Tom Dedeurwaerdere

Recent history shows the benefits of formal arrangements for pooling plant genetic resources on the global scale, such as through the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. New challenges such as global infectious diseases affecting food crops and animals or the impact of climate change on shifts in production practices have lead public and private research entities, farmers and industry to pool genetic resources beyond plant genetic resources only. This paper presents a comparative analysis of such global genetic-resource commons, in the fields of microbial, plant and animal genetic resources, with the aim to contribute to the understanding of the challenges faced and to analyze possible institutional solutions. The analysis in this paper shows that, under conditions of appropriate quality control, the use of standard contracts against misappropriation and an initial investment in the creation of social networks, managing use and exchange of global genetic resource as a commons can be a desirable and effective solution to provide essential knowledge assets that contribute to conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity with major benefits both in developing and industrialized countries.

The importance of questioning the values, background assumptions, and normative orientations shaping sustainability research has been increasingly acknowledged, particularly in the context of transdisciplinary research, which aims to integrate knowledge from various scientific and societal bodies of knowledge. Nonetheless, the concept of reflexivity underlying transdisciplinary research is not sufficiently clarified and, as a result, is hardly able to support the development of social learning and social experimentation processes needed to support sustainability transitions. In particular, the concept of reflexivity is often restricted to building social legitimacy for the results of a new kind of ‘complex systems science’, with little consideration of the role of non- scientific expertise and social innovators in the design of the research practice itself.
The key hypothesis of the paper is that transdisciplinary research would benefit from adopting a pragmatist approach to reflexivity. Such an approach relates reflexivity to collective processes of problem framing and problem solving through joint experimenta- tion and social learning that directly involve the scientific and extra-scientific expertise. To test this hypothesis, the paper proposes a framework for analysing the different types of reflexive processes that play role in transdisciplinary research. The main conclusion of the analysis is the need to combine conventional consensus-oriented deliberative approaches to reflexivity with more open-ended, action-oriented transformative approaches.

This paper investigates a situation of coexistence of landraces and modern crop varieties for market-oriented production in the Yunnan rice fields in China. Through a fieldwork survey of an experiment by the government with the introduction of modern varieties in traditional villages, the paper shows that landraces and modern crop varieties can co-exist. The analysis shows that the major features that play a role in the choices made by the individual farmers between modern crop varieties and landraces are not the agronomic conditions, although they certainly play a role, but economic and social drivers. The results of the analysis allows a better under- standing of the distinct socio-economic drivers and impacts of each of the production systems. The latter can provide insights for policy strategies aimed at promoting agrobiodiversity rich landscapes in situations of co- existence of heterogeneous socio-technical production systems.

The field of the collaborative economy is characterized by a wide spectrum of sustainability oriented grassroots initiatives such as cooperatives, social businesses, associations and informal initiatives. However, many of these organisations are facing isomorphic pressures from the purely for profit organisational models and lack institutional support. For the further development of these grassroots initiatives, it is therefore important to better understand the organisational models that allow them to maintain a strong social mission in spite of these pressures. To this purpose, this paper develops a hierarchical cluster analysis of 50 collaborative economy initiatives operating in the Region of Brussels Capital. The analysis shows the existence of four main clusters of enterprises operating in the Brussels Region: foreign for-profit enterprises, start-ups, citizen initiatives and partnership social enterprises. Each of these clusters is characterized by a specific combination of analytical features such as the mission, the governance structure, the legal form and the type of economic resource mo-bilisation. On this basis, the paper explores the likely organisational trajectories of these clusters in the colla-borative economy and the various institutional strategies that can strengthen the recognition and support for the sustainability oriented grassroots initiatives.

Deforestation, forest degradation, biodiversity loss and rural poverty have long been important concerns in forest management in developing countries. Many of these countries lack appropriate forest legislation, regulation and incentives to promote sustainable forest governance ...

In this article the A. takes into account the particular relationship within contemporary cognitive science between theories of consciousness and theories of intentionality, in the sense that the problem of consciousness has become a side-issue in the study of intentional processes ...

... Page 11. Page 12. Acknowledgments The contributions to this book are the result of an international research project on reflexive governance, financed through the European Com-mission's Sixth Framework Programme from 2005 to 2010 (see http:// refgov. cpdr. ucl. ac. be). ...

