Scientific mobilization of keystone actors for biosphere stewardship.

The biosphere crisis requires changes to existing business practices. We ask how corporations can become sustainability leaders, when constrained by multiple barriers to collaboration for biosphere stewardship. We describe how scientists motivated, inspired and engaged with ten of the world's largest seafood companies, in a collaborative process aimed to enable science-based and systemic transformations (2015-2021). CEOs faced multiple industry crises in 2015 that incentivized novel approaches. New scientific insights, an invitation to collaborate, and a bold vision of transformative change towards ocean stewardship, created new opportunities and direction. Co-creation of solutions resulted in new knowledge and trust, a joint agenda for action, new capacities, international recognition, formalization of an organization, increased policy influence, time-bound goals, and convergence of corporate change. Independently funded scientists helped remove barriers to cooperation, provided means for reflection, and guided corporate strategies and actions toward ocean stewardship. By 2021, multiple individuals exercised leadership and the initiative had transitioned from preliminary and uncomfortable conversations, to a dynamic, operational organization, with capacity to perform global leadership in the seafood industry. Mobilizing transformational agency through learning, collaboration, and innovation represents a cultural evolution with potential to redirect and accelerate corporate action, to the benefit of business, people and the planet.

Operationalizing ecosystem service bundles for strategic sustainability planning: A participatory approach.

The ecosystem service concept is recognized as a useful tool to support sustainability in decision-making. In this study, we collaborated with actors in the Helge å catchment, southern Sweden, in an iterative participatory ecosystem service assessment. Through workshops and interviews, we jointly decided which ecosystem services to assess and indicators to use in order to achieve a sense of ownership and a higher legitimacy of the assessment. Subsequently, we explored the landscape-level interactions between the 15 assessed services, and found that the area can be described using three distinct ecosystem service bundles. The iterative, participatory process strengthened our analysis and created a shared understanding and overview of the multifunctional landscape around Helge å among participants. Importantly, this allowed for the generated knowledge to impact local strategic sustainability planning. With this study, we illustrate how similar processes can support local decision-making for a more sustainable future.

Emergence of Collaborative Environmental Governance: What are the Causal Mechanisms?

Conflict in environmental governance is common, and bringing together stakeholders with diverse perspectives in situations of conflict is extremely difficult. However, case studies of how diverse stakeholders form self-organized coalitions under these circumstances exist and provide invaluable opportunities to understand the causal mechanisms that operate in the process. We focus on the case of the Georgian Bay Biosphere Reserve nomination process, which unfolded over several years and moved the region from a series of serious conflicts to one where stakeholders came together to support a Biosphere Reserve nomination. Causal mechanisms identified from the literature and considered most relevant to the case were confirmed in it, using an 'explaining outcomes' process tracing methodology. Perceived severity of the problem, institutional emulation, and institutional entrepreneurship all played an important role in the coalition-building process. The fear of marginalization was identified as a potential causal mechanism that requires further study. The findings here contribute to filling an important gap in the literature related to causal mechanisms for self-organized coalition-building under conflict, and contribute to practice with important considerations when building a coalition for natural resource management and governance.

How Does Socio-institutional Diversity Affect Collaborative Governance of Social-Ecological Systems in Practice?

Social and institutional diversity ("diversity" hereafter) are important dimensions in collaborative environmental governance, but lack empirical assessment. In this paper, we examine three aspects of diversity hypothesized in the literature as being important in collaborative forms of environmental governance-the presence of diverse actors, diverse perspectives, and diverse institutions. The presence of these aspects and formative conjectures were empirically considered using a mixed methods approach in four biosphere reserves in Sweden and Canada. We found that the diversity of actors involved and domains of authority varied among cases, that stakeholder perspectives were highly diverse in all cases, and that institutional variety (in terms of strategies, norms, and rules) was evident in all cases, but differed among them. Empirical support from the cases further affirms that diversity contributes to the ability to engage with a broader set of issues and challenges; diversity contributes to novel approaches to solving problems within the governance group; and diversity contributes to the flexibility of the group involved in governance in terms of addressing challenges. One conjecture, that diversity decreases the efficiency of governance in decision-making and responding to issues, was not supported by the data. However, our analysis indicates that there might be a trade-off between diversity and efficiency. The findings highlight differences in the ways in which diversity is conceptualized in the literature and on the ground, emphasizing the pragmatic advantages of actively seeking diversity in terms of competencies and capacities.

