We’re famously called ‘navel gazers’ by other members of our Joseph’s coat faculty members.

Comparatively, said my colleague, the conservation biologists are given 5 minutes each once a month to talk about their stuff. They, she went on, publish a lot. We, on the other hand, publish not very much (but see today’s other post about the gerald young book award)

But neither group, she added, make one iota of difference to the terrifying trajectories of our planet’s life support systems.

So whilst one group secures adoring students, book awards, and knowing, cynical smiles, the other collects academic accolades, buckets of cash and newspaper headlines, some people are left asking whether we are not making a difference because university promotion schedules don’t recognise or reward real-world results, or whether we just aren’t very good, or willing to try our hands at implementation, advocacy and management…

At the time, I promised to put together a list of exemplary ANU Theses that were multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or just plain undisciplined. I am sorry it has taken so long.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but a great place to start. All are available at Menzies Library, ANU, and some are available via ‘digital theses’ (links provided) – sadly these only available to ANU students at the moment.

Apologies to all those off-campus: think of it as a good reason to come and visit us!

• Valerie Brown (1978) Holism and the University curriculum: promise or performance?
• Lorrae van Kerkhoff (2002) ‘Making a difference’ : science, action and integrated environmental research
• Robin Connor (2004) Individual transferable quota in fisheries management
• Joern Fischer (2004) Beyond fragmentation: Lizard distribution patterns in two production landscapes and their implications for conceptual landscape models
• Katrina Proust (2004) Learning from the past for sustainability: towards an integrated approach
• Peter Deane (2004) A failing science: Understanding private landowners in the forestry milieu
• Ioan Fazey (2005) Understanding the role and value of experience for environment conservation
• Lisa Robins (2008) Get real: making capacity building meaningful
• Kate Sherren (2008) Sustainability Bound? A study of interdisciplinarity and values in universities.

"a timely, inspirational and important book" (Ronnie Harding)

Read the Nature review by Harold Segal here

He says “Tackling Wicked Problems is a timely volume that deserves a wide, global readership.”

Congratulations compañeros!

Tackling WickedProblems Flyer

Dr Percy gives a keynote at the National Human Ecology Conference, the Philippines

HE Framework at UPLB
Although the college has since developed a HE framework to work from, they are self-admittedly, still struggling to confidently champion HE in the academic and broader community.

Conference Participants

Like the approach at ANU, they are unashamed about the normative aspect of HE. As Maria said, ‘the conspicuousness of the goal of a functional human-ecological system is necessary to drive home the point that the study of human ecology cannot be divorced from current issues and problems impinging upon human ecological systems. This makes the study of human ecology problem- and solution-oriented’. The framework tries to convey the dynamic aspect of human-environment relationships as well as the temporal and spatial variability of its different elements.

HE as a perspective and as a disciplinal endeavor takes as its unit of analysis the systemic nature of human-environment interaction. The implication for Maria is that human ecologists are tasked with; considering the structural nature of a human ecological phenomenon while focusing on the functional and dynamic character of this phenomenon exemplified by the interaction between humans, either as individuals or as social groups, and environmental variables; and identifying, understanding and rethinking of forms of human-environment interaction which provide for the dynamic nature of any human ecological system.

What has been lacking in the program so far she argues, is a set of core courses which clearly reflect the HE approach for all majors in HE. I was surprised when she presented the proposed new program about the high number of core courses dedicated to HE. Here they are:
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Human Ecology Faculty, UP Los Baños

Where are they now? HE graduate stories
We also heard from Riki Sandalo, the president of the Human Ecology Society in the Philippines about his survey of HE graduates. 76 out of the 2000 total graduates responded. From his results he developed a profile of the ‘typical’ College of Human Ecology alumni:

Hedda and other conference participants

I wondered what we would get from such a survey of ANU HE graduates. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was quite similar. Interestingly the reaction from the audience was ‘how do we attract more men to Human Ecology?’ Any ideas, Human Ecologist males reading this?

The conference only went for one and a half days and I was surprised at the small number of presentations from academics. Many of the presenters were from the NGO sector reporting from the field. I think this was partly a reflection of the conference theme of ‘partnerships’. There was a lot of talk around the importance of working together with the private and civil society sectors. But I also got a strong impression that grants for research were thin on the ground for Human Ecologists and that most of the faculty members had their hands full with teaching.

