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To respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene, scholars from various disciplines increasingly emphasize that a mere outer transformation is insufficient and that we also need an inner transformation that addresses deep leverage points. Yet, the open questions are how the inner and outer dimensions relate to each other and how inner transformation might lead to outer transformation. How we attempt to answer these questions is determined by our dominant paradigm. Paradigms define how we understand and shape the world, and thus, they define how we conceptualize challenges, such as inner and outer transformation. Various authors argue that the dominant paradigm, which is characterized by reductionism, empiricism, dualism, and determinism, might be a root cause for insufficiently addressing sustainability challenges. As an alternative, many argue for a relational paradigm, which understands complex phenomena in terms of constitutive processes and relations. A relational paradigm might offer possibilities to reconceptualize inner and outer transformation in the Anthropocene and might shed new light on how to integrate both in sustainability science. Yet, it is still being determined how a relational paradigm can contribute to the understanding of inner and outer transformations towards sustainability in the Anthropocene. Therefore, this dissertation's overarching scope is to contribute to systems change towards a more social-ecological future by generating insights into and exploring possibilities of a relational paradigm for inner and outer transformation in the Anthropocene. This thesis is divided into three sub-questions. The first research question aims to increase the theoretical understanding of a relational paradigm. The second research question aims to develop a transformative educational case study grounded in a relational, justice-oriented approach. The third research question aims to analyze how a relational paradigm might contribute to policies and practices for sustainable lifestyles. The results indicate that inner and outer transformation in the Anthropocene can be reconceptualized as paradigm-ing relationality in the Ecocene. "Paradigm-ing" as an active verb, reconceptualizes inner and outer transformation into ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and socialecological realities that are ongoing, nonhierarchical, nonlinear, dynamic, co-creative processes of intra-action. The Ecocene decenters the human and attends to what we might be able to intra-actand become-with. These insights can offer unexplored perspectives to address sustainability challenges and increase our capacities to respond in novel ways.
New media and digital technologies open up numerous possibilities to document different versions of reality, which makes it essential to examine how they transform the logic behind the creation and production of documentaries in digital cultures. The goal of this study is to investigate the integration between the traditional documentary and new media: the interactive documentary, in the context of the different sociocultural and technological environments of China and the West. Accordingly, a comparative study on the evolution and integration of these two fields was carried out. The documentary genre brings with it a method of classification and various modes of representing reality, while new media provide new approaches to interactivity as well as the production and distribution of interactive documentaries. In this context, the study examines the differences and characteristics of interactive documentaries in China and the West. Interactive documentaries grow and change as a continuously evolving system, engaging the roles of the author and the user, such that their roles are mixed for better co-expression and the reshaping of their shared environment. In addition, an analytical approach based on the types of interactivity was adopted to explore this new form of documentary both to deduce how the stories about our shared world can be told and to understand the impact of interactive documentaries on the construction of our versions of the reality as well as our role in it.
Environmental governance beyond borders: Governing telecoupled systems towards sustainability
(2023)
This doctoral dissertation analyses the environmental governance of long-distance social-ecological interactions in telecoupled systems in two issue domains: global commodity chains and infrastructure projects as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Although both domains involve different governance actors, institutions and processes, they both concern the question of how the involved actors develop governance structures and institutional responses to telecoupling. This dissertation aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how to govern environmental problems that are associated with global flows. Since many multilateral environmental governance initiatives have not yet produced the desired solutions to global problems, particular attention is directed at unilateral state-led governance approaches. This dissertation addresses the questions of (1) how to achieve a spatial fit between the scale of telecoupled systems and the scale of governance institutions, (2) how governance actors exercise agency in governing telecoupled systems, and (3) how state actors can govern the domestic and foreign environmental effects of telecoupled flows. The results show that creating a spatial fit in the governance of global commodity flows is challenging because boundary and resolution mismatches can emerge. Boundary mismatches denote situations where social-ecological problems transcend established jurisdictional boundaries, whereas resolution mismatches refer to governance institutions that have too coarse a spatial resolution to allow them to address the specific aspects of social-ecological problems effectively. No single governance institution is likely to avoid all mismatches, which highlights the need to align multiple governance approaches to effectively govern telecoupled systems.
