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Our research on factors influencing the adoption of roles may help RwL researchers to perform their roles as intended. Conventional welfare production is unsustainable. A societal emphasis on green economic growth may therefore be superseded by an extended concept of well-being. Taking a transformative approach, science may take part in catalysing this Taking a transformative approach, science may take part in catalysing this challenging transformation of both the understanding and the level of well-being.
Instead of economic growth at the expense of sustainability, we aim to cooperatively refocus on integrating economic, social and ecological perspectives into a more holistic, sustainable approach to individual and municipal well-being in Wuppertal Germany. Therefore, the research team investigates and develops concepts of local sustainable well-being production, e.
What are the conditions and constraints of transforming well-being in Wuppertal and most particularly of the role of scientists in this endeavour? Answering this research question with a comparative case study approach, we have analysed our resources, processes, contexts and normativity. Hampered co-design interacts with role conflicts. Open-minded stakeholders are crucial for local well-being transformation, as is the awareness that urban residential districts have bottomed out.
However, the normative sustainability claims of the transformative research project are not fully shared by all of its stakeholders, which is both necessary and challenging for transformative research. Open Access - just follow the link Page Numbers: Mitigating an Aporia more. Is the self-determination of future generations impeded by lasting constitutions, as Thomas Jefferson suggests?
In this article it is not only argued that the opposite is true, but also that the question misses the point. The role of constitutions is to provide the prerequisites for democratic self-determination and potentially also to facilitate the institutional empowerment of future generations. Dec Publication Name: Nov 8, Conference Start Date: Man sagt Demokratien nach, dass sie relativ gut darin sind, akute Krisen kurzfristig zu meistern. Dies ist zwar hinsichtlich nachhaltiger Politik pathologisch, aber durchaus intendiert und demokratisch sinnvoll: Ihre Institutionalisierung ist selbst der demokratischen Gegenwartsfixiertheit unterworfen, die sie verringern will Kates Trotzdem gibt es sie.
In den weltweiten Demokratien wurden 29 Institutionen identifiziert.
Von diesen haben sechs ein eher hohes Wirkungspotenzial, sollten basierend auf ihren formalen Eigenschaften also in der Lage sein, die demokratische Gegenwartsfixiertheit zu reduzieren Beispiele: Sep 28, Organization: Sep 28, Conference Start Date: Determinants of researchers' roles in real-world transitions: A comparative analysis of urban real-world laboratories more.
According to transformative research and related approaches, scientists may not only observe, describe and analyse sustainability transitions, but may also initiate or catalyse them.
By supporting real-life transitions, sustainability By supporting real-life transitions, sustainability scholars may become agents of change themselves. In this paper, we search for the factors that determine which roles researchers take regarding their contribution to real-life transitions.
If measured against the democratic all-affected principle, it is obvious that there are significant inequalities in empirical political participation. However, both versions are applicable to future generations. Es ist daher plausibel anzunehmen, dass dieses Problem eine nicht unerhebliche Rolle bei der individuellen Wahlentscheidung spielt. Die Schriften der beiden Autoren sind zu Standardwerken geworden, noch heute wird auf beide in der Parteienforschung Bezug genommen. They were dying and there was little we could do to treat them. According to transformative research and related approaches, scientists may not only observe, describe and analyse sustainability transitions, but may also initiate or catalyse them. On the other hand, in direct democracies, there are more direct ways for voters to influence politics via initiatives etc.
A suitable context for addressing this research question are so-called real-world laboratories. Real-world laboratories are transformative in nature and close to transdisciplinary processes and action research, addressing real-world problems by means of a strong collaborative interaction between science and practice. The real-world laboratory process is structured in three broad phases of co design, co-production and co-evaluation, and engages in cyclical real-world interventions, aiming at results both for science and practice.
The boundaries of real-world laboratories are usually both spatial and content-related. Real-world laboratory phases and settings allow for a variety of ways for researchers to contribute to real-life transitions. The spectrum ranges from rather indirect contributions like taking a traditional science role e. This reflects the options commonly considered within transformative research as a whole. In order to identify the factors that determine which roles are chosen in what situation, we employ a research design unique in current real-world laboratory research.
