Abteilung Umweltsozialwissenschaften

Sustainable land governance in a telecoupled world is currently a challenge. Distant actors, institutions, and interactions shape local land uses and are assumed to affect sustainable development in critical ways as they exert new and often additional claims on land and trigger adverse local impacts like displacement. Action towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is urgently needed, as are agents of change that will initiate sustainability transformations. However, empirical studies on transformation pathways towards sustainable land governance remain scarce. Moreover, very few studies have addressed the identification of actors through whom such transformation might be achieved. To address this gap, we analysed the likelihood of actors becoming agents of change based on their aims, resources, and relational profiles in the land governance network. Our study focused on Madagascar, a country that manifests unsustainable land governance, with distant actors increasingly influencing local land use. We combined an analysis of agency with social network analysis to disentangle attributes and the transformative potential of different actors involved in land governance in northeastern Madagascar. Our results show that actors have different combinations of aims, resources, and relational profiles. Combined analysis of their agency and social networks enabled us to identify potential agents of change and yielded options for transformation actions through which they can become operational agents of change. Our research contributes to promoting pathways to sustainability transformations where actors with various agency levels and social network assets are empowered to establish sustainable land governance. The combination of agency analysis and social network analysis is an innovative method that helps to advance sustainability science.

Objective
Standardized face-to-face interviews are widely used in low and middle-income countries to collect data for social science and health research. Such interviews can be long and tedious. In an attempt to improve the respondents' experience of interviews, we developed a concept of gamified interview format by including a game element. Gamification is reported to increase engagement in tasks, but results from rigorously developed research are equivocal, and a theory of gamification is still needed.

Materials & methods
We evaluated the proposed gamification with a randomized controlled trial based on self-determination theory, specifically on the basic psychological needs theory. In total, 1266 respondents were interviewed. Single and multiple mediation analyses were used to understand the effects of the gamified interview format.

Results
Our evaluation showed that the gamification we had developed did not improve the outcome, the experience of the interview reported by respondent. The effect of the gamified interview format depended on the ability of respondents: gamification can be counterproductive if it overburdens the respondents. However, the basic psychological needs theory explained the mechanisms of action of gamification well: feeling competent and related to others improved the reported experience of the interview.

Conclusion
We emphasize the need to develop context-specific gamification and invite researchers to conduct equivalently rigorous evaluations of gamification in future studies.

When populations are displaced, say after a hurricane or a man-made crisis, water and wastewater utilities can face a real challenge in providing services to those displaced. The challenge is especially difficult when the local infrastructure was already strained in trying to meet the host community's pre-displacement demand. What most communities need are resilient water and wastewater infrastructure systems, and what we develop in this paper is an integrated approach that can achieve such systems. Our approach takes into account the operating environment of bridging what some call the humanitarian-development (HD) nexus. The HD nexus is the phase in which a community transitions toward a response paradigm that combines humanitarian response with long-term services. The HD nexus poses inherent contextual challenges, and we identify them, through interviews with municipalities in Lebanon, in their physical, social, financial, and institutional dimensions. Furthermore, we explore interactions that can inform how best to address these challenges. Our results introduce policy areas (i.e., utility pricing and establishing shared development priorities) that support this transition across the HD nexus and achieve resilient systems. Our discussions give rise to an empirical understanding of the infrastructures' operating environments and thus contribute to global conversations on sustainable development.

The recent debate on innovation-based structural change in Evolutionary Economic Geography is characterised by a strong focus on the rise of new industrial paths. This paper seeks to shift attention and cast light on radical innovation activities occurring within existing paths without necessarily leading to their dissolution. Departing from a systemic perspective of path development we propose a stage model of path transformation. We outline how radical change becomes initiated, reinforced and finally consolidated in established industrial paths. Particular attention is devoted to the ways in which actors - influenced by 'the past' and driven by visions and expectations (that is, 'the future') - exert agency to stimulate asset modification processes that are assumed to underpin path transformation and the reconfiguration of the wider support structures. The framework is applied to the analysis of the automotive industry in West Sweden, which is currently transforming towards the development of self-driving cars.

Werterhalt und Bewirtschaftung von Kanalisation und ARA können kleine Gemeinden vor Herausforderungen stellen. Es gibt Alternativen, aber lohnen sich diese? Zwei Gemeinden wurden bei der strategischen Planung für ihr neues Abwassersystem unterstützt. Viele Ziele wurden als entscheidungsrelevant identifiziert, insbesondere Umweltschutzziele. Es zeigte sich, dass dezentrale Technologien mit Stoffstromseparierung die Anforderungen häufig besser erfüllen können als konventionelle Abwassersysteme.

While economic geography has contributed deep insights into the knowledge-related determinants of industry emergence, less is known about the legitimacy that people confer to the new industries. Based on a comparative case study in the potable water reuse industry (California, United States) and the video games industry (Hamburg, Germany), this article explores the legitimation dynamics in regional industrial path development. We elaborate on how system-building/reconfiguration and institutional work processes differ between industries that are new-to-the-world versus new-to-the-region. Our framework contributes to specifying the embedded agency that supports legitimation and thus path development in these two distinct industry formation trajectories.

