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Ensuring food security and halting biodiversity loss are two of the most pressing global sustainability challenges. Attempts to identify pathways have been dominated with a biophysical-technical focus that provides technical solutions to the integration of food security and biodiversity conservation. The social-political dimension, however, including equity, governance, and empowerment received little to no attention. By focusing on the poorly investigated social-political dimension, this dissertation aimed to identify governance properties that facilitate and impede the integration of food security and biodiversity conservation through an empirical case study conducted in a multi-level governance setting of southwestern Ethiopia. To address the overarching goal of this dissertation, first the author examined how the existing widely discussed food security approaches and agricultural land use framework, land sparing versus land sharing unfold in the local context of southwestern Ethiopia. The finding in this dissertation indicated that the existing global framing of food security approaches as well as frameworks around agricultural land use has limited applicability in on-the-ground realities mainly because landscapes are complex systems that consist of stakeholders with multiple and (often) conflicting interests. This was evident from the finding that local land use preference was not a matter of "either/or", but instead involved mixed features exhibiting properties of both land sparing and land sharing. Moreover, in addition to the biophysical factors embedded in the existing food security approaches and land use frameworks, stakeholders preference involved social factors such as the compatibility of land use strategy with local values and traditions, which are mainly unaccounted in the existing global frameworks. Findings in this dissertation revealed that the existing reductionist analytical framings to the issues of food security and biodiversity conservation seldom address the complexity inherent within and between food security and biodiversity conservation sectors. Second, this dissertation identified governance structural and process related challenges that influence individual as well as integrated achievements of food security and biodiversity conservation goals. The result of the study showed that the governance of food security and biodiversity conservation was characterized by a strongly hierarchical system with mainly linear vertical linkages, lacking horizontal linkages between stakeholders that would transcend administrative boundaries. Furthermore, with regard to the governance process, three key and interdependent categories of governance process challenges namely, institutional misfit, the problem of interplay, and policy incoherence influenced the achievement of individual and integrated goals of food security and were identified. Given the interdependence of these governance challenges, coupled with the complexity inherent in the food security and biodiversity conservation, attempts to achieve the dual goals thus needs an integrative, flexible and adaptive governance system Third, to understand how food security and biodiversity conservation unfold in the future, the author explored future development trajectories for southwestern Ethiopia. Iterative scenario planning process produced four plausible future scenarios that distinctly differed with regard to dominating land use strategies and crops grown, actor constellations and governance mechanisms, and outcomes for food security and biodiversity conservation. Three out of the four scenarios focused on increasing economic gains through intensive and commercial agricultural production. In contrast, one scenario involved features that are widely considered as beneficial to food security and biodiversity conservation, such as agroecological production, diversification practices, and increased social-ecological resilience. In smallholder landscapes such as the one studied here, such a pathway that promises benefits for both food security and biodiversity conservation may need to be given greater emphasis. In order to ensure the integration of food security and biodiversity conservation, recognizing their interdependence and addressing the challenges in a way that fits with the local dynamics is essential. In addition, addressing the food security-biodiversity nexus requires a holistic analytical lens. Moreover, this dissertation indicated that there is a clear need to pay attention to the governance structure that accommodates the diversity of perspectives, enable participation and strong coordination across geographical boundaries, policy domains and governance levels. Finally, this dissertation revealed opportunities to integrate food security and biodiversity through the pro-active management of social-ecological interactions that produce a win-win outcome. The win-win outcome could be achieved in a system that involve properties such as diversification and modern agroecological techniques, smallholders empowerment, emphasize adaptive governance of social-ecological systems, value local knowledge, culture and traditions, and ensure smallholders participation.
A central aspect of sustainability governance is collaboration, which has been lauded for its benefits but also criticized for its challenges. The potential benefits of collaboration have apparently been recognized also in the context of EU agriculture. Yet, there has been a lack of holistic consideration of how collaboration can be systematically integrated and promoted in the governance of EU agriculture. Sustainable agriculture cannot only be encouraged through changes in the overall governance system but also through the support of existing and emerging small-scale collaborative initiatives for sustainable agriculture. Indeed, there has been substantial research on the conditions that influence success of similar collaborative initiatives. However, the knowledge resulting from this research remains rather scattered and does not allow for the identification of overall patterns. Additionally, little of this research specifically focuses on sustainable agriculture. What is more, the promotion of collaboration for sustainable agriculture is further complicated by the lack of clarity of the meaning of sustainable agriculture, which is an inherently ambiguous and contested concept. This cumulative dissertation aims to address these gaps by contributing to a better understanding of how collaboration can be facilitated and designed as a means to govern for and advance sustainable agriculture. For this purpose, the dissertation addresses three sub-aims: 1) Advancing the understanding of the concept of sustainable agriculture; 2) scrutinizing the current governance system regarding its potential to facilitate or hamper collaboration; 3) assessing conceptually and empirically how actor collaboration can be facilitated as a means to govern for sustainable agriculture, both from a top-down and a bottom-up perspective. In doing so, this dissertation focuses on EU agriculture and applies a mix of methods, ranging from qualitative to quantitative dominant. The findings of this dissertation highlight that collaboration has been underappreciated and even hampered as an approach to governing for sustainable agriculture. In contrast, this dissertation argues that collaboration offers one promising way to promoting and realizing agriculture and emphasizes the need to integrate different approaches to collaboration and to sustainable agriculture.
Poor quality of freshwaters is a widespread problem. The concept of complexity is a particularly promising concept to analyse and address this problem, and public policy problems more generally. The main reason is the concept's strength in unifying structural features of problems within a more comprehensive structural approach to political problem-solving. So far, however, these possible benefits remained hidden given the lack of a clear understanding of complexity, ultimately hampering a systematic analysis of the implications of complexity for solutions and governance strategies. This study aims at strengthening the value of the concept of complexity for systematic comparative analyses of water-related problems and public policies in general. To achieve this goal, this work is to specify the concept of complexity as well as the implications of complexity for solutions and governance strategies, both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. To this end, five main basic approaches are applied, referring to underlying premises, the role of an interdisciplinary approach, the European Water Framework as an empirical reference point, the integration of practical knowledge, and the focus on external validity. This dissertation provides a detailed operationalisation of complexity related to the dimensions of goals, variables, dynamics, interconnections, and informational uncertainty. It also shows that freshwater pollution-related problems in Germany differ along these five complexity dimensions. This applies to 37 types of pollution-related problems and four clusters of problems, which refer here to tame, wicked, system complexity, and uncertainty problems. This dissertation suggests that relations between complexity and policy delivery can be both positive and negative and vary along dimensions of complexity and policy delivery. Regarding the analysed freshwater pollution problems, this work also shows various effects of complexity on policy delivery, both along the 37 types of problems, and along four clusters of wicked problems. This dissertation suggests a differentiated theoretical approach to define governance for complex problem-solving, demonstrating that the role of diverse institutions, actors, and interactions differs for solutions along five key dimensions of complexity and different management strategies that are information gathering, modelling, using decision-support tools, prioritising of measures, conflict solving, deciding under uncertainty, and being adaptive and flexible.