ICTA

This report summarizes the group discussions and priorities that emerged from a workshop hosted by the Gordon Foundation, the University of Waterloo's Water Institute and the Lake Futures project. The workshop was held virtually in December 2020. Its purpose was to define what is needed to improve access to water quality data in the Great Lakes region.

Would it be possible to go one step further than proposing sustainable development as the ultimate answer where people live within nature harmoniously if natural resources were not managed by central authorities, who mostly are male, aged, middle-class bureaucrats? The objective of conducting this research ‘Decoupling Developmentalism-Environmentalism Dualism in Man-Nature Relationship: The Cases of Human-Nature Conceptualization in Freshwater Ecosystems Management in Turkey’ is to find out the ways why green approaches in social, political and economic spheres in Turkey are not integrated as a first step to decouple the antagonism in man’s relationship with nature. With the major assumption of the possibility that human beings can live within nature harmoniously, the thesis tries to find out whether ways other than sustainable development approach, which sees man as custodian, cooperative and places human beings to a conqueror role are possible, if different agents in decisionmaking mechanisms are empowered both in local and national levels. The research with regards to the thesis can be classified as an approach to societalenvironmental relations, questioning the very root of the nature/society dualism. The major aim is to find out the differentiation of conceptualizing the relationship between human and nature that is not only restricted to sustainable development discourse. Moreover, the research is conducted in order to get an insight of stakeholders and decision-makers’ approaches to demystify the antagonism between nature and human beings, or conservation-development and how Turkey’s case fits to existing approaches. The scope of the research is to propose a prototype as decision-makers in order to minimize the conflict as a result of the differentiation. Bearing in mind that we have reached a stage where ecological credit crunch will define human’s limits remarks for non-teleological and ecofriendly
ways of conceptualizing the relationship between human beings and nature is explored with an emphasis of ‘who’ other than middle-class, aged, senior male bureaucrats in Ankara. The analysis tried to grasp the discrepancies of conceptualizing human-nature relationship in order to find out which segment of
the society would be closer to adopt green values, with the intention of proposing them to be involved in a greater extent to decision-making mechanisms with regards to natural resources management, as well as an attempt to grasp the
overall picture in understanding nature-human relationship in Turkey by focusing on wetland management based on the research conducted in Bafa Lake (Aydın), Uluabat Lake (Bursa), Salt Lake (Konya) and Egirdir Lake (Isparta). Thanks to the scale that is constructed by operationalizing the existing debates on environmental ethics, agents that would follow more ecologically sound discipline towards living harmoniously within nature is analysed.
Keywords: sustainable development, nature, conceptualization of environment (environmental ethics), water management, Turkey

Coping with global environmental change demands new forms of civic engagement and interaction able to transform passive audiences attending to the drama of unsustainability into committed actors for sustainability. This entails linking diverse sources of scientific knowledge with personal experiences, emotion and ethical judgments. In this paper, we assess the potential as well as the limitations of innovative theatre-based participatory tools and methods aimed at supporting sustainability learning and agent transformation. To this aim, we first review a series of experiences using theatrical performance and introduce the notion of performative methods. Second, we assess to what extent these new approaches can be of relevance in environmental action research and sustainability science, practice and learning. Finally, we list a series of key research questions to further guide methodological innovation in this promising area of sustainability science and practice. Our findings show a growing and successful use of such methodologies worldwide, both in academia and in implementation-oriented approaches. An increasing number of topics and complexity is being embraced by these methods, offering a fertile ground for innovation in participatory sustainability science.

El artículo plantea la necesidad de construir un marco de análisis complejo que logre plantear propuestas y establecer criterios para una toma de decisiones que permita avanzar hacia un proyecto de cambio social en consumo y estilos de vida sostenibles a escala estatal. Sintetiza la metodología empleada, la elaboración de escenarios de futuro, y explora diferentes incertidumbres a las que nos enfrentamos como las relativas a la alimentación, la vivienda, el transporte, los residuos, los usos del tiempo, el empleo, el modelo productivoy el económico.

Este estudio se presenta como una revisión del sistema agroalimentario actual desde el punto de vista de la energía y de los impactos de su uso, por parte de los distintos modelos de producción, distribución y consumo alimentario. Se divide en tres bloques fundamentales: i) Introducción al sistema agroalimentario mundial y a las alternativas existentes al mismo, como un contenido previo fundamental para poder entender las dinámicas y relaciones económicas, sociales y ambientales en las que nuestro sistema agroalimentario se desarrolla; ii) Consumos energéticos asociados a las fases de la cadena alimentaria, en el que se introduce la importancia de la energía en la alimentación y se desglosan una a una las principales fases del sistema de producción y distribución de alimentos y iii) Casos prácticos de comparativas energéticas entre cuatro alimentos escogidos (manzana, leche, carne de cerdo y tomate).