How do environmental governance processes shape evaluation of outcomes by stakeholders? A causal pathways approach.

Multi-stakeholder environmental management and governance processes are essential to realize social and ecological outcomes. Participation, collaboration, and learning are emphasized in these processes; to gain insights into how they influence stakeholders' evaluations of outcomes in relation to management and governance interventions we use a path analysis approach to examine their relationships in individuals in four UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. We confirm a model showing that participation in more activities leads to greater ratings of process, and in turn, better evaluations of outcomes. We show the effects of participation in activities on evaluation of outcomes appear to be driven by learning more than collaboration. Original insights are offered as to how the evaluations of outcomes by stakeholders are shaped by their participation in activities and their experiences in management and governance processes. Understanding stakeholder perceptions about the processes in which they are involved and their evaluation of outcomes is imperative, and influences current and future levels of engagement. As such, the evaluation of outcomes themselves are an important tangible product from initiatives. Our research contributes to a future research agenda aimed at better understanding these pathways and their implications for engagement in stewardship and ultimately social and ecological outcomes, and to developing recommendations for practitioners engaged in environmental management and governance.

Rethinking Social Barriers to Effective Adaptive Management.

Adaptive management is an approach to environmental management based on learning-by-doing, where complexity, uncertainty, and incomplete knowledge are acknowledged and management actions are treated as experiments. However, while adaptive management has received significant uptake in theory, it remains elusively difficult to enact in practice. Proponents have blamed social barriers and have called for social science contributions. We address this gap by adopting a qualitative approach to explore the development of an ecological monitoring program within an adaptive management framework in a public land management organization in Australia. We ask what practices are used to enact the monitoring program and how do they shape learning? We elicit a rich narrative through extensive interviews with a key individual, and analyze the narrative using thematic analysis. We discuss our results in relation to the concept of 'knowledge work' and Westley's (2002) framework for interpreting the strategies of adaptive managers-'managing through, in, out and up.' We find that enacting the program is conditioned by distinct and sometimes competing logics-scientific logics prioritizing experimentation and learning, public logics emphasizing accountability and legitimacy, and corporate logics demanding efficiency and effectiveness. In this context, implementing adaptive management entails practices of translation to negotiate tensions between objective and situated knowledge, external experts and organizational staff, and collegiate and hierarchical norms. Our contribution embraces the 'doing' of learning-by-doing and marks a shift from conceptualizing the social as an external barrier to adaptive management to be removed to an approach that situates adaptive management as social knowledge practice.

Adaptive governance, ecosystem management, and natural capital.

To gain insights into the effects of adaptive governance on natural capital, we compare three well-studied initiatives; a landscape in Southern Sweden, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and fisheries in the Southern Ocean. We assess changes in natural capital and ecosystem services related to these social-ecological governance approaches to ecosystem management and investigate their capacity to respond to change and new challenges. The adaptive governance initiatives are compared with other efforts aimed at conservation and sustainable use of natural capital: Natura 2000 in Europe, lobster fisheries in the Gulf of Maine, North America, and fisheries in Europe. In contrast to these efforts, we found that the adaptive governance cases developed capacity to perform ecosystem management, manage multiple ecosystem services, and monitor, communicate, and respond to ecosystem-wide changes at landscape and seascape levels with visible effects on natural capital. They enabled actors to collaborate across diverse interests, sectors, and institutional arrangements and detect opportunities and problems as they developed while nurturing adaptive capacity to deal with them. They all spanned local to international levels of decision making, thus representing multilevel governance systems for managing natural capital. As with any governance system, internal changes and external drivers of global impacts and demands will continue to challenge the long-term success of such initiatives.