Afin de contribuer à l’établissement des positions belges sur un tel régime international et surtout d’obtenir des informations représentatives sur le degré de connaissance et de prise en compte par les acteurs belges des dispositions de la Convention sur la Diversité Biologique en matière d’accès aux ressources génétiques et de partage juste et équitable des avantages résultant de leur utilisation (APA), la Direction Générale Environnement du Service Public Fédéral belge de Santé publique, Sécurité de la Chaîne alimentaire et Environnement a lancé un appel d’offre ayant pour objectif de mener une enquête. Le sujet de cette dernière est : « Marché relatif à l’analyse du degré de connaissance et de prise en compte par les acteurs belges des dispositions de la Convention sur la Diversité Biologique en matière d’accès aux ressources génétiques et de partage juste et équitable des avantages résultant de leur utilisation. » En Novembre 2005, les pouvoirs publics confièrent la réalisation...

The adoption of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010 is a major landmark for the global governance of genetic resources and traditional knowledge. The way in which it will be translated into practice will however depend on the concrete implementation in national country legislation across the world. Implementing the Nagoya Protocol compares existing ABS regimes in ten European countries, including one non-EU member and one EU candidate country, and critically explores several cross-cutting issues related to the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol in the EU. Gathering some of the most professional and widely acclaimed experts in ABS issues, this book takes a major step towards filling a gap in the vast body of literature on national and regional implementation of global commitments regarding ABS and traditional knowledge. Academics and practitioners interested in (international) environmental law, access and benefit-sha...

This chapter illustrates an innovative perspective aimed at demonstrating that the inception of the international legal regime related to the management of genetic resources and traditional knowledge long predates the discussion on ABS of the CBD, and is the product of the interaction of different legal fields: the international law on development, trade, environment and intellectual property protection.

Versions papier et électronique : le numéro est expédié par poste. Il est également accessible immédiatement en ligne. ... Versions papier et électronique : les numéros sont expédié par poste au fur et à mesure de leur parution. Tous les numéros en ligne sont immédiatement ...

ABSTRACT The 2010 Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS) is the latest protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Its core objective is to further the implementation of the third objective of the CBD, i.e. the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. The implementation of the Protocol can lead to two fundamentally different policy processes. The first type of process is based on a market-oriented self-regulatory approach, which emphasizes the self-regulating capacity of the concerned economic actors and assumes this is the most effective and efficient mechanism to achieve the objectives of the Protocol and the CBD. The second type of process is based on a normative institutionalist approach, which focuses on the norms and formal rules of institutions that support, frame, shape and constrain the actions of the players acting within them. This second approach relies on the positive institutionalization of the core principles of the ABS regime within national legislation and public policies, beyond the minimal measures for the coordination of the bilateral contracting between economic actors. While the former approach only relies on best efforts of private actors to achieve the social and environmental objectives of the CBD, the latter, by institutionalizing ABS, guarantees that the objectives of the CBD are preserved during the implementation. In other words, for the objectives of the CBD to be ensured through the implementation of the Protocol, an institutionalist approach to implementation is to be preferred. But the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol is a multi-level governance process: a continuous interaction between different policy-levels, between different departments within these levels and between different governmental and non-governmental actors will be necessary for the implementation to be effective. This multi-level context is likely to impact the choice between a self-regulatory approach and a normative institutionalist approach. This paper thus uses the case of the Nagoya Protocol in Belgium to depict how multi-level implementation favors some governance patterns at the expense of others. It shows that the multi-level governance context characterizing the Nagoya Protocol has a natural tendency towards a market-oriented self-regulatory approach, risking falling short of achieving the objectives of the Protocol.

Versions papier et électronique : le numéro est expédié par poste. Il est également accessible immédiatement en ligne. ... Versions papier et électronique : les numéros sont expédié par poste au fur et à mesure de leur parution. Tous les numéros en ligne sont immédiatement ...

ABSTRACT In recent years, there has been a marked proliferation in the literature on economic approaches to ecosystem management, which has created a subsequent need for real understanding of the scope and the limits of the economic approaches to ecosystems and biodiversity. Within this Handbook, carefully commissioned original contributions from acknowledged experts in the field address the new concepts and their applications, identify knowledge gaps and provide authoritative recommendations. The Handbook offers a wealth of case studies and further: • identifies the conceptual underpinnings of economics of ecosystems and biodiversity • demonstrates new research methodologies and their applications • provides authoritative assessment of the recent results and findings in ecosystems' services and biodiversity valuation and accounting • provides the reader with the state of the art of the research on the economics of ecosystem services and biodiversity • provides spatial explicit tools for mapping ecosystem services values for land-use planning, including in the context of business and industry. This authoritative assessment will appeal to researchers and academics at both the advanced undergraduate and post-graduate levels of environmental economics and ecological economics. Policy makers in government, business and conservation sectors will find much to engage them as the work will prove essential for implementing effective response policies for the management of ecosystems and biodiversity.