Our constellation of empirical cases allows us to make both diachronic within-case comparisons and synchronic between-case comparisons. We therefore select three current urban real-world laboratories, located in the city of Wuppertal, Germany. Projects aiming to create sustainable well-being are developed, researched and realised in three different city districts together with local practice partners. Each of these real-world laboratories is scientifically accompanied and supported by one junior researcher. For our comparative analysis of the different roles of researchers and the situations in which they occur, we employ qualitative content analysis based on observation protocols, interviews with collaborating actors, research diaries and secondary data.
As a preliminary finding, the roles of the researchers identified mostly inductively but nevertheless theoretically informed , and thereby the ways they contribute to real-life transition, vary considerably across the real-world laboratory settings and over time. Regarding the latter, first results suggest that this may be due to the changing demands of the different sub-stages of the real-world laboratory process. Regarding the former, for example the type of practice partner, the type of real-world problem, the specific initial situation, the scope of civic participation, and several micro dynamics, seem to influence which roles the researchers adopt.
For instance, the Wuppertal cases show collaborations with very different practice partners, i. Their specific activities, resources and organisational structures pose different challenges and requirements to the researchers and shape their roles in contributing to real-world transitions significantly.
As an example, the scarce resources of the district development agency for the respective real-world transition push the researcher into a more active, change agent-like role, causing her to bear a large share of responsibility for the operational development and implementation of the local real-world transition.
This impulse is reinforced by the challenging initial situation in this real-world laboratory, where the whole sub-project must be launched from scratch. This contrasts with the two other real-world laboratories, where the operational local real-world transitions depend to a lesser extent on the researchers, allowing them for rather indirect contributions like reflection and knowledge inputs. After all, our research outlined above is a form of self-reflexive research that helps us to better understand our own roles and activities in real-world transitions, enabling constructive criticism and improvements.
Moreover, we aim to add further empirical insights to the debates on and concepts of both real-world laboratories and transformative research. Jun 21, Conference Start Date: Sustainable Development , Urban Planning , Transdisciplinarity , Sustainability Science , Scientists as Activists , and 3 more Wuppertal , Real world Laboratories , and transformative science Wuppertal , Real world Laboratories , and transformative science. Transforming Well-Being in Wuppertal: Conditions and Constraints more. Sustainable development as a global challenge brings about several implications not only for society, economy and politics, but also for 21 st century science.
Here, scientists become agents of change themselves, fostering transformation processes as scientists, often in collaborations with societal stakeholders as carriers of practical knowledge. One of the most pressing issues in this field is the transformation of cities towards meeting the needs of sustainability, as was recently emphasised by latest Flagship Report of the German Advisory Council on Global Change WBGU What are the conditions and constraints of urban transformation towards sustainability and of the role of scientists in this endeavour? The Centre for Transformation Research and Sustainability, jointly established by the University of Wuppertal and the Wuppertal Institute in October , researches urban sustainability transformation in a local transformative research project, called " Well-Being Transformation Wuppertal WTW ".
We research concepts of local sustainable welfare production, therefore mapping relevant civil society initiatives, developing an indicator system on a participatory basis for measuring sustainable well-being in Wuppertal, and supporting scientifically so-called real-world laboratories in the production and evaluation of their contributions towards urban sustainable well-being transformation. The city of Wuppertal is a very interesting case for researching urban sustainability transformation, for it still undergoes large structural changes and struggles with scarce municipal resources, making room and pressing for civic engagement.
In order to gather and analyse the conditions and constraints of the well-being transformation in Wuppertal and of 'being transformative' as scientists in this context, we briefly introduce both the approaches of transdisciplinary research and transformative science in the context of urban sustainability transformation. Based on these theoretical and methodological approaches, issues that might condition or constrain successful transformation processes in Wuppertal are derived.