The exchange of information among organizations is the lifeblood of governance networks. It is a necessary condition for successful governance. Political divides between organizations often impede information exchange. We ask which organizations are most likely to broker information across political divides. We consider survey (n = 312) evidence of technical information exchange in Swiss water governance. Bayesian exponential random graph modeling results show that scientific organizations play crucial roles for cross‐divide brokerage. To a lesser extent, this also holds for higher‐level governmental agencies. Participation in policy forums is associated with a higher likelihood of brokering across political divides. There is however no clear benefit to participating in more than two or three forums. We conclude that an active role played by scientific organizations is the most promising avenue to increase information flow across political divides. Beyond this, we suggest setting up carefully constructed exchange forums and selectively engaging moderate members of subgroups.

Vor dem Hintergrund der Pestizidverbots- und Trinkwasserinitiative, die nun im Juni zur Abstimmung kommen, standen 2020 die Pestizidproblematik und Fragen zu den anhaltend hohen Nährstoffüberschüssen im Zentrum der Wasserpolitik. Am Fall Chlorothalonil wurde klar, wie schnell neue Erkenntnisse aus der (Umwelt-)Toxikologie die Wasserversorgung treffen können. Entsprechend stieg der Druck, die Vorsorge zu stärken. «Dauerthemen» sind das Ringen um mehr Stromproduktion aus Wasserkraft und um mehr Ausnahmen beim Ausscheiden der Gewässerräume.

Community involvement is recognized as a core condition for success in informal settlements upgrading. However, the wider ramifications of this requirement are not well understood. Mostly, community involvement has been equated with a narrow interpretation of participation, largely focusing on the elicitation of dwellers’ preferences at the planning stages. We argue that this approach overlooks the actual needs for livelihoods reconstruction in the course of upgrading. To better conceptualize these requirements, we propose to analyse the time–space configuration of practices, which we frame as constituting Oscillating Domestic Spaces. The concept illustrates the contingent nature of daily activities to meet livelihoods needs and how people navigate these conditions. Challenges associated with reconstructing new domestic spaces are illustrated using the Kenyan Slum Upgrading (Kensup) initiative in Nairobi, Kenya. The findings suggest that an inadequate understanding and consideration of livelihoods reconstruction reduced legitimacy of the initiative, resulted in rapid deterioration of physical amenities and relegated most of the alleged ‘beneficiaries’ deeper into poverty. We suggest that, for successful settlements upgrading, livelihoods reconstruction should be a core process in the planning, implementation and post-implementation stages.

Public resistance to sustainable innovations is oftentimes accompanied by strong negative emotions. Therefore, it is essential to better understand the underlying factors of emotions toward sustainable innovations to facilitate their successful implementation. Based on the Value-Innovation-Congruence model of Emotional responses (VICE model), we argue that positive and negative emotions toward innovations reflect whether innovations are congruent or incongruent with (i.e., support or threaten) people's core values. We tested our reasoning in two experimental studies (N = 114 and N = 246), by asking participants to evaluate innovations whose characteristics were either congruent or incongruent with egoistic values (study 1) or with biospheric values (study 1 and study 2). In line with the VICE model, we found overall that the more an innovation was perceived to have characteristics congruent with these values, and biospheric values in particular, the stronger positive and the weaker negative emotions they experienced toward the innovation, especially the more strongly people endorsed these values. Emotions, in turn, were related with acceptability of innovations. Our findings highlight that emotions toward innovations can have a systematic basis in people's values that can be addressed to ensure responsible decision-making on sustainable innovations.

Policies that mandate the adoption of renewable energy innovations could ensure their widespread adoption. Yet, such policies may not be implemented if they face strong opposition from the public, especially when strong negative emotions are at the core of opposition. In a field experiment (N = 97), we investigated people's emotional responses to two policy options aimed at increasing the adoption of heat pumps in a neighbourhood in the city of Groningen: a campaign promoting the voluntary adoption of heat pumps versus a regulation that mandates the adoption of heat pumps. In line with reactance theory, the policy option mandating the adoption of heat pumps was perceived to threaten people's freedom more and, in turn, caused stronger negative and weaker positive emotions than the policy option promoting voluntary adoption. Yet, emotions towards the policy options were also related to people's values, providing partial support for the Value-Innovation-Congruence model of Emotional responses. Stronger egoistic values were related with stronger negative emotions, particularly towards the policy option mandating adoption, while stronger biospheric values were related with stronger positive emotions, but only towards the policy option promoting voluntary adoption. Emotions, in turn, were related with acceptability of the policy options. Our findings imply that measures aimed at increasing positive emotions and reducing negative emotions towards policies aimed at increasing the adoption of energy innovations could profit from considering people's core values.

The five reflective questions can support leaders of inter- and transdisciplinary projects or programs in better understanding the challenges they experience in meetings or workshops, and in recognizing their own leadership strategies to address them (or not). By assigning explicit time for reflection and considering different integration dimensions, inter- and transdisciplinary research leaders can strengthen their integrative leadership strategies to advance integration in future meetings or workshops.

