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...

Summary of papersAs the above notes on the small group discussion highlight, a number of significant challenges face researchers, practitioners and policy makers in defining sustainable management and in designing a set of institutional arrangements which can work together to achieve...

Often concepts of sustainability have been criticised for being theoretically ill-founded and lacking practical impact. This paper provides a new theoretical foundation of sustainable development, which is based on a coherent set of three normative and functional categories: systems integrity,...

The notion "risk governance" refers to an integrated concept on how to deal with complex, ambiguous and uncertain impacts in particular. The notion of governance pertains to the many ways in which all relevant actors, individuals and institutions, public and private, deal with interventions that...

This challenging book takes a broad and thought-provoking look at the precautionary principle and its implementation, or potential implementation, in a number of fields. In particular, it explores the challenges faced by public decision-making processes when applying the precautionary principle,...

Participation has become a mantra in environmental governance. However, there are signs that the participatory agenda has started to lose its momentum and justification because of disappointments about actual achievements. Rather than focusing on improving participatory processes or articulating...