Here we focus on staff and resources, process, the context and the normativity of the transformative sustainability approach. The framework conditions of the WTW project are analysed in order to identify the most relevant conditions and constraints for transforming well-being in Wuppertal, thereby referring back to the relevant academic debates and discussing preliminary conclusions for WTW and the broader issues at hand. As part of the results, the role of 'transformative scientist' in urban sustainability transformation is both constrained and challenging due to time and financial constraints as well as by different demands from science and practice.
Practice partners need to be funded, too, which is constrained by the current research funding structure that also hampers true co-design from the very beginning. Furthermore, open-minded stakeholders are crucial, as well as a subjective perception that city-quarters have bottomed out, developing new visions and achieving tangible, motivating results. Moreover, the normative sustainability claims of the transformative research project are not fully shared by all stakeholders, thus generating trade-offs and complicating the research process.
Brixen, Italy More Info: Sep 3, Conference Start Date: Democracies are said to be ill equipped to handle wicked problems like climate change adequately. In climate change, the main detrimental effects will manifest in the long term future, whereas effective counteraction is only possible In climate change, the main detrimental effects will manifest in the long term future, whereas effective counteraction is only possible today.
Therefore, as the most affected, i. Furthermore, the electoral pressure to present short term policy impacts, the assumed short-sightedness of voters, and the complexity, uncertainty and missing salience of long-term policies all contribute to what is often called democratic myopia. Hence, mitigating democratic myopia is a necessary-albeit not sufficient-condition for mitigating climate change. One promising approach to mitigate democratic myopia is to design new institutions that introduce the interests of future generations into today's political decision-making process.
This approach is normatively justified by the democratic all-affected principle that states that everyone who will be affected by collectively binding decisions should have a voice in making them. In order to explore the potential of such institutions to mitigate democratic myopia, I proceed in three steps: First, rather than discussing the dozens of hypothetical proposals for such institutions that can be found in literature, I turn to the world's democracies, scanning them for institutions that already do introduce future generations' interests into the democratic decision-making process.
Applying some minimum criteria, I identify 28 of them, for example the Israeli Parliamentary Commission for Future Generations , the recently established Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, and the compulsory sustainability assessment of the German land Baden-Wuerttemberg since But are those institutions powerful enough to change the institutional incentive system in favor of policy-making for the long term?
For a more differentiated view, secondly I develop an index of impact potential, sorting the institutions into six categories ranging from very low to very high impact potential. Impact potential is understood as an institution's formal capability to modify the institutional incentive system of democratic politics to the benefit of the political consideration of future generations' interests.
Therefore, a high impact potential also implies a high formal capability to mitigate democratic myopia.
As a result, only six institutions in four democracies show a rather high, high or very high impact potential. Still, this is puzzling, because the institutionalization of such strong institutions as the six detected ones is subjected to the very same constraining democratic myopia it is determined to mitigate.
According to this hypothesis, successful institutionalizations thus should only occur in contexts where the immediate pressure of democratic myopia is relatively low, opening windows of opportunities for this type of democratic self-binding. Therefore, I thirdly employ a modified fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis in order to analyze several political-institutional, economic and cultural framework conditions which, if pronounced in a certain direction, should relax the 'presentistic' pressure on politicians and thereby enable the desired institutionalization.
The results add some surprising insights to the debate on democratic myopia and its mitigation. Sep 10, Conference Start Date: The urgent issue of intergenerational justice is philosophically well addressed, but what is still missing is an elaborated conceptual and argumentative link both to political science and to real world politics. Adapting several concepts of democratic theory, this paper establishes the conceptual foundation for analysing strategies to implement intergenerational rights of and obligations to future generations in our current political institutional frameworks.
I start with the argument that the issue of future, i. Political representation is a means to meet the claim of democracy that everyone who will be affected by collectively binding decisions should have a voice in making them. This so called all-affected interests principle comes in two versions: However, both versions are applicable to future generations. Firstly, due to the expanded impact of man, our descendants will be causally affected by what we do.
In order to validate this it is not even necessary to evoke extreme cases like the long term effects of climate change or nuclear waste disposal.