Theory of Change (ToC) has been promoted as a useful tool in sustainability research for visioning, planning, communication, monitoring, evaluation and learning. It involves a mapping of steps towards a desired long-term goal supplemented with continuous reflection on how and why change is expected to happen in a particular context. However, there is limited reported experience with the development and application of ToCs in inter- and transdisciplinary research contexts. While some previous publications have focused on ex-post application, there has been little discussion about the process of developing and using ToCs in strategic planning and monitoring in large inter- and transdisciplinary research programs. This article reports challenges and lessons learned from the experience of developing and using ToCs in the inter- and transdisciplinary research program Wings (Water and sanitation innovations for non-grid solutions). Challenges include (1) managing time constraints, (2) balancing between concrete and abstract discussions, (3) ensuring diversity in group composition, (4) fluctuating between reservations and appreciation, and (5) fulfilling both service and science roles while leading the ToC process. The experience highlights the importance of alternating formal and informal interaction formats throughout the process, ensuring heterogenous group formation, involving early career scientists, being responsive to emergent needs and making the added value of developing and using ToCs explicit and tangible for all participants. Although these lessons are mainly derived from developing ToCs within the interdisciplinary program team, they can support other programs in both their inter- and transdisciplinary research endeavors.

Intensiv genutzte Landschaften und Lebensraumfragmentierung sind mitverantwortlich für den Rückgang der Biodiversität, weil Lebensraumqualität und grundlegende biologische Prozesse wie z.B. die Ausbreitung gestört werden. Stetig wachsende Städte als überregionale Barrieren für die Vernetzung natürlicher Lebensräume stellen eine besondere Herausforderung dar (Abb. 1). Wir zeigen am Beispiel von Amphibien auf, wie eine gezielte Platzierung blaugrüner Infrastrukturen die Durchlässigkeit von Städten verbessern könnte und dadurch Lebensräume und Laichgebiete von regionaler Bedeutung besser vernetzt werden. Die Einrichtung blaugrüner Infrastrukturen ist eine vielversprechende Massnahme, um die Anpassung an den Klimawandel zu fördern und die Lebensqualität zu verbessern. Synergien zur Vernetzung der Biodiversität bieten sich auf lokaler und regionaler Ebene an.

L'utilisation intensive des paysages et la fragmentation des habitats sont en partie co-responsables du déclin de la biodiversité, dans la mesure où la qualité des habitats et des processus biologiques fondamentaux tels que la dispersion sont perturbés. L'urbanisation croissante constitue un défi particulier dans ce contexte, notamment en tant qu'obstacle transrégional à la connectivité des habitats naturels. En prenant l'exemple des amphibiens, nous montrons comment la planification ciblée d'infrastructures bleuesvertes pourrait améliorer la perméabilité des villes en reliant mieux les habitats naturels et les sites de reproduction d'importance régionale. L'installation d'infrastructures bleues-vertes est une mesure prometteuse qui est actuellement planifiée dans de nombreuses villes surtout pour promouvoir l'adaptation au changement climatique ainsi que pour l'amélioration de la qualité de vie. Cependant, des synergies pour la mise en réseau de la biodiversité sont aussi disponibles non seulement à niveaux local mais aussi régional.

A timely transition of socio-technical systems to more sustainable alternatives is crucial in mitigating climate change and other environmental problems. While innovation plays a significant role in such transitions, policy makers and the scientific community have become increasingly aware that the deliberate destabilization of existing socio-technical regimes—including associated institutions and technologies—is also often necessary. However, such aspiration is politically contested. This paper presents the Endowment-Practice-Institutions (EPI) Framework to study the contestation of institutions underpinning socio-technical regimes. By integrating key theories from Institutional Sociology and Political Economy, the framework conceives actors' capability of influencing institutional structures to be dependent on their institutional work practices and the various endowments that enable these practices. We present Japanese coal policy as an example to illustrate how the framework can be used to assess actors' institutional work and their influence on institutional outcomes. In addition to providing new theoretical insights, the framework helps to systematically analyze agency-driven mechanisms pertinent for the maintenance or destabilization of socio-technical regimes.

Institutional change is crucial for the transitions of socio-technical systems. This study addresses why some actors have strong agency by uncovering the determinants of their influence on formal institutions. We focused on a recent and major policy process in Swiss waste management as the empirical case. We carried out content analysis of consultation documents, expert surveys, online questionnaire and social network analysis. The resulting data were then analysed with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions associated with large influence. Results suggest that only several actors have a major influence on the policy output. Possessing material or non-material resources is found to be necessary yet not sufficient, as actors need to exhibit high activity and embeddedness in social networks or articulate a discourse rich in various concepts. By elucidating the configuration of endowments critical for actors' influence on formal institutions, this study yields novel insights into the ingredients of strong agency. The analytical approach we present can be applied to various settings and thus can be pursued for a systematic analysis on the determinants of actors’ influence and how it varies with political or organizational context.

Les pesticides sont avant tout utilisés dans l’agriculture, mais aussi en milieu urbain et dans d'autres domaines. Sous forme de produits phytosanitaires, ils réduisent les pertes de rendement et de qualité dues aux organismes nuisibles. Toutefois, l'emploi actuel de pesticides porte toutefois un préjudice considérable à l'environnement et en particulier à la biodiversité. En dépit de certaines lacunes, les répercussions indésirables sont bien documentées. La présente fiche d'information aborde spécifiquement les incidences de l'usage de pesticides sur l'environnement, la biodiversité et les services écosystémiques et propose des pistes d'action possibles pour la politique et la société, visant à réduire les effets indésirables. Elle ne thématise pas, par exemple, l'importance des pesticides pour la production agricole ou les incidences sur la santé humaine.

