Article

The global community of think tank leaders is coming together for assistance and learning during the corona virus pandemic. R. Andreas Kraemer, Founder of Ecologic Institute, summarizes operational experience and focuses on the changing agenda for think tanks in these times of corona. The blog entry is part of a growing collection curated by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (TTCSP) of the University of Pennsylvania. Read more

Despite numerous efforts to promote and implement more integrated approaches, coordination problems persist and impede sustainable water governance and management. This paper introduces a framework for guiding a transdisciplinary diagnostic approach (i.e. a context-sensitive assessment of multi-level water governance, which is combined with a change management process) to address such coordination problems. The approach aims at addressing some of the challenges identified in scientific scholarship and water governance practice by combining context-specific participatory assessments of individual cases with comparative case analysis guided by a generic conceptual framework. Read more

The German article "Seven at one blow! Regional Food Strategies as key to more sustainable Urban-Rural cooperations" deals with the role of regional food strategies as a promising approach for an integrated, sustainable development of urban and rural areas. The article, written by Stephanie Wunder, Coordinator Food Systems at the Ecologic Institute and Franziska Wolff, Head of Environmental Law & Governance at Öko-Institut summarizes the results of the UBA project "Rural Urban Nexus", led by Ecologic Institute. The text is part of "The Critical Agricultural Report". Since 1993 "Der kritische Agrarbericht" is an annually published flagship book, that critically reflects about agriculture in Germany in the context of the EU Common Agricultural Policy. The 2020 edition focused on the changing relationship between rural and urban areas. Read more