| Speaker: | Prof. Claudia Pahl-Wostl, Osnabrück University |
| Event date: | Tuesday, 07 May 2019 07:00 pm – 08:30 pm |
| Place: | Campus Kirchberg, Salle Paul Feidert (E00-D10) 6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi L-1359 Luxembourg |
Many water related problems can be attributed to governance failure at multiple levels of governance rather than to the resource base itself. This is particularly worrying in the light of increasing uncertainties and increasing pressures on resources management due to global and climate change. At the same time our knowledge on water governance systems and conditions for success of water governance reform is still quite limited. For a long time, research and policy have been dominated by the futile search for simplistic panaceas to solve complex water governance problems. The lecture will introduce a diagnostic approach to identify governance failures and persistent sustainability problems, as well as leverage points for transformative change. A diagnostic approach takes into account the complexity of social-ecological systems in a systematic fashion and supports context-sensitive analysis and a transferability of insights among similar classes of problems and contexts. The focus is on processes of transformative change rather than idealized governance arrangements. Governance of transformation is conceptualised as multi-level process of social and societal learning.
Claudia Pahl-Wostl is full professor for resources management at the Institute for Environmental Systems Research at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. Her major research interests are adaptive, multi-level governance and management of water resources, social and societal learning and their role in sustainability transformations, and conceptual and methodological frameworks to analyze social-ecological systems. In 2012 the Bode Foundation Water Management Prize was awarded to Prof. Pahl-Wostl for the pioneering interdisciplinary work on “Governance in times of change” and comparative analyses of water governance in large river basins. Claudia Pahl-Wostl was Co-Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Water System Project and a member of the planning committee of the solution-oriented “Sustainable Water Future Programme”, a core project of Future Earth. She has participated in and coordinated several European projects. Her emphasis on interdisciplinary and community-building work is reflected in her role as editor of three books and fifteen special issues in peer reviewed journals.
Lecture in the framework of the lecture series ‚Science and Citizens meet Challenges of Sustainability‘ and the ‚Certificate in Sustainability and Social Innovation‘.