Environmental policy and knowledge. Copying with complexity through inclusive management

Scholars agree that governance of the public environment entails cooperation between science, policy and society. This requires the active role of public managers as catalysts of knowledge co-production, addressing participatory arenas in relation to knowledge integration and social learning. This paper deals with the question of whether public managers acknowledge and take on this task. A survey accessing Directors of Environmental Offices (EOs) of 64 municipalities was carried out in parallel for two regions - Tuscany (Italy) and Porto Alegre Metropolitan Region (Brazil). The survey data were analysed using the multiple correspondence method. Results showed that, regarding policy practices, EOs do not play the role of knowledge co-production catalysts, since when making environmental decisions they only use technical knowledge. We conclude that there is a gap between theory and practice, and identify some factors that may hinder local environmental managers in acting as catalyst of knowledge co-production, raising a further question for future research.

(Table 1) Annual gross and new primary production rates obtained for areas centered on the AWI-HAUSGARTEN mooring (2000-2005)

The lack of extended dataset has so far prevented an inclusive understanding of the long-term relationships between primary production (PP) and vertical export in the Arctic Ocean. It is urgent to investigate these connections as Arctic ecosystems are on the verge of climate-related shifts, which could be caused by the combined effects of increase in Pacific and Atlantic inflow, climate warming, and sea ice decline. For a period of 6 years we investigated the degree of coupling between PP and export by making use of modelled PP rates and vertical particle fluxes collected with sediment traps moored at ~300 m depth in the eastern Fram Strait. Our analyses indicate that total and new simulated PP averaged for different areas centered on the mooring location (5-200 km radius) explain at best 20-44% of the observed biogenic particle fluxes at 300 m, when applying extended time-lags (55-90 days) between PP and vertical fluxes. Based on this phasing, we define a conceptual framework that presents the temporal dimension as a prime determinant of the maximum strength of the PP-export coupling at a given depth. Our results support that planktonic food webs in the Fram Strait process heavily biogenic material in the epipelagic zone, but we further suggest that Atlantic-Arctic water interactions induce a particular ecological setting responsible for the extended turn-over. In conclusion, we hypothesize that global warming could promote a transition toward a more retentive ecosystem in the Fram Strait region despite the likely increase of pelagic PP in the Arctic Ocean.