Pestizide werden primär in der Landwirtschaft, aber auch im Siedlungsraum und in weiteren Bereichen eingesetzt. Als Pflanzenschutzmittel vermindern sie Ertrags- oder Qualitätseinbussen durch Schadorganismen. Der heutige Pestizideinsatz belastet aber die Umwelt und insbesondere die Biodiversität beträchtlich. Trotz Wissenslücken sind die unerwünschten Auswirkungen gut dokumentiert. Das Faktenblatt nimmt spezifisch die Auswirkungen von Pestiziden auf Umwelt, Biodiversität und Ökosystemleistungen in den Blick und zeigt mögliche Handlungsansätze für Politik und Gesellschaft zur Reduktion der unerwünschten Nebenwirkungen des Pestizideinsatzes auf. Nicht thematisiert werden im Faktenblatt etwa die Bedeutung von Pestiziden für die landwirtschaftliche Produktion oder die Auswirkungen auf die menschliche Gesundheit.

Scientists are increasingly exploring on-site water systems to supplement conventional centralized water and wastewater infrastructure. While major technological advancements have been achieved, we still lack a systematic view on the non-technical, or institutional, elements that constitute important barriers to the uptake of on-site urban water management systems. This paper presents a conceptual framework distinguishing between institutional barriers in six key dimensions: Equity, Knowledge and Capabilities, Financial Investment, Legal and Regulatory Frameworks, Legitimacy, and Market Structures. The analysis of the existing literature covering these barriers is translated into a typology of the socio-technical complexity of different types of alternative water systems (e.g., non-potable reuse, rainwater systems, and nutrient recovery). Findings show that socio-technical complexity increases with the pollution load in the source water, correlating to potential health risk, and the number of sectors involved in the value chain of an alternative water system. For example, greywater reuse for toilet flushing might have systematically less complex institutional barriers than source separation for agricultural reuse. This study provides practitioners with easily accessible means of understanding non-technical barriers for various types of on-site reuse systems and provides researchers with a conceptual framework for capturing socio-technical complexity in the adoption of alternative water systems.

Transitions from one socio-technical regime configuration to another entail long phases of institutional complexity, where two or more field logics co-exist in a sector and induce incompatibilities and frictions. This paper presents a dynamic phase model, which characterizes the types of institutional complexity that may build up and settle across various phases of a transition, illustrated with a case study from the diffusion of onsite water reuse in San Francisco. Results from semi-structured expert interviews and a focus group demonstrate that different forms of institutional complexity may follow each other in a transition trajectory and that formidable strategic agency is needed by the actors in a field in navigating prolonged phases of competing cultural demands. Gaining a more balanced perspective of both organizational and field-level reconfigurations may help better explain why transitions succeed in some places and fail in others.

Under the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), energy infrastructure projects that are permitted by federal agencies require preparation and publication of an environmental impact assessment. However, fifty years after the passage of NEPA, agencies’ compliance behaviors, and how these behaviors might shape the risks associated with energy infrastructure, remain largely unexplored. Here, we consider how assessment documents from forty-six of the largest U.S. natural gas pipeline mega-projects address landslide risks. Using a series of text mining and content analysis methods, we evaluate the prevalence of recycled text across assessments. We find that text similarity does not correspond closely to reported risk levels – in many cases, common verbiage is used and only project-specific details (e.g., locations, numeric figures) are substituted. While such approaches likely expedite preparation of assessments and facilitate knowledge transfer between projects, we argue that common text potentially hinders clear communication of differential risks to decision-makers and the public, who may lack the technical expertise to contextualize the magnitude and severity of reported figures. In light of ongoing policy efforts to streamline lengthy and costly energy infrastructure permitting processes under NEPA, it is vital that such efforts do not undermine the risk communication requirements of the review process.

Increasing demands on ecosystems, decreasing biodiversity, and climate change are among the most pressing environmental issues of our time. As changing weather conditions are leading to increased vector-borne diseases and heat- and flood-related deaths, it is entering collective consciousness: environmental issues are human health issues. In public health, the field addressing these issues is known as environmental health. This field addresses both the effects people have on their environment as well as the effects of the environment on people. Psychology, as a discipline concerned with explaining, predicting, and changing behavior has much to contribute to these issues because human behavior is key in promoting environmental health. To date, however, an integrative view of environmental health in psychology is lacking, hampering urgently needed progress. In this paper, we review how the environment and human health are intertwined, and that much can be gained through a systemic view of environmental health in psychology. Based on a review of the literature, we suggest that psychologists unite efforts to promote an integrative science and practice of environmental health psychology, and jointly address environmental-health related behavior. The research agenda for this field will include integrating behavior change theory and intervention approaches. Thereby, psychology can potentially make an important contribution to sustained environmental health for generations to come.

