Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
142
result(s) for
"Brunner, Ronald D"
Sort by:
Adaptive governance as a reform strategy
This article expands research on adaptive governance in natural resource and climate change policy into other policy areas and the larger context of reform. The purpose is to clarify adaptive governance as a reform strategy, one that builds on experience in a variety of emergent responses to the growing failures of scientific management, the established pattern of governance. Emergent responses in information technology, national security, development aid, and health care policy are reviewed here. In these cases, factoring a large national or international problem into many smaller problems, each more tractable scientifically and politically, opened additional opportunities for advancing common interests on the ground. The opportunities include simplification of research through intensive inquiry, participation in policy decisions by otherwise neglected groups, and selecting what works on the basis of practical experience rather than theory. What works can be improved incrementally in the context at hand, diffused through networks for voluntary adaptation elsewhere, and used to inform higher-level decisions from the bottom up. Adaptive governance is a promising strategy of reform. The open question is whether it will be used well enough to sustain a once-progressive evolution toward fuller realization of human dignity for all.
Journal Article
Context and climate change: an integrated assessment for Barrow, Alaska
An intensive approach to Barrow, Alaska's adaptations to climate change and variability during recent decades suggests reconsideration of the interconnected roles of science, policy, and decision-making structures. First, profound uncertainties are inherent in unique interactions among the many natural and human factors affecting Barrow's vulnerability. Science cannot significantly reduce these uncertainties through extensive approaches, but intensive approaches can reconstruct and update local trends, clarify the underlying dynamics, and harvest experience for policy purposes. Second, sound policies to reduce Barrow's vulnerability to coastal erosion and flooding must incorporate these profound uncertainties and the multiple values of the community. Minimizing vulnerability to climate change is only one of the community's interests, and must compete with other interests for limited time, attention, funds and other resources. Third, the community itself is in the best position to understand its own context, to decide on sound policies, and to take responsibility for those decisions. In short, local context matters in science, policy, and decision-making structures for adaptation to climate change and variability. Overall, cognitive constraints may be the most important human dimension of climate change. Factoring the global problem into more tractable local problems would make the most of our cognitive capacity.
Journal Article
A Paradigm for Practice
Lack of consensus on a paradigm for practice inhibits the cumulative development of practical knowledge and skills. It also encourages devolution of these and other paradigm functions by default to the established paradigm in the policy movement, reductionism, which includes positive methodology. But reductionism is insufficient for practice. It tends to displace practical aims and expectations, and discount and delegitimize practical and other ways of knowing. This gives rise to problems in practice, illustrated here by problems in psychotherapy, global climate change, and various 'high-modern' schemes to improve the human condition. To help alleviate such problems eventually, this article outlines a contextual paradigm for practice based on examples of good practice, the policy sciences, and related sources. The immediate purpose is to stimulate policy scientists, other practitioners, and other contextualists to make explicit and compare their paradigms.
Journal Article
Finding Common Ground
Over the past century, solutions to natural resources policy issues have become increasingly complex. Multiple government agencies with overlapping jurisdictions and differing mandates as well as multiple interest groups have contributed to gridlock, frequently preventing solutions in the common interest. Community-based responses to natural resource problems in the American West have demonstrated the potential of local initiatives both for finding common ground on divisive issues and for advancing the common interest.The first chapter of this enlightening book diagnoses contemporary problems of governance in natural resources policy and in the United States generally, then introduces community-based initiatives as responses to those problems. The next chapters examine the range of successes and failures of initiatives in water management in the Upper Clark Fork River in Montana; wolf recovery in the northern Rockies; bison management in greater Yellowstone; and forest policy in northern California. The concluding chapter considers how to harvest experience from these and other cases, offering practical suggestions for diverse participants in community-based initiatives and their supporters, agencies and interest groups, and researchers and educators.
eBook
Learning from Climate Variability
Adaptive governance is a pattern that began to emerge from conflicts over natural resources in the American West a few decades ago. This was a pragmatic response to the emerging evidence that effective control was dispersed among multiple authorities and interest groups, that efficiency was only one of the many goals to be reconciled in policy decision processes, and that science itself was politically contested. Climate change as a policy problem exhibits many of these same features and has similarly led to gridlock in international and national forums. But humankind is not without guidance in securing the protection of life, limb, and livelihood in the face of environmental distress, particularly with regard to the challenge of adaptation. One effective analogy can be drawn to adaptations in the face of large climate variability such as El Niño. This paper compares adaptive governance with the tradition of scientific management in the international climate change regime, and it explores an example of adaptive governance in responding to the effects of a severe El Niño event in the Pacific islands. This event illustrates some of the specific kinds of human choices that will be made by those who are concerned about climate change as a policy problem. The basic choice is not scientific management or adaptive governance but continuing with business as usual or opening the frame to a wider range of possibilities.
Journal Article
The Policy Scientist of Democracy Revisited
A recent appraisal by Farr et al. (Am Polit Sci Rev 100:579-587 2006) credited Lasswell with raising important questions of professional responsibility for political science. However, the appraisal rejected working answers to those questions offered by Lasswell and his colleagues without considering them substantively or comprehensively. In doing so, the appraisal misleads those academics in political science and other disciplines who may be interested in a genuinely professional role for themselves, a role that takes into account the social consequences of the exercise of their knowledge and skills. This article provides a more authentic introduction to Lasswell's life and work and vision of the policy scientist of democracy, and suggests some alternatives for would-be professionals.
Journal Article
The World Revolution of Our Time: A Review and Update
In 1935 Harold D. Lasswell introduced constructs of the world revolution to improve the rational selection of topics and timing for policy research. This article reviews and updates his construct of the skill revolution arising from the differentiation of specialized environments in modern society, including three variants: the garrison-state construct, the permanent revolution of modernizing intellectuals, and the unspeakable revolution. Among transformations of the skill revolution facilitated by the growing interdependence of modern society, or globalization, are contending fundamentalist and cosmopolitan revolutions. A Gnostic revolution of declining faith in Western civilization is also possible. This article concludes with a preferential construct tracing a possible sequence of events leading toward a world order of peace, welfare and social justice.
Journal Article
Living with climate change : how communities are surviving and thriving in a changing climate
The climate has changed and communities across America are living with the consequences: rapid sea level rise, multi-state wildfires, heat waves, and enduring drought. Living with Climate Change: How Communities Are Surviving and Thriving in a Changing Climate details the steps cities are taking now to protect lives and businesses, to reduce their vulnerability, and to adapt and make themselves more resilient. The authors included in this book have been directly involved in the successful design and implementation of community-based adaptation and resilience programs. In this book, they apply decades of combined experience in hazard risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and environmental protection to provide timely and practical advice on how to plan for and live with a climate that is changing faster and more erratically than predicted. The book also examines obstacles to local, state, and national action on climate change, includes case studies to illustrate smart, effective policies and practices that have already been put in place, and defines how these actions benefit the economy, the environment, and public health. Living with Climate Change provides much-needed guidance for finding and enacting solutions to immediate and future risks of climate change.
eBook