Bridging across Scientific Communities
Bridging across Scientific Communities
Both the Inception Workshop and the foundation of WINS are building one of the most promising achievements in the area of institutional analysis of natural resource systems: This is the recognition that human-environment interactions that are mediated by linked social and ecological systems, often via specific technologies and infrastructure, require a high degree of institutional diversity and polycentric governance. Sustainability of social-ecological systems crucially depends on actors’ individual and collective behaviour guided by adequate institutions (sets of rules) and governance structures (forms of organisation). The scientific communities involved in institutional analysis of linked social-ecological systems have often developed their own and sometimes very specific analytical frameworks using quite different heuristics and languages. This diversity reflects the wide spectrum of physical transaction and transformation activities through which humans interact in social-ecological systems. Such activities include, for example, conversion of entire resource systems, withdrawal of resource units, production, provision or consumption of goods and services based on ecological and biological processes, or using the absorption capacity of ecological systems for waste deposit and pollution. Specialisation of scientific communities on a limited range of activities explains the emergence of different framings. Although necessary, such specialization should not prevent the building of a common understanding across abovementioned communities.
The core activities of WINS, i.e. discourse, research and education, will draw on both an international and a local network of scholars from various schools and disciplines, having in common their interest in institutional analysis of social-ecological systems. The association of scholars to WINS will be in the shape of affiliated faculty coming from different organisations such as HU-based faculty, other German of foreign universities and research institutes. A visiting scholar programme is intended to serve as one major mechanism to attract scholars and to integrate them into joint research and advanced academic education. Special attention will be paid to integrating young academics into the affiliation structure, for example by means of a WINS Young Researchers Club. A Deliberation Circle of affiliated scholars will support the WINS Coordinators in designing and developing the Workshop. The constitutional understanding of WINS is not to form a cluster of individuals working in the bondage of narrow rules and inflexible procedures. In contrast, the vision associated with the WINS initiative aims at making the Workshop lively by developing a culture of openness and thus welcoming everybody, provided that he or she may contribute to the WINS objectives.
WINS Workshop Coordination Group
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Konrad Hagedorn
Division of Resource Economics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Prof. Dr. Markus Hanisch
Division of Economics of Agricultural Cooperatives, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Prof. Dr. Andreas Thiel
Guest Professorship Environmental Governance, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Dr. Timothy Moss
Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS,) Research Department Institutional Change and Regional Public Goods
WINS Inception Workshop Programme (download)
WINS Inception Workshop Presentations
WINS Inauguration Ceremony (download)
Photo Gallery
© all fotos by Keerthi Kiran Bandru
Prof. Hagedorn, Initiator of WINS welcomes the participants of the WINS Inception Workshop.
Tom Evans, former co-director (research) of The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Prof. Dr. Regina Birner, Universität Hohenheim, Germany
Prof. Arild Vatn, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, International Environment and Development Studies
Prof. Dr. phil. Michael Kämper-van den Boogaart, Vice President for Academic and International Affairs, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Daniel H. Cole, Professor of Law and of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Workshop participants during a break