Policy to Practice
INHERIT, Combining Health Sustainability and Equity for a "Triple Win"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session George P Morris
Generations alive today are the first with incontrovertible proof of their impact on planetary processes and systems. The pace and scale of change denies any real possibility of delivering health, wellbeing, health care or anything approaching equity in these domains in the medium to longer term without fundamental change. Building health and wellbeing henceforth on ecological principles demands a recognition of human social complexity in the determinants of health, but also the interconnectivity and interdependence of human beings and the natural world. The term ‘ecological public health’ encapsulates the required response. There is undeniable convergence between the aspirations of ecological public health and the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. Progress in each requires decision makers to navigate within complexity but also overcome professional, disciplinary, and policy silos. Only in this way, can we identify and deliver effective policy solutions at national and subnational level. The European Union funded INHERIT project, emphasises the benefits of a common analytical framework to frame complex issues in ways that point to solutions. INHERIT seeks to identify policies which can deliver the “triple win” of health and wellbeing, equity, and environmental sustainability in the areas of living, moving, and consuming. It also recognises transformative change must be gained through a better understanding of human lifestyles, behaviour, and their determinants. The paper outlines INHERIT’s conceptual underpinnings and how it seeks to exploit insights of strategic environmental health in combination with knowledge from behavioural science.
Environmental Leadership, Mitigation Strategies, and the (De)Contested Future : Re-Mapping Economic Policy and the Land-Ocean Divide
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Will McConnell, Eric Schockman
In the emerging discourse of environmental awareness, the concept “sustainable development” reveals its polyvalence as a speech-act largely through absences of meaning. In part, this absence has created a significant gap - at best, a debilitating openness - in global as well as local approaches to “best practices” to combine economic and environmental forms of sustainability. Despite the strength of models of leadership outlined in the Brundtland Report (1987), the definitions offered therein have created a foundation for fundamentally opposed drives toward understanding environmental sustainability. The neoclassical economic approach in developing models for sustainable development privilege land-based, cost-driven modeling of sustainable development, which, to-date, has produced weak forms of leadership in political processes of “environmental” sustainability. The coordination of policy, current science of climate change, and modeling of mitigation strategies and budgets to address the magnitude of future losses is inadequate. This paper considers current models, which omit inclusion of ocean-based research on, and preliminary modeling in, the damage accrued via land-based pollution. New forms of leadership in land-based models are crucial. In its “unsettling” nature, its divergence from land-based temporalities and spatial properties, the ocean offers multiple points at which the discourse of (land-based) sustainability collapses within its own tensions to reveal new horizons of policy, damage mitigation and, currently absent in the discourse, reversal modeling. Developing stronger models of leadership across this physical and behavioral series of gaps and tensions offers a way into the full complexity, and excitement, of re-envisioning an entire discourse of the (contested) future.
Sustainable Ecosystem Governance : Assessing the Influence of Governance, Management, and Community Structures on the protection of UNESCO World Heritage Ecosystems
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eike Schmedt
This study finds itself at the very intersection of challenges in the ecological as well as social sector. By analyzing ecosystems that have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list and assessing their individual governance, management, and community structures, the paper creates an overview of some of the most precious ecosystems in the world. It further shows how well protected sites are structured and what is missing from those that lack in their protective strategies. To develop this overview, the author utilizes a mixed methods approach. As a first step, nearly 200 ecosystems on the World Heritage List are assessed through a self-developed statistical analysis that enables adequate comparative evaluations. The second step is to identify some of the most positive and negative examples and create a coherent individual qualitative analysis that assesses what specific governance, management, and community structures or the lack thereof can be identified as having an impact on the individual ecosystem. As a result, this research enables researcher and practitioners to have an overview of good and bad practices in the protection of World Heritage ecosystems. In particular, it shows how the interconnectedness of different actors and governance systems that surround an ecosystem can enhance or degrade the protection efforts and the survival of these ecosystems for future generations.