Tropical ecosystems are critical for biodiversity conservation and local people’s livelihood sustenance. However, these ecosystems are under high pressure from land-use and land cover (LULC) change, which is further projected to intensify and increase rapidly, thereby affecting biodiversity and the provisioning of vital ecosystem services (ES). It is thus important to understand how LULC might change in the future and how such changes could affect biodiversity and ES provisioning in a given landscape of tropical ecosystems. Scenario planning has become an increasingly popular tool and technique to produce narrative scenarios of the future landscape change. Thus, quantifying changes under different land-use scenarios could be a means to elucidate the synergies and trade-offs within the scenarios. In this dissertation, the author examines the future of biodiversity and ES provisioning for different plausible land-use scenarios in southwestern Ethiopia. First, he translates four future plausible narrative social-ecological land-use scenarios ("Gain over grain", "Coffee and conservation", "Mining green gold" and "Food first") developed for southwestern Ethiopia by participatory scenario planning into spatially explicit LULC scenario maps. Results showed distinct LULC changes under each scenario. Second, the author investigates the impact of these land-use scenarios on biodiversity by specifically modelling woody plant species richness in farmland and forest. Both indicators of human disturbance and environmental conditions were used. Third, he also investigates the effect of these land-use scenarios on woody plant-based ES provisioning by combining woody plant species with household surveys on how woody plants were used by the local community. He models and predicts the current and future availability of woody plant-based ES under the four scenarios of landscape change. Overall, the findings of this dissertation show the importance of integrating future land-use mapping with participatory, narrative-based scenarios to assess the social-ecological outcomes of alternative futures. The spatially explicit maps of LULC change, biodiversity and ES (at different scales) could be used as a valuable input to support stakeholders and decision-makers to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of different development trajectories on ecosystems and human well-being and to avoid or minimize future undesirable consequences. To this end, apart from the benefits of coffee production under "Mining green gold" and crop production under "Food first" scenarios, the findings under these scenarios of large-scale agricultural intensification point to a potentially high loss of biodiversity and ES. These two scenarios could have a negative long-term impact on ecosystems and human well-being. Finally, the "Coffee and conservation" scenario, which involves the creation of a new biosphere reserve, appears to be the most sustainable scenario. This scenario could result in a sustainably managed, diversified landscape which could make major contributions to biodiversity conservation and human well-being in the region and beyond.
Over the past two decades, transitions research has witnessed rapid development. However, there is still a notable gap in our understanding of sustainability transitions in conflict settings and the role of international organizations in these transitions. Little is known about the dynamics of power, limiting and facilitating factors, and the role of (international) actors in sustainability transitions in conflict settings. This dissertation seeks to make contributions to these discussions by examining energy transitions in Afghanistan, a conflict-affected country, between 2001 and 2021. It specifically focuses on the involvement of international development organizations, shedding light on their role in energy access, institutional change, and imagining Afghanistan's future energy system development. After security, access to affordable energy is frequently reported to be Afghanistan's most pressing need. Following the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001, billions of dollars and dozens of international development organizations poured into Afghanistan to support the reconstruction of the country including its energy sector. Between 2001 and 2021, the government of Afghanistan and the international development organizations worked on various aspects of energy system development despite on-going insurgency and threats against infrastructural projects. In 2021, the Taliban regained power, resulting in the suspension of operations for most development organizations, with only a few humanitarian agencies remaining active. Within this context, this thesis explores topics such as the country's energy potential and policy, the role of international development organizations in the energy sector, and visions for a future energy system in Afghanistan. The research conducted for this thesis employed a qualitative case study approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews and document analysis.
