The goals and concerns surrounding the debate over government policies related to the greater use and production of biofuels were addressed in an executive session convened by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Venice International University on May 19th and...

Global environmental change is increasingly understood to have causes, consequences, and responses which span multiple levels, from the local to the global. The multi-level nature of such problems has required a radical shift in the relationship between knowledge and action. This working paper...

Decision-makers often seek to design policies that support sustainable development. Prospective evaluations of how effectively such policies are likely to meet sustainability goals have nonetheless remained relatively challenging. Evaluating policies against sustainability goals can be...

The boundary between science and policy is only one of several boundaries that hinder the linking of scientific and technical information to decision making. Managing boundaries between disciplines, across scales of geography and jurisdiction, and between different forms of knowledge is also...

The recognition that information matters in world affairs raises a number of questions as to when, how, and under what conditions it influences the behavior of policy actors. Despite the vast and growing array of institutions involved in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information...

This paper provides a context for the Dahlem Workshop on "Earth System Analysis for Sustainability." The authors begin by characterizing the contemporary epoch of Earth history in which humanity has emerged as a major - and uniquely self-reflexive - geological force. They turn next to the...

The goals and concerns surrounding the debate over government policies related to the greater use and production of biofuels were addressed in an executive session convened by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Venice International University on May 19th and...

Previous research on the determinants of effectiveness in knowledge systems seeking to support sustainable development has highlighted the importance of “boundary work†through which research communities organize their relations with new science, other sources of knowledge, and the...

Ecosystem stewardship is an action-oriented framework intended to foster social-ecological sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Recent developments identify three strategies that make optimal use of current understanding in an environment of inevitable uncertainty and abrupt change:...