Centralities are a widely studied phenomenon in network science. In policy networks, central actors are of interest because they are assumed to control information flows, to link opposing coalitions and to directly impact decision-making. First, we study what type of actor (e.g., state authorities or interest groups) is able to occupy central positions in the highly institutionalized context of policy networks. Second, we then ask whether bonding or bridging centralities prove to be more stable over time. Third, we investigate how these types of centrality influence actors' positions in a network over time. We therefore adopt a longitudinal perspective and run exponential random graph models, including lagged central network positions at t1 as the main independent variable for actors' activity and popularity at t2. Results confirm that very few actors are able to maintain central positions over time.

In the last decade, an awareness towards temporary rivers has increased globally in response to drying climates and growing human demand for water. However, social perceptions of temporary rivers have rarely been incorporated in their science and management. In this study, we advance an understanding of the socio-cultural values of temporary rivers principally in a European context. We used an ecosystem services-based approach for a participatory and deliberative exercise with 16 researchers and managers. Our results point out to two important aspects of socio-cultural values in temporary rivers. First, cultural ecosystem services have high socio-cultural values and usually represent the interests of the less influential stakeholders in related conflicts. And second, the temporal and geographical variability of these types of rivers is key to understand their socio-cultural values. As an example, the low provision of freshwater in a long non-flowing phase is one of the reasons for its high value. The results above point to future research needs that deserve more attention like the study of tradeoffs and synergies of ecosystem services and interdisciplinary research and management. We finally acknowledge the need to conduct case study research to account for geographical variation and to include the multiple views of different stakeholder groups.

Background: Products made from recycled organic materials are an important part of a circular economy, but the question is whether they will be adopted by the public. Such products can elicit strong emotional responses and public resistance. As a case in point, we studied products made from sewage waste, such as recycled toilet paper, which can serve as material alternative to wood and plastic when making household items (e.g., tables). In an experimental study, we investigated the role of values in emotional responses to such wastewater products, and whether emotional responses were influenced by value-tailored messages. We expected that people would experience positive emotions towards products that supported their values, especially when the messages emphasised the benefits of these products for their values (e.g., when the products were presented as good for the environment). We presented participants with one of two messages describing wastewater products as having positive implications for either biospheric values (i.e. positive consequences for the environment) or hedonic values (i.e. positive consequences for personal enjoyment). We predicted that the relationship between values and positive emotions would be stronger when the messages emphasised the positive implications of wastewater products for one's core values. Additionally, we predicted that emotions would be associated with acceptability and intentions to purchase the products.
Results: The more strongly people endorsed biospheric values, the more positive emotions they reported towards wastewater products. As expected, this relationship was stronger when the environmental benefits of products were emphasised. Hedonic values were significantly but weakly associated with more negative and more positive emotions, and this did not depend on the message framing. However, we found that emphasising pleasurable benefits of wastewater products reduced positive emotions in people with weaker hedonic values. Positive and negative emotions were significantly associated with higher and lower acceptability of the products and intentions to purchase the products, respectively.
Conclusions: Our findings have implications for the effective marketing of wastewater products. For people with strong biospheric values, emphasising the positive environmental consequences may promote wastewater products. Such biospheric messages do not seem to make the products less (or more) appealing for people with strong hedonic values, who do not generally have strong emotional responses to these products. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings and avenues for future research.

The basis for the assessment of ecosystem services (ES) of non-perennial rivers to date has been a comparison of the ES provision among three different hydrological phases: flowing conditions, isolated pools, and dry streambeds. Being of an opinion that this practice might promote an incomplete and hence biased ES assessment, we propose two considerations for the ES assessment of non-perennial rivers. First, the conditions of each hydrological phase can vary based on the nature of multiple aquatic states. Second, the duration, frequency, timing, and magnitude of the aquatic states matter in the ES provision. Different scenarios of flow regime should be compared instead of hydrological phases in ES assessments. Our proposal sheds some light on the complexity of non-perennial rivers and allows for a better understanding of relationships between non-perennial rivers and society. Therefore, it can serve as the basis for the proper and participatory ES assessment, face for trade-offs between ecosystem conservation and resource use and reduce conflicts among stakeholders within river and water management.

Policy discourses are important platforms for political actors to express their preferences on certain issues and are usually linked to a specific policy subsystem. From a research perspective, they have the potential to indicate ideological coalitions, policy change and learning. Using discourse network analysis, we identify core policy actors, issues, and coalitions in Switzerland's climate policy discourse and investigate how they have evolved over the past 15 years. In line with the policy process literature, we expected to see more stability than change in the discourse linked to the mature climate policy subsystem. However, our results have shown that policy discourses are more volatile than policy subsystems, and that national and international policy developments are able to trigger change, particularly in terms of the configuration of actor coalitions and the issues discussed.