More precisely, every reasonable political decision will work into the future. Secondly, future people who will be born into a jurisdiction will have to follow the rules that are made or approved there today, at least as long as they are not able to change them. Every law is made to bind the future. In consequence, democratic theorists call for the political representation of future generations. Unfortunately, the categories of our standard concepts of political representation, like elections, authorisation, accountability, communication, and responsivity are not compatible with contemporarily unapproachable, not yet existent constituents like future generations.
Hence, we have to develop a new concept of representation that is consistent with this kind of constituents. According to Rehfeld it is necessary to define the function of the specific kind of representation. I develop three simple formal necessary conditions that have to be satisfied in order to meet the function and to identify an institutional arrangement as proxy representation: Last but not least, I discuss the major philosophical stumbling block towards the political consideration of future generations, the well-known non-identity problem.
With regard to proxy representation, I reject this problem as invalid. If measured against the democratic all-affected principle, it is obvious that there are significant inequalities in empirical political participation. The all-affected principle states that everyone who will be affected by collectively The all-affected principle states that everyone who will be affected by collectively binding decisions should have a voice in making them.
The question of how to reduce this time-induced inequality is anything but trivial. How can we deal with this problem from a political science perspective? Unfortunately, the very concept of political participation is per se unsuitable for contemporarily non-existent people. At first sight, the same holds true for the more indirect mode of political voice, which is political representation.
The categories of our standard concepts of political representation, like elections, authorization, accountability, and communication are not compatible with contemporarily unapproachable, not yet existent constituents. Hence, at best we might be able to develop functional equivalents to these categories in order to enable something like the political representation of future generations.
Equipped with a new conceptual lens, we detect new institutions i. A Case Study more. Indicators are located at the interface between science, politics and publics.
Parteitypologien im Überblick (German Edition) [Jan Hefter] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com * FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr im. Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr im Fachbereich Politik - Politische Systeme - Politisches procedure Deutschlands, word: 1,0.
They are therefore confronted with various expectations, interpretations, and ascribed meanings which may conflict at any level of institutionalization. This is especially true for indicators of Sustainable Development, due to the fuzziness of the concept. The study focuses on Rhineland-Palatinate as the first German Land which institutionalized its own indicator-based Sustainable Development Strategy with a periodical indicator reporting system in Additionally, it is occasionally referred to as a pioneer in sustainability politics in literature.
Moreover, the regional level is widely underrepresented in sustainability indicators research. The study attempts to describe, understand, and explain the institutionalization of the Rhineland-Palatinate sustainability indicators set. For that, the level of institutionalization is operationalized by examining to what extend the political functions of the indicators system are already realized. After introducing the case, the paper therefore first analyzes its political functions as described in documents and literature, pointing out the role of sustainability indicators in policy and governance.
The following functions are considered: Secondly, the paper discusses the political aspects of the institutionalization process and the variables that may have influenced it positively or negatively in order to understand and, where possible, explain the observed level of institutionalization. Here, issues like formalization and legal status, centralization, political and administrative promoters and opponents, social participation, resources, institutionalized forums, opposing narratives in public administration, political instrumentality, relevance for political action, and the existence or lack of quantified objectives are taken into account.
Structured interviews, document analysis and media analysis were chosen as methods of empirical data acquisition. As a result, the study shows that the political functions of the Rhineland Palatinate sustainability indicators system are on the whole rather weakly implemented. Nevertheless, low-threshold functions show a relatively high level of realization and submit an offer to politicians and society: The indicators reports are easily accessible and reviewable by everyone.
The indicators are communicated to politicians, the public administration, outside experts, and pressure groups. Reference data is provided. But politicians and society do not embrace that offer. The indicators are not considered by the politics of the day, nor do they result in policies. They are not used as evaluation tools. Neither politicians nor local print media mention them in the public. Representing Future Generations Today more. Aug Publication Name: Representing Future Generations Today. Short Papers [in German].
A Habermasian rational moral discourse may reach its limits when there are fundamental differences in moral evaluations due to irreconcilable worldviews. A state that excludes religious arguments from public moral discourse discriminates against a particular i. On the other hand, once the decision on the moral issue is taken the unsuccessful party is obliged to respect the democratic majority decision if it had the chance to voice and explain its perspective in the public discourse.
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