Event Details

Every Tuesday 09.30 – 10.30, during term, we invite an academic to brief us on their research. The format is a 30 minute talk followed by discussion.

Co-developing reflexive adaptation in socio-ecological governance

(outline of a developing research proposal)

Dr Dermot O’Reilly

The concern with ‘Earth System Governance’ or how to govern complex emergent systems is a burgeoning academic and political question. Academics, politicians and policymakers have also increasingly moved towards thinking about ‘adaptive governance’ in the context of social-ecological adaptation, and have experimented with various modes of network, collaborative, and meta- governance. Despite these experimentations both political reviews (Climate Change Committee 2019) and academic reviews have pointed to the significant gap between espoused mitigation and adaptation targets and actual governance and implementation systems for adapting human-ecological interactions. The immediacy of the coming ecological threat and the identified gaps in governance motivate our proposal for an interventionist research project working with local and regional platforms for socio-ecological governance. Our proposed research will combine interventionist action and observational research in a self-consciously socially constructionist collaboration with local and regional actors.

In the presentation we outline our current thinking informing the proposed research, the potential interventionist design and research methodology, and invite collaborative reflection upon it.