Sustainable resource governance under pressure: How to govern trade-off situations under global change

Despite near-global consensus on Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, unresolved and politically contentious trade-offs between sustainability, economic growth, and climate adaptation and mitigation have undermined implementation.

The situation is particularly vexing for policy makers , who often have incomplete knowledge about specific threats, but still bear responsibility for managing trade-offs between competing resource uses and avoiding dangerous thresholds and irreversible impacts.

Despite burgeoning research on sustainability and resource governance, scholars have not yet systematically investigated how trade-offs are managed in practice.

GOVTROFF will fill this gap through three objectives: (1) Development of a coherent method, which enables ‘deep diagnosis’ of collective decision-making in complex governance systems facing trade-offs. (2) To assess the method’s feasibility and validity and to get new insights about governance arrangements for effective response to trade-off situations, the method will be applied to UNESCO World Heritage Sites. (3) To enable multi-case comparative studies, meta-analyses, and cumulative knowledge, GOVTROFF establishes an empirically operable analytical scheme.

The scheme is complemented by an open research infrastructure.

The long-term goal of this research is to provide policy makers with effective design principles for how complex trade-off situations in resource management can be governed sustainably to meet emergent 21st century environmental and social threats.

The results will contribute to one of the European Union’s main objective to ensure ‘Stable and sustainable development’ and to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals as well as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

The fellowship will provide the adoption of specific new skills and building the transferable strengths that will impact the employability and career prospects of the fellow significantly.