The ethical apparatus: The material-discursive shaping of ethics, autonomy, and the driverless car
(2023)
This research argues that the emergent driverless car, as a kind of autonomous vehicle, is a Foucault-ian "ethical apparatus", working as an epistemic device to materially embody and enable discursive power by generating notions of "autonomy" and "ethical decision-making". The ethical implications of AI, algorithmic, and autonomous technologies are topics of current regulatory and academic concern. This concern relates to the lack of meaningful oversight of black boxes inside AI systems, liabilities for manufacturers, and inadequate frameworks to hold AI-based socio-technical systems to account. One recent artefact, the driverless car, has taken on these concerns quite literally in the shaping of a niche discourse of the "ethics of autonomous driving". Ambitions to produce a fully autonomous vehicle based on AI technologies are constrained by speculative concerns that its decision-making in unexpected accident situations cannot be assumed to protect humans. "The ethics of autonomous driving" evaluates proposals to build "ethical machines" by examining the relationship between structures of human values and moral decision-making, and how they comport to computational architectures for decision-making. This is the first case this work takes up, chiefly organised around an analysis of a thought experiment, the Trolley Problem, and the online game, Moral Machine, that crowdsourced values to suggest approaches to an "ethics of autonomous driving". Rather than evaluate the feasibility or appropriateness of these two approaches, this work attends to the more critical issue that ethics is being proposed in terms of technologies turning on the logics of risk, speculation, and probabilistic correlations that are fundamental to how machine learning makes decisions. The concern in this work is less a normative framework or approach for a better or more appropriate ethics of autonomous driving. Rather, this work argues that what we understand as "the ethical" is being transformed when architected by, through, and for Artificial Intelligence / autonomous technologies to become their own regulators. Hence the production of autonomous driving necessitates computational infrastructures that are creating a world legible to and for the navigation of a driverless car. The author argues that this is fostering computational governance that has implications for human bodies and social relations, chiefly that conventional approaches to regulation and accountability attend to human values and decision-making rather than computational ones. A second case that this research examines is that of driverless car crashes, to examine how "autonomous" driving requires substantial embodied human knowledge and micro-work. Taken together, these two cases make an argument for how myriad practices of knowledge-production are translating the human world into something legible to the navigational needs of the car, producing changes in the human world through the actions of the car on that basis, and advancing notions of "autonomy". This work concludes with arguments for a critical reconceptualisation of ethics and ethical decision-making in AI / autonomous systems.
Protected areas are an essential tool for conserving biodiversity. However, their ecological effectiveness is contested and their capacity to resist human pressures differ. This dissertation aimed to assess the ecological effectiveness of different protection levels (from strict to less strictly protected: national park, game reserve, forest reserve, game-controlled area, and unprotected areas) in biodiversity (both mega diverse butterflies and mammals), maintaining habitat connectivity, and reducing anthropogenic threats at the wider landscape in the Katavi-Rukwa Ecosystem of southwestern Tanzania. To achieve this overarching goal, the researcher employed an interdisciplinary approach. First, he analyzed butterfly diversity and community composition patterns across protection levels in the Katavi-Rukwa Ecosystem. He found that species richness and abundance were highest in the game reserves and game-controlled areas, intermediate in the forest reserves, national park and unprotected areas. Species composition differed significantly among protection levels. Landscape heterogeneity, forest cover, and primary productivity influenced species composition. Land-use, burned areas, forest cover, and primary productivity explained the richness of species and functional traits. Game reserves hosted most indicator species. Second, the author modelled the spatial distribution of six large mammal target species (buffalo Syncerus caffer, elephant Loxodonta africana, giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis, hartebeest Alcelaphus buselaphus, topi Damaliscus korrigum, and zebra Equus burchellii) across environmental and protection gradients in the Katavi-Rukwa Ecosystem. Based on species-specific density surface models, he found relatively consistent effects of protection level and land-use variables on the spatial distribution of the target mammal species: relative densities were highest in the national park and game reserves, intermediate in forest reserves and game-controlled areas and lowest in un-protected areas. Beyond species-specific environmental predictors for relative densities, the results highlight consistent negative associations between relative densities of the target species and distance to cropland and avoidance of areas in proximity to houses. Third, the author examined temporal changes in land-use, population densities and distribution of six large mammal target species across protection levels between 1991 and 2018. During the surveyed period, cropland increased. Wildlife densities of most, but not all target species declined across the entire landscape. Based on logistic regression models, target species preferred the national park over less strictly protection levels and areas distant to cropland. Fourth, he quantified land-use changes, modelled habitat suitability and connectivity of elephant over time across a large protected area network in southwestern Tanzania. Based on analyses of remotely-sensed data, cropland increased from 7% in 2000 to 13% in 2019. Based on ensemble models, distance from cropland influenced survey-specific habitat suitability for elephant the most. Despite cropland expansion, the locations of the modelled elephant corridors (n=10) remained similar throughout the survey period. Based on circuit theory, the author prioritizes three corridors for protected area connectivity. Key indicators of corridor quality varied over time, whereas elephant movement through some corridors appears to have increased over time. Overall, this dissertation underpins differences in ecological effectiveness of protected areas within one ecosystem. It highlights the need to utilize a landscape conservation approach to guide effective conservation across the entire protection gradient. It also suggests the need to enforcing land use plans and having alternative and sustainable forms for generating income from the land without impairing wildlife habitat.