Videoke
As for the social/light side of the conference, Filipinos certainly know how live up a conference dinner. Not even half-way through the main course, the MC had already kick-started the karaoke with a few brave folk dancing. But having heard of the legendary late night revelry at conference dinners in the Philippines, I was slightly disappointed when it was all cut short at 9:30 PM. Still, I was pretty impressed to see senior academics get up and belt their lungs out. Fun times.

Conference Dinner

I had the opportunity to attend COP15 last December as part of the ANU climate change science and policy field school. I came out of Copenhagen with many experiences and insights, but this blog focuses just on my ‘research’ area, which I presented a couple of weeks ago at the Human Ecology Forum.

At COP15 (amongst the range of my other interests) I was studying the inclusion of health co-benefits of climate change mitigation in the conference agenda, with a comparison to what is presented in the literature. I kept it pretty broad, including issues such as direct health impacts, socio-economic impacts from environmental change and the ethical dimensions of these issues in my research scope. Being at COP15 gave me a chance to attend health-related events and booths on topics as diverse as water and food scarcity, disease, meteorological science and the displacement of people. The aim was to explore how health issues were perceived and represented, and if there was any agenda push or official inclusion of health co-benefits in the negotiations and text. Due to the access restrictions of the NGO pass issued to ANU students, the bulk of my experiential research concentrated on the health issues presented by the side events and booths and is therefore weighted from the perspectives of NGO delegates. At the same time I was conducting a literature review looking at how the health co-benefits and impacts are presented, and if there is any discussion of how to argue ‘health co-benefits’ external to the conference of the parties.

To my surprise, there were few side events at COP15 explicitly about health, but many others I attended mentioned health either:

-       As part of a national climate change agenda (e.g. the government of Kiribati, who impressed me with their level-headed explanation of measures they were taking rather than just appealing for help)

-       In relation to other climate change issues

• Migration
• Employment
• Youth
• Gender
• Technology transfer

-       As part of a broader agenda (e.g. in an event on adaptation including the International Human Dimensions Program- a very promising ‘human dimensions science’ collaboration)

For me another highlight was the World Health Organisation, who was at the conference with a very clear mandate to argue the health co-benefits. However, from my personal experience as an ‘NGO’ delegate, this mandate was weakened by the rabble of so many other events going on at once, and then by most of the interested conference attendees being locked out in the final days in which the specific health events were concentrated.

How does this compare to the literature? I was happy to see that in terms of facts, statements and graphics, the information presented to me at COP15 was very similar or the same as the arguments currently going around in the literature. But what surprised me is that inclusion of the health co-benefits of climate change is only really a recent thing in the ‘official’ dialogue, even though it has always been implied (e.g. in the UNFCCC, where adverse climate change effects are explained to include health issues).

The real difference between the literature and COP15 was not the information itself, but how it was presented and pushed as an agenda. I found that presentation of the health co-benefits was there- but all over the place (as is true of the conference as a whole). In COP15 health issues were also brought up in light of thier potential to become part of a wider issue grouping of the ‘human dimensions’ to climate change, which goes beyond most of the sector-focused literature. This could be in part due to the sheer number of applications for  side events which the organisers received for COP15, which resulted in them having to ask various groups with similar interests to work together within single events (with mixed success).

My main realisations from looking at health at COP15 go beyond the health agenda and are probably true for any interest grouping in these sorts of conferences. I have been considering whether these groups (such as WHO) could have done any better in the foray that was COP15, and realised that even with some effective presentation of the health co-benefits and collaboration between groups, my focus as an NGO delegate had missed the main problem. Before I came to the conference I did not realise how much of a disconnect there would be between the rabble of side events/booths and the official negotiations, which were too busy in themselves to consider any other happenings. It was like there were a number of different conferences going on at once, with different audiences and different purposes. With this sort of forum, I should not have been surprised that there was very little run through of the health agenda (being presented in one forum) to the actual negotiations (going on in another forum, and almost totally decided upon already).

This study has, surprisingly, made me consider issues which don’t just apply to health co-benefits. Notably, my frustrations have centred on the question: what is the point of having side events and booths at the conference, when it is clear that the negotiators have no time at all to engage with them, and can’t really change their official positions anyway? I realised that at COP15, their real role was to help networking and collaboration between different organisations, rather than reach the negotiators. I’m hoping that for the health agenda at least, the range of events also helped to broadly engage and encourage grassroots action in parallel with an international agreement (which some including myself would argue is the more effective mode of change).

