‹ Still sleepless in Cheltenham - more notes from the Commons Conference •
Those interested in reslience and commons research may already know of the editorial by Elinor Ostrom in the May 2008 issue of Global Environmental Change. Ostrom’s keynote at the IASC Conference dinner, like this paper, argued for a need to define a set of diagnostic questions and variables to better understand multi-scale social-environmental systems and the problems these are currently facing. The GEC paper maps out a working set of variables in more detail, which her group aims to further develop through interaction with scholars across disciplines.
As someone who tends to work across disciplinary and spatial boundaries I find this a really important contribution, but also wonder how this fits with the more contextualised knowledge that my colleagues are so good at producing. I think we need both, and conversations between.
The high point of the conference dinner though was sharing a drink (or several) with my friend Floriane Clements of University of Newcastle, who had just successfully defended her PhD thesis that afternoon - Ostrom being one of the examiners. Congratulations Floriane!
Tags: knowledge, sustainable
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