Contemporary society is shaped by the idea that time is, above all, a scarce economic resource that must be used efficiently. Increasingly, however, scientific findings suggest that such a way of perceiving of time seems a major cause of the current global climate and sustainability crisis. Considerably less research work has been carried out in relation to the role of individual time-related needs regarding unsustainable consumption behaviour, although consumer research has been addressing needs-oriented approaches to sustainable consumption for a long time. Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) is considered an essential strategy to achieve the global sustainability goals of Agenda 2030. Internationally, as well as on a national level, ESE is increasingly mainstreamed in educational curricula and practice. Given the relation between time, needs and sustainability, it appears valuable to inquire into this field from the perspective of ESE. The core research interest of this cumulative dissertation is therefore the question of how the connection between time, our needs and sustainability can be conveyed through pedagogical approaches. The inquiry used an exploratory, qualitative research design to address this question. In a first step, the concept of sustainability-related time use competence was developed. This then served as a guiding concept for the understanding of time used in this work and as the overall objective for the educational intervention developed and piloted as part of the research. Next, a content analysis of German curricula was conducted with the aim of determining whether and to what extent these address the relation between time and sustainability. The results show curricula contain only a few starting points that encourage a connection between time and sustainability in school lessons. The study further indicates that an understanding of time as a scarce resource to be used efficiently has prevailed in school contexts so far. The next step involved developing and piloting a time use competence curriculum in cooperation with three partner schools, using an Action Research Approach. This intervention followed the pedagogical approach of Self-Inquiry Based Learning (SIBL) seeking to sensitise learners to the relation between individual needs and consumer behaviour. During implementation, which lasted one semester, students logged their time, were encouraged to reflect on their personal needs, and subsequently implement individual change projects related to time use. This was embedded in continuous reflective individual and group exercises. The results strengthen the hypothesis that there is a relation between time use and sustainability. Furthermore, the pedagogical approach of SIBL has proven suitable to enable students to reflect on their time use and to raise their awareness of the role of individual needs. Participants reported that changes in time use did indeed increase their personal well-being. A third empirical study was carried out, inquiring into students' time use during the period of COVID-19-induced school closures, using a Grounded Theory Approach. Since the pandemic disrupted young peoples' routines drastically, the research focused on which kinds of learning experiences students made during this time and which insights can be derived for ESE. The results of the semi-structured interviews with 69 participants show first that a variety of learning experiences are revealed, such as learning one's own learning and everyday rhythms or creatively adapting consumption habits to the new situation of "lockdown". Overall, a key finding of this work is that students are currently unable to adequately realise their time-related needs. In view of the findings from research on time and sustainability, one recommendation is therefore that everyday school life could give students more space to organise their time according to their needs. Furthermore, it would be advisable to give the topic of time in connection with sustainability more space in curricula and in teacher training. The experiences during the pandemic have shown that schools and all actors involved including students and teachers, are so far insufficiently prepared to handle crises. Here, the approach to time use competence piloted in this work can offer valuable stimulations for ESE research and practice. This is especially true since it is compatible with existing approaches to key competencies for sustainability by seeking to complement them with a stronger focus on individual, needs-oriented time shaping.
