization is exacerbated by uncertainties and a lack of policy attention. Human–environment interfaces in mountains hence require holistic policies. We analyse the potential of the Global Mountain Green Economy Agenda (GMGEA) in building awareness and thus prompting cross-sectoral policy strategies for sustainable mountain development. Considering the critique of the green economy presented at the Rio + 20 conference, we argue that the GMGEA can nevertheless structure knowledge and inform regional institutions about the complexity of mountain socio-ecological systems, a necessary pre-condition to prompt inter-agency collaboration and cross-sectoral policy formulation. After reviewing the content of the GMGEA, we draw on two empirical cases in the Pakistani and Nepali Himalayas. First, we show that lack of awareness has led to a sequence of fragmented interventions with unanticipated, and unwanted, consequences for communities. Second, using a green economy lens, we show how fragmentation could have been avoided and cross-sectoral policies yielded more beneficial results. Project fragmentation reflects disconnected or layered policies by government agencies, which inherently keep specialized agendas and have no incentive to collaborate. Awareness makes agencies more likely to collaborate and adopt cross-sectoral approaches, allowing them to target more beneficiaries, be more visible, and raise more funds. Nevertheless, we also identify four factors that may currently still limit the effect of the GMGEA: high costs of inter-agency collaboration, lack of legitimacy of the green economy, insufficiently-secured smallholder participation, and limited understanding of the mechanisms through which global agendas influence local policy.

Challenges in the participatory assessment of sustainable management practices in dryland ecosystems under regime shifts

Regime shifts, defined as a radical and persistent reconfiguration of an ecosystem following a disturbance, have been acknowledged by scientists as a very important aspect of the dynamic of ecosystems. However, their consideration in land management planning remains marginal and limited to specific processes and systems. Current research focuses on mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of spatio-temporal data for specific environmental variables. These methods do not fulfill the needs of land managers, who are confronted with a multitude of processes and pressure types and require clear and simple strategies to prevent regime shift or to increase the resilience of their environment. The EU-FP7 CASCADE project is looking at regime shifts of dryland ecosystems in southern Europe and specifically focuses on rangeland and forest systems which are prone to various land degradation threats. One of the aims of the project is to evaluate the impact of different management practices on the dynamic of the environment in a participatory manner, including a multi-stakeholder evaluation of the state of the environment and of the management potential. To achieve this objective we have organized several stakeholder meetings and we have compiled a review of management practices using the WOCAT methodology, which enables merging scientific and land users knowledge. We highlight here the main challenges we have encountered in applying the notion of regime shift to real world socio-ecological systems and in translating related concepts such as tipping points, stable states, hysteresis and resilience to land managers, using concrete examples from CASCADE study sites. Secondly, we explore the advantages of including land users’ knowledge in the scientific understanding of regime shifts. Moreover, we discuss useful alternative concepts and lessons learnt that will allow us to build a participatory method for the assessment of resilient management practices in specific socio-ecological systems and to foster adaptive dryland management.

Systems medicine and integrated care to combat chronic noncommunicable diseases

We propose an innovative, integrated, cost-effective health system to combat major non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular, chronic respiratory, metabolic, rheumatologic and neurologic disorders and cancers, which together are the predominant health problem of the 21st century. This proposed holistic strategy involves comprehensive patient-centered integrated care and multi-scale, multi-modal and multi-level systems approaches to tackle NCDs as a common group of diseases. Rather than studying each disease individually, it will take into account their intertwined gene-environment, socio-economic interactions and co-morbidities that lead to individual-specific complex phenotypes. It will implement a road map for predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory (P4) medicine based on a robust and extensive knowledge management infrastructure that contains individual patient information. It will be supported by strategic partnerships involving all stakeholders, including general practitioners associated with patient-centered care. This systems medicine strategy, which will take a holistic approach to disease, is designed to allow the results to be used globally, taking into account the needs and specificities of local economies and health systems.

Farming Systems and Resilience Building in a Changing Climate On-Farm Comparisons of Organic and Conventional Cocoa Cultivation in Alto Beni, Bolivia

