Participation is said to improve decisions on environmental conflicts. When investigating 16 case studies of participatory processes in European Water and Biodiversity Governance, which necessarily is multi-level, the picture becomes blurred: many different forms of participation can be...

International aid projects in post-communist countries were meant to support the existing systems of environmental protection during the transition period and also to introduce new standards of environmental governance. This paper looks at the role project evaluations can play in fulfilling...

This report constitutes the main deliverable of WorkPackage 2 of GoverNat, "Assessing multilevel activities in water and biodiversity governance", dealing with an assessment of state-ofthe- art European water and biodiversity governance, based on the analysis of a series of casestudies developed...

Invasive species are one of the main reasons for the loss of biodiversity. Therefore, national strategies are developed to deal with biological invasions. Economic evaluation as a tool of policy advice has to take into account three challenges: (1) reflecting ecological knowledge, which is...

An assessment of the consequences of biological invasions and of the measures taken against must be at the base of each social decision in this field. Three forms of uncertainty can be distinguished that make such a decision difficult to take: (1) factual uncertainty, which encompasses not only...

The politically influential idea of sustainable development is closely tied to the concept of inter- and intragenerational justice without clarifying these concepts and their relationship. In developing an account of human development, the capability approach conceptualizes parts of...

Conceptual discussions on the impacts of ecosystem services (ESS) on human well-being have largely been boiled down to limits and applications of their monetisation. Therefore, in practice, the use of the ESS concept has been to a large extent boiled down to payment-for-ecosystem-services...

This paper sketches a re-conceptualisation of sustainable development (SD) on the basis of the capability approach (CA). The notion sustainable development was developed as a compromise in a political process and has been re-interpreted (some say: diluted) again and again in the last 20 years....

Community currencies and their contribution to a sustainable development have been quite widely discussed. In contrast, their potential to raise the personal quality of life of their members and users has been less noted. Combining these two strands, we argue that community currencies enhance an...