As climate change is intensifying the frequency and severity of floods around the globe, adaptation is increasingly vital. Besides structural measures to mitigate flood risk, non-structural measures are known to be highly effective and low-cost. Such non-structural measures include Flood Early Warning Systems (FEWS). Effective warning creation and dissemination are crucial to successful FEWS. Despite extensive bodies of research that cross the boundaries between disciplines and application domains, systematic understanding of the detailed aspects contributing to the effectiveness of flood warnings is lacking. We systematically review the state-of-the-art in risk perception and warning communication present in academic (and grey) literature for FEWS. We focus on the elements of risk warnings specifically, rather than reviewing the topic of risk communication in general. We start with exploring how personal attributes affect individual risk perception related to flood warnings. We then deconstruct flood warnings into three basic components: content, format and dissemination channel. Most importantly, we found 21 individual elements (options) for these components, each associated with varying levels of support for their effectiveness in literature. Important caveats were identified, such as a lack of research into the speech format and SMS channel. We then describe and visualise the warning creation process, providing a framework for guidance. Accelerating technological advancement necessitates continued research into the effectiveness of novel formats and channels, rendering the currently most widely supported and researched elements increasingly obsolete. Further research is needed to explore the complex interplay between elements, i.e., how do different combinations impact effectiveness? Finally, little is known about the transferability of our findings to Africa, Asia and South America, as industrialised countries dominate the research. We hope our findings will contribute to improved understanding, and support the practice of creating effective flood warnings.

Strategic placement of water-sensitive urban design (WSUD) is essential in optimising its performance and maximising co-benefits. However, little is known about the current placement and interconnectedness between WSUD assets and the performance of current planning strategies. We evaluated the placement of existing WSUDs in a highly urbanised catchment in Sydney, Australia. We used a three-step process: (1) compiling a comprehensive spatial asset database, (2) performing spatial correlation analysis between asset locations and biophysical, urban form and socioeconomic variables and (3) using a novel approach to facilitate holistic understanding through analysing asset locations compared with the outcome of the spatial suitability analysis tool (SSANTO). WSUD coverage was generally low, with clustering in some municipalities. Placement was constrained by physical variables, such as slope, limited space and varying land uses. However, placement was not detectably influenced by most socioeconomic variables. SSANTO's suitability score at asset locations was only slightly higher than average, suggesting that the placement of existing WSUD was opportunistic, rather than strategically planned. Further development and implementation of tools able to account for spatial constraints will help guide future WSUD placement as a component of green urban stormwater management.

Sanitation and wastewater management are highly relevant for reaching a number of interconnected sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially SDG 6, the provision of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation for all as well as protection of water resources against pollution, and SDG 14.1, reducing nutrient emissions to the marine environment. Recent evidence increasingly shows that conventional sewer-based wastewater management will not be able to reach these targets. Rather than further optimizing and diffusing this ageing infrastructure paradigm, radical innovations like urine source separation technologies could help to leapfrog towards faster achievement of the SDGs. The technology would simplify on-site sanitation and develop a closed-loop nutrient cycle, thereby allowing for exceptionally high nutrient removal from wastewater and direct reuse in agriculture from the first day of implementation. Radical innovations, however, need decades to materialize. Based on a review of relevant academic and grey literature, we show how the past three decades of development of urine source separation have brought breakthroughs in toilet design and treatment processes, enabling the technology's value chain to reach the brink of maturity. In a short outlook, we discuss how the technology may reach global diffusion over the next decade, with the main remaining challenges relating to the creation of mass-markets for urine-diverting toilets, automation and mass-production of treatment systems, and the legitimation of fertilizer produced from urine in the agricultural sector.

During a civil war and its aftermath, rival powerholders frequently engage in decision-making over land use, for example, via land acquisitions or legal reforms. This paper explores how powerholders influence land use decision-making and what their engagement implies for territorial control. We analyse three cases of land use changes in Myanmar's south between 1990 and 2015, where the Myanmar state and an ethnic minority organization fought over territorial control. We gathered qualitative data with a mix of methods and visualised actor networks and institutions. Our analysis reveals that the state managed to increasingly control decision-making over local land use from a distance by employing actor alliances and institutions such as laws and incentives, whereas the ethnic organization lost influence. We conclude that engaging in land use decision-making plays a crucial role in influencing the outcomes of a civil war and that it represents a form of war- and state-making.

Digital technologies can be important to policy-makers and public servants, as these technologies can increase infrastructure performance and reduce environmental impacts. For example, utilizing data from sensors in sewer systems can improve their management, which in turn may result in better surface water quality. Whether such big data from sensors is utilized is, however, not only a technical issue, but also depends on different types of social and institutional conditions. Our article identifies individual, organizational, and institutional barriers at the level of sub-states that hinder the evaluation of data from sewer systems. We employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to compare 23 Swiss sub-states and find that two barriers at different levels can each hinder data evaluation on their own. More specifically, either a lack of vision at the individual level or a lack of resources at the organizational level hinder the evaluation of data. Findings suggest that taking into account different levels is crucial for understanding digital transformation in public organizations.

Sustainability transitions are key to addressing grand challenges confronting humanity, yet there are many developments that undermine this endeavor. For example, new products and industries emerge that exacerbate existing challenges, instead of mitigating them. Context systems such as policy making, finance, education or independent journalism, which provide critical resources for transitions, transform in ways that hamper their ability to support sustainability transitions. We argue that transitions research needs explicitly to confront unfavorable developments in order to create a broader repertoire of strategies, including precautionary policies, to better orchestrate sustainability transitions.

