NAVIGATE - navigating the climate and biodiversity policy landscape

Description

There is no shortage of strategies aiming for sustainable development in general, and for climate and biodiversity goals in particular. On the contrary, strategies for societal transformation spanning the local, national, and global levels, are abundant. Yet, key environmental goals are often not achieved because current climate and biodiversity strategies often fail due to, for example, gaps between overarching goals and the concrete policy instruments in-use, implementation challenges, conflicts between different environmental strategies, with strategies in other policy areas, or with the agendas and actions of business and industry, organisations, civil society, and single individuals.

Together, these multiple barriers constitute important root-causes for failed goal achievement and lose-lose outcomes. The aim of this research is therefore to advance our knowledge about these existing, but far from explicitly recognized, barriers, and to provide recommendations on how to improve contemporary and future climate and biodiversity strategies and their implementation in order to avoid controversies and goal-conflicts and to increase synergies among strategies.

To achieve this, the project uses an interdisciplinary co-learning approach to draw on the expertise from a range of social science disciplines, and utilises a diverse set of methods. There is also strong interaction with relevant stakeholders on the local, regional, national, and global levels.

As such, the research will provide guidance for civil servants who are working to transform national and international strategies into political practice and concrete policy measures, as to how the goals of climate mitigation, adaptation, and biodiversity preservation might be reconciled across all policy decisions.

We lead:

Subproject 1 - Mapping and analysing the strategy landscape (Mikael Karlsson)

Subproject 5 - Civil society (Daniel Lindvall)

Read more about the project