This dissertation evaluated the efficacy of three different internet-based interventions that can be regarded as indirect interventions to reduce depression since they primarily targeted risk factors for depression. For this purpose three registered randomized controlled trials were conducted. In addition to assessing the efficacy of the interventions regarding the primary outcomes, the efficacy to reduce depression and further secondary outcomes was studied. In Study I (N=200) the efficacy of an internet-based stress management intervention (iSMI), which was adapted and tailored to career starting teachers, was compared to a waitlist control group (WLG). The participants of the intervention group (IG) reported significant reductions on the primary outcome perceived stress at post-intervention (T2) and three month follow-up (3-MFU). Furthermore, it was shown that the intervention indirectly also reduced depression at T2 and 3-MFU. The effects were sustained at an extended 6-MFU. Besides efficacy, the feasibility to complement the iSMI with a newly developed internet-based classroom management training was shown. Moreover, mediation analyses corroborated the role of problem- and emotion-focused coping skills in the intervention's effect on stress and the indirect effect of the intervention on depression through stress. Study II (N=262) demonstrated the efficacy of an internet- and app-based gratitude intervention on the reduction of primary assessed repetitive negative thoughts at T2 and 3-MFU, as compared to a WLG. The participants of the IG also reported significantly reduced depressive symptoms at T2, and 3-MFU, with significant clinically meaningful effects. The effects were sustained at an extended 6-MFU. Besides efficacy, mediation analyses showed that repetitive negative thinking mediated the gratitude intervention's effect on depression. Finally, Study III N(=351) showed that an internet-based intervention, tackling worries at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, was effective as compared to an active mental health advice group. At T2, two weeks after randomization, the IG reported significantly reduced levels on the primary outcome worry as compared to controls. Participants of the IG also reported significantly reduced levels of depression at T2, with significant clinically meaningful reductions. The extended follow-ups in the IG indicated that the improvements from baseline were sustained until the 2-MFU and the 6-MFU. In a mediation analysis, worry was shown to mediate the intervention's effect on depression. Across all three studies a reliable deterioration of depression was occasionally observed. In summary, the studies in this dissertation demonstrated the efficacy of various indirect interventions focusing on rather common psychological problems to indirectly reduce depressive symptoms. The extent to which depression severity could be reduced is comparable to reductions found within participants with comparable baseline depression severity, in internet-based interventions directly addressing depressive symptoms. Indirect interventions are suggested to increase the uptake of interventions that reduce depressive symptoms, since they might be perceived as less stigmatizing and might broaden the range of interventions to choose from.
This dissertation deals with the increasingly recognized role of incumbent firms in advancing sustainability-oriented industry transitions. Incumbent firms are understood as firms-in-industries, which are embedded in established market structures and thereby contrast new entrant firms. The purpose of this research is twofold. First, to provide empirical evidence of barriers to and success factors of incumbent-driven industry transitions. Second, to unify hitherto dispersed descriptions of transition-related firm behaviour in a new understanding of incumbent firms in industry transitions. To this end, theoretical concepts are discussed and extended on the basis of different empirical studies in the German meat industry. The meat industry serves as suitable research setting due to its diverse sustainability challenges, ranging from climate change and pollution to animal welfare and public health, as well as its current developments towards sustainable protein alternatives. The meat context also offers opportunities to delve into individual-level processes influencing transition-related behaviour. The main contribution of this dissertation is a Multi Embeddedness Framework (MEF) that details processes and outcomes of integrated incumbent firm behaviour, including passive, reactive and proactive behaviors. The framework acknowledges the diversity in incumbent firm behaviors within industries and firms and provides new insights into transition-related behaviors at firm and individual level. With regard to the latter, the potential of learning about and from innovative start-up firms as well as shared sensemaking processes are discussed. The contents of this dissertation provide valuable contributions to the transition literature as well as important management implications with regard to the stimulation and promotion of proactive behaviors