This paper contributes to the geography of transitions literature by conceptualizing transition trajectories from a multi-scalar perspective. It combines an institutional perspective of transitions with conceptions of scale from human geography to derive a framework which explicates how (de-)institutionalization and re-scaling mechanisms condition different transition trajectories. Our conceptual elaborations show that the traditional local-global niche cumulation and upscaling trajectory can be complemented with two alternative trajectories that build on analytically different sequences of institutionalization and re-scaling processes. This is illustrated through a case study of technology standardization in the sanitation sector, more specifically the development of the ISO 30500 standard for non-sewered sanitation systems, which was initiated by a consortium led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The observed transition trajectory departs from key assumptions of the local-global niche model, with actors engaging in direct institutionalization at the global level, followed by re-scaling global rationalities into different (sub-)national contexts.

Aquatische und terrestrische Ökosysteme sind eng miteinander verknüpft - sowohl durch die Bewegungen von Organismen wie auch durch den Austausch von Nährstoffen oder Schadstoffen. Dennoch werden in der Regel Wasser- und Land-Ökosysteme isoliert voneinander betrachtet und verwaltet. Diese Silo-Mentalität in Forschung, Praxis und Gesetzgebung behindert integrative Ansätze für den effektiveren Schutz der Biodiversität.

Local fiscal transfer rules in Turkey were revised in 2008, such that, while a significant portion of transfers continued to be based on population size, the remainder was distributed based on other criteria such as the development index. In this paper, we investigate the extent of fiscal fairness in Turkey during the period 2008–2012. We define fiscal fairness by the degree of association of transfers and local spending with the structural and socioeconomic indicators, as opposed to political-party associations. Our empirical analysis reveals that while local fiscal transfers during the investigated period were significantly correlated with the socioeconomic and structural indicators, political factors also played a significant role. Particularly, we find robust evidence that cities where the incumbent party-AKP (Justice and Development Party), who won significantly more votes in the general elections than the main opposition party-CHP (Republican People's Party), received significantly more transfers and fiscal spending than the rest. The evidence also suggests that the metropolitan municipalities held by CHP received significantly more government expenditure than the rest; though less robust than the former. This observation also holds for the metropolitan municipalities held by AKP. Additionally, we observe that cities with metropolitan municipalities that were governed by either the incumbent or the main opposition party, were less fiscally independent than the rest. We also note, however, that given the increasing opacity in data reporting, this study does not account for the large amounts of public funds that are allocated in tenders with special invitees, via public–private partnerships or in the form of social assistance, although they are also likely to constitute a major component of politically-biased fiscal transfers during the study period.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) charts a new path of balance for humanity and the planet. The highly interconnected SDGs will only be achieved in their entirety through transformative changes in our societies. Recent studies on the interactions between the SDGs identify the conservation of biodiversity as one of the most potent levers to achieve sustainability. The biodiversity-focused SDGs 14 (life below water) and 15 (life on land) emerge as multipliers of co-benefits across the goals. This factsheet aims to explain the importance of biodiversity for implementing all SDGs and to provide decision makers with options and entry points for transformative change.

Die Agenda 2030 für nachhaltige Entwicklung mit den darin enthaltenen 17 globalen Zielen für nachhaltige Entwicklung (Sustainable Development Goals SDGs) zeigt einen neuen Weg des Gleichgewichts für die Menschheit und den Planeten auf. Die SDGs sind stark miteinander verknüpft. Deshalb werden sie in ihrer Gesamtheit nur durch transformativen Wandel unserer Gesellschaften erreicht werden können. Neuere Studien zu den Wechselwirkungen zwischen den SDGs haben den Erhalt der Biodiversität als einen der stärksten Hebel zur Erreichung von Nachhaltigkeit identifiziert. Die auf Biodiversität fokussierten SDGs 14 (Leben unter Wasser) und 15 (Leben an Land) zeigen eine ausgesprochen positive Wirkung, einen Zusatznutzen, auf die Erreichung anderer Ziele. Dieses Faktenblatt erläutert die Bedeutung der Biodiversität und zeigt Optionen für Entscheidungsträger auf, welche Ansatzpunkte für transformativen Wandel genutzt werden können.

Environmental frames are widely used in an effort to increase public support for energy sources in the sustainable energy transition. Research suggests that environmental frames are most effective when they are congruent with people's biospheric values. Yet, this value-congruence account has been mainly tested for promoting behaviors, policies or products that have clear environmental benefits. But what if they do not? For example, what if energy sources are promoted as green but are not seen as such by the public? We extend the value-congruence account by proposing that besides the congruence between the frames and biospheric values, it is important to consider how much the products themselves are congruent with environmental frames and biospheric values. We tested this novel value-frame-product account by evaluating the effectiveness of environmental frames (vs. financial frames) on the acceptability of energy sources that are typically seen as high, moderate, and low in environmental friendliness, and depending on how strongly people endorse biospheric values. Overall, the results supported none of the congruence accounts, suggesting that matching frames (and products) with people's values might be less effective in enhancing acceptability of products than previously thought. Instead, environmental framing increased the acceptability of all energy sources, independent of people's biospheric values and the perceived environmental friendliness of those energy sources. Moreover, highly environmentally friendly energy sources were more acceptable and evaluated more positively, especially among people who strongly endorsed biospheric values. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study.