Then, is there any more effective and open way to try to bring branching agendas such as ‘health co-benefits’ to a COP? I was forced to conclude that by the time a COP is underway, it is too late for any new agenda to be introduced. The really effective agenda push has to come in the years leading up to the conference itself, when the substantive part of the text is drafted. Organisations such as WHO have been working on this, for example, by making repeated submissions to the secretariat outlining their agenda and where they want to the text to change. However, I’m not sure how effective this has actually been in getting changes realised in the text- maybe a topic for my further undergrad study?

Learning from others to provide a ‘how to’ guide for aspiring water policy makers is a principal focus of Dr Meijerink’s book Water Policy Entrepreneurs: A Research Companion to Water Transitions around the Globe’.

Human Ecology Forum, Friday March 5th between 10am and 12 noon in Room 101 (Old Library) of the Forestry Building (No. 48), The Australian National University

If you’re not a local, you can watch a video of her research. Catherine presented her video at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) Millennium Conference: Water-Ecosystem Services, Drought and Environmental Justice (click on the video icon, hers is the third down) held in Georgia last year.

Catherine writes:
Concepts of justice and the distribution of public resources have been an important aspect of social debate for centuries.  Finding fair and just allocations of natural resources remains a major preoccupation for national governments and their constituent communities.  Where such allocations or decisions are perceived as unjust, underlying social tensions can emerge and result in social conflict.  This study examines two such social conflicts: a 2006 NSW government action to cut a water allocation and the Victorian government’s North South Pipeline and Food Bowl Modernisation Project.

This study investigates these conflicts from a justice perspective, concentrating on notions of fairness and justice. Using a transdisciplinary investigative framework the thesis explores these notions through stakeholder perceptions of procedural justice and distributive justice.  Procedural justice is concerned with the fairness of elements of the decision-making process and distributive justice with the outcome or decision.  The study aims to find out how people perceive fairness and justice within the social context of the decision-making process and how these perceptions contribute to their acceptance of an outcome. The seminar will explore how justice constructs can be used in decision-making processes to increase the acceptance of outcomes and how better outcomes might be achieved.

Should I take some comfort from the fact that manufacturers clearly think they need to state their green credentials? Or just be outraged that anyone may actually think that they have made a legitimate environmental claim?

He was referring to the Filipino artesanal fishers that we were to invite to a workshop on how addressing the fact that it often costs the fishers more to go fishing than to stay at home. Fishing is not very profitable  in the now sparsely populated coastal waters of northern Luzon, especially if you’re sticking to the legal handlines and traps rather than the illegal cyanide and dynamite.

Very soon after, another colleague took a photo of the fish we had been served for dinner, with his wedding ring as a reference point. Yes, the fish were increasingly small, and the incomes of the usually poorly educated fishers, even smaller. Words like intractable and insurmountable came far more easily to mind than hope and encouragement.

But Perry’s words have often come back to me, and I think they apply as much to the fishers as it does to  the countless development, disaster and research practitioners who are looking to improve the depressing trajectories that confront us every time we string a time series graph together. If we can’t hope, if our clients, participants and patients can’t hope, what will we have left? Philip Prett calls hope – substantial hope – ‘cognitive resolve’, and Braihwaite, Courville and Piper talk about the “bootstrapping that takes place between hope,
empowerment, ideas for change, and action”,  writing “hope is the most enduring of these,
lying in wait through cycles of adversity and resistance to change.”

Time to plot out a framework of the enabling role of hope in sustainability.

<<Thanks to a timely suggestion from our resident super star Lorrae Van Kerkoff,  I have been delving into the hope literature inspired by work of Val Braithwaite and colleagues.  See the special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2004; 592; 6 – the quotes are from Val Braithwaite’s preface “collective hope”.>>

Special saludo to Ines of Lisbon, who wants to join our community of practice through her work on sustainability and migration. Welcome Ines!

Following advice from the recently published book ‘Doctorates down under’, a group of PhD students researching the nexus between people and environment are establishing a ‘peer support group’. The group will meet semi-regularly, both through Skype and face-to-face, to discuss their ideas and issues. Interested? contact Deb (deborah dot cleland at gmail dot com). This Friday (15 Jan 2010) we will meet at 10am at Vivaldi’s cafe on the ANU campus.