Resilience research has been applied to socioeconomic as well as for agroecological studies in the last 20 years. It provides a conceptual and methodological approach for a better understanding of interrelations between the performance of ecological and social systems. In the research area Alto Beni, Bolivia, the production of cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.), is one of the main sources of income. Farmers in the region have formed producers’ associations to enhance organic cocoa cultivation and obtain fair prices since the 1980s. In cooperation with the long-term system comparisons by the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) in Alto Beni, aspects of the field trial are applied for the use in on-farm research: a comparison of soil fertility, biomass and crop diversity is combined with qualitative interviews and participatory observation methods. Fieldwork is carried out together with Bolivian students through the Swiss KFPE-programme Echanges Universitaires. For the system comparisons, four different land-use types were classified according to their ecological complexity during a preliminary study in 2009: successional agroforestry systems, simple agroforestry systems (both organically managed and certified), traditional systems and conventional monocultures. The study focuses on interrelations between different ways of cocoa cultivation, livelihoods and the related socio-cultural rationales behind them. In particular this second aspect is innovative as it allows to broaden the biophysical perspective to a more comprehensive evaluation with socio-ecological aspects thereby increasing the relevance of the agronomic field studies for development policy and practice. Moreover, such a socio-ecological baseline allows to assess the potential of organic agriculture regarding resilience-building face to socio-environmental stress factors. Among others, the results of the pre-study illustrate local farmers’ perceptions of climate change and the consequences for the different crop-systems: all interviewees mentioned rising temperatures and/or an extended dry season as negative impacts more with regard to their own working conditions than to their crops. This was the case in particular for conventional monocultures and in plots where slash-and-burn cultivation was practised whereas for organic agroforestry systems the advantage of working in the shade was stressed indicating that their relevance rises in the context of climate change.

2013 Doctoral Workshop on Distributed Systems

The Doctoral Workshop on Distributed Systems was held at Les Plans-sur-Bex, Switzerland, from June 26-28, 2013. Ph.D. students from the Universities of Neuchâtel and Bern as well as the University of Applied Sciences of Fribourg presented their current research work and discussed recent research results. This technical report includes the extended abstracts of the talks given during the workshop.

2014 Doctoral Workshop on Distributed Systems

The Doctoral Workshop on Distributed Systems has been held at Kandersteg, Switzerland, from June 3-5, 2014. Ph.D. students from the Universities of Neuchâtel and Bern as well as the University of Applied Sciences of Fribourg presented their current research work and discussed recent research results. This technical report includes the extended abstracts of the talks given during the workshop.

Knowledge in software-maintenance outsourcing projects: beyond integration of business and technical knowledge

Knowledge processes are critical to outsourced software projects. According to outsourcing research, outsourced software projects succeed if they manage to integrate the client’s business knowledge and the vendor’s technical knowledge. In this paper, we submit that this view may not be wrong, but incomplete in a significant part of outsourced software work, which is software maintenance. Data from six software-maintenance outsourcing transitions indicate that more important than business or technical knowledge can be application knowledge, which vendor engineers acquire over time during practice. Application knowledge was the dominant knowledge during knowledge transfer activities and its acquisition enabled vendor staff to solve maintenance tasks. We discuss implications for widespread assumptions in outsourcing research.

Patterns of motor abilities and technical skills as predictors of success for young elite football players

Sport-motor tests play an important role in football talent selections. However, single tests represent only parts of the complex game performance. The best game performance therefore does not necessarily need to go hand in hand with the best results in all tests of a test battery. Considering the complexity of the game performance appropriately, a holistic perspective together with a person-oriented approach are applied. Thereby, systems consisting of several variables are identified and analysed in a longitudinal study. Following this idea, six sport-motor tests were aggregated into a subsystem. 106 young male elite football players were tested three times (2011, 2012, 2013; Mage, t2011=12.26, SD=0.29). One year later (2014) their performance level was enquired. Data were analysed using the LICUR method, a cluster analytical method. Four patterns were identified, which remained stable at all measuring points. The players frequently show intraindividual and structurally similar patterns over time. At the third measuring point, a pattern occurred out of which the players are significantly more likely to advance to the highest performance level one year later. This pattern appears consistently above average, but does not always show best test performances. The significantly frequent development along structurally stable patterns suggests a predictive validity of the subsystem sport-motor tests between the ages of 12 to 15. Above average, but not necessarily outstanding performances both in the motor abilities as well as in the football specific tests appears to be particularly promising. This finding emphasizes the need of a holistic perspective in the talent selection.

Fortaleciéndo la soberanía alimentaria mediante la revalorización de saberes ecológicos locales: experiencia en los Andes bolivianos

Ethnobiology research contributes significantly to initiatives that aim to enhance food sovereignty among indigenous and/or traditional people. In Bolivia, one of the Latin-American countries that shows the highest poverty and undernourishment levels, the purpose of this research-action project was to enhance food sovereignty through the revitalization of the local ecological knowledge and to promote local technological innovation processes in the Andean community of Tallija-Confital. During a first step the endogenous knowledge and strategies related to food security and sovereignty were investigated, based on the principles and tools of the Revitalizing Participatory Research (RPR). In a second step local technical innovation processes were supported through a “knowledge dialogue” between exogenous and endogenous knowledge systems, focusing on the processing of the cañahua (Chenopodium pallidicaule Aellen) gluten. The research results demonstrate that Andean people have developed complex endogenous knowledge and strategies to adapt to socio-environmental changes that show a great potential to contribute to the enhancement of food sovereignty. Nevertheless, in the current globalized context that translates into new challenges for local communities, beyond the revitalization of local ecological knowledge, a dialogue between different knowledge systems can lead to important local technological innovation for the improvement of their well-being. Key words: food sovereignty, knowledge dialogue, endogenous development, technological innovation