Integration is a key process in transdisciplinary research and knowledge co-production. Nonetheless, it is often used as a buzzword without specifying what exactly it means or what actually happens during integration. We propose conceptualizing integration as a multidimensional interactive process. We characterize it as an open-ended learning process without pre-determined outcomes. Integration designates relations established throughout a transdisciplinary research process between elements that were not previously related. Those elements are participants in the process and their thought-styles and thought-collectives and more specifically pieces of knowledge, ideas, or practices from different thought-collectives as well as views of individual researchers and practitioners. Integration can happen at manifold instances of a transdisciplinary research process. It can take place among two, several, or all participants and can be one-sided or mutual. It might include insights, practices, frameworks, or concepts shared by two, several, or all participants. Consensus is only one along with other ways of retaining plurality of thought-styles and seeing integration as a balance between them that remains subject to continuous revision. To analyse or achieve effective integration, further dimensions beyond the cognitive have to be taken into account including at least an emotional and a social-interactional dimension.

This article emphasizes the importance of actor networks for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and suggests how a network perspective can contribute to our understanding of (global) sustainability governance. Actor networks are often driven by homophily, as actors tend to interact with those similar to them. Yet, not least in a context sustainability governance, heterophily of actor cooperation is claimed to be beneficial. In contrast to homophily, heterophily represents situations where actors cooperate with those that are different, and thus combine diverse sets of knowledge and competences. Based on the case of Swiss actors involved in the implementation of the SDG 6 on water in countries of the global South, we use social network analysis and qualitative interview data to study how homophily and heterophily influence actors' information exchange. According to quantitative network data, information exchange between actors is indeed influenced by homophily regarding the type of actor and the policy forums actors are participating in. Nevertheless, we also find evidence for heterophily, as actors tend to exchange information with actors with different methodological foci. Furthermore, qualitative interview data show that actors perceive heterophilous network ties as beneficial for SDG implementation.

Public infrastructure decisions affect many stakeholders with various benefits and costs. For public decisions, it is crucial that decision-making processes and outcomes are fair. Fairness concepts have rarely been explored in public infrastructure planning. We close this gap for a global issue of growing importance: replacing sewer-based, centralized by decentralized wastewater systems. We empirically study fairness principles in this policy-relevant context, and identify possible influencing factors in a representative online survey of 472 Swiss German residents. In a transition phase, innovative, decentralized pilot wastewater systems are installed in households. We designed two vignettes for this context to test the adhesion to principles of distributive justice—equality, equity, and need—at individual and community levels. A third vignette tests procedural justice with increasing fulfilment of fair process criteria. The results confirm our hypotheses: equity is perceived as fairer than equality at individual and collective levels. Contrary to expectations and literature, need is perceived as even fairer than equity. Procedural justice results confirm literature, e.g., the majority (92%) of respondents deems a policy fair that includes them in decision-making. Only few demographic and explanatory factors are significantly correlated with respondents' fairness perceptions. Although unexpected, this is positive, implying that introducing decentralized wastewater technology can be designed for the entire population independent of characteristics of individuals. Generally, our results confirm literature: fairness perceptions depend on the circumstances. Hence, they should be elicited in the exact application context to be able to enter negotiation processes and provide concrete advice to decision makers.

This study investigates the influence of MPs' co-sponsorship activities on their agenda-setting success. It analyses the strategic choices open to MPs who engage in co-sponsorship, the resulting centralities in the co-sponsorship network, and the effects on the success of parliamentary proposals. MPs can develop their co-sponsorship efforts within their party family ('bonding') or beyond it ('bridging'), and they can use co-sponsorship both to receive political support ('support-seeking') and to provide it ('support-providing'). The success of these different co-sponsorship strategies is empirically assessed here by investigating the acceptance or refusal of parliamentary proposals introduced in the Swiss Parliament from 2003 to 2015. The bridging/support-seeking strategy that pro-actively recruits co-sponsors across party families is the most rewarding. This holds especially for MPs belonging to pole parties, who overall appear as more sensitive to centrality-related effects than MPs of moderate right parties.
 

Poor mental health is a neglected problem worldwide. People living through humanitarian emergencies suffer not only from scarcity of water, food and poor hygiene but also from poor mental health. Mental disorders can impair health-related daily behavior, handwashing with soap, of vulnerable individuals. However, it is unknown whether handwashing interventions have a different impact on people with poor mental health. A longitudinal study collected data from 638 people in Malawi at baseline and follow-up. We conducted face-to-face interviews with a quantitative questionnaire that used the RANAS approach to behavior change to measure factors underlying handwashing. We assessed mental health using the validated Chichewa version of the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20). Mental health was impaired in 27% of the people assessed. We found a negative relationship between mental health and handwashing after the intervention (r = - 0.083*). The mediation analysis revealed significant indirect effects of mental health on handwashing via factors feelings and difficulty in getting soap for handwashing. These findings imply that mental health assessment should be included in WASH surveys. Interventions that increase positive emotions would make behavior change more successful in populations with a significant proportion of people with poor mental health. This research is especially relevant to emergency contexts.

Despite mounting urgency to mitigate climate change, new coal mines have recently been approved in various countries, including in Southeast Asia and Australia. Adani's Carmichael coal mine project in the Galilee Basin, Queensland (Australia), was approved in June 2019 after 9 years of political contestation. Counteracting global efforts to decarbonise energy