Microbial ex-situ collections provide tangible use value for private and public companies and research organizations. The paper addresses the factors that affect conservation of microbial type strains by collections and their distributional policy. A unique worldwide survey of microbial collections provides empirical support for the need of a public-private institutional design to ensure knowledge accumulation in microbial and genetic material used in life science research . Results suggest that the industry relies on public research infrastructure through microbial collections. Results also indicate that public research infrastructure is the basis for distribution of inputs for both basic and applied research.

In this article the A. takes into account the particular relationship within contemporary cognitive science between theories of consciousness and theories of intentionality, in the sense that the problem of consciousness has become a side-issue in the study of intentional processes ...

... Institutional Frameworks to Govern the Provision of Global Public Goods Eric Brousseau*, TomDedeurwaerdere**, Bernd Siebenhüner*** *EconomiX, Université de Paris X, eric@brousseau. info **CPDR, Université de Louvain, ; tom.dedeurwaerdere@cpdr.ucl.ac.be ...

Innovation in the life sciences depends on how much information is produced as well as how widely and easily it is shared. As shown by the contributions in this volume, policies governing the science commons – or alternative, more restricted information spaces – determine ...

Public service (ex situ) micro-organism collections serve to secure genetic resources for unforeseen future needs, and importantly, to provide authenticated biomaterials for contemporaneous use in private and public entities and as upstream research materials. Hence, it is important to understand the functioning and strategic decisions of these providers of public good resources.2 The existing literature tends to use case studies of individual collections. This paper uses a unique worldwide survey of microbial collections to analyse the heterogeneity among culture collections, and to empirically assess the economic and institutional conditions that contribute to this  heterogeneity with respect to conservation choice and associated industry spillovers. Results suggest that in the short run publicprivate
partnerships may indeed support knowledge accumulation with particularly strong public good properties. It is important to be aware of this strong tie, in order to steer also the long term conservation patrimony into one that offers not only short term usability but also
resilience to future unforeseen needs e.g. of emerging crop plagues.
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In this paper, we study the production and dissemination of public
knowledge goods, such as technological knowledge, generated by a
network of voluntarily cooperating innovators. We develop a privatecollective model of public knowledge production in networked
innovation systems, where group-based social preferences have an
impact on the coalition formation of developers. Our model builds on
the large empirical literature on voluntary production of pooled public
knowledge goods, including source code in communities of software
developers or data provided to open access data repositories. Our
analysis shows under which conditions social preferences, such as
‘group belonging’ or ‘peer approval’, influence the stable coalition size,
as such rationalising several stylized facts emerging from large-scale
surveys of open-source software developers, previously unaccounted for.
Furthermore, heterogeneity of social preferences is added to the model
to study the formation of stable but mixed coalitions.

At the very moment that humanity is facing a broadening ecological crisis, and that both policy makers and civil society are calling for a transition towards more sustainable societies, modern science seems incapable of providing operational solutions for managing this transition. In this context, both Noble prize laureates and high-level science officials have stressed the need of an in depth transformation of the modes of organization of scientific research for governing the transition to sustainable societies. However, existing analyses of ongoing initiatives show that most of the barriers to a major, consolidated effort in sustainability science will not be removed without far-reaching institutional change. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an incremental institutional change approach, based on a gradual institutionalization process of existing initiatives. The analysis in this paper shows that strategic research for sustainability and reform of research funding mechanisms will only be effective if they are supported at the same time by reforms of career and training paths at higher education institutions. To promote this vision, the paper proposes a set of capacity building measures that can be undertaken at the level of research funding, higher education institutions and networking.

This book addresses the gap in the existing literature on the governance of transdisciplinary research partnerships in transformational sustainability research by exploring the governance of knowledge co-production in coupled socio-ecological system dynamics. Multiple social and ecological crises raise new cross-sectoral research questions that call for an evolution in contemporary science in the direction of society-wide knowledge co-production on sustainability transformations of interdependent social and ecological systems. This book proposes a new approach to this based on enabling capacities for collaboration among scientifc researchers and societal actors with diverse values, perspectives, and research interests. By drawing upon the thriving literature on the conditions for community and multistakeholder-driven collective action, the analysis sheds new light on the governance arrangements for organizing so-called transdisciplinary research partnerships for sustainability. This book identifes robust conditions that lead to efective collaborative research with societal actors and digs deeper into capacity building for partnership research through fostering social learning on sustainability values among research partners and organizing training and knowledge exchange at institutions of higher education. The book proposes solutions for addressing collective action challenges in transdisciplinary partnerships in an accessible and broadly interdisciplinary manner to a large audience of sustainability scholars and practitioners. It will be of interest to students and researchers in the felds of sustainable development, social ecological transitions, and science policy, while also being a useful resource for engineers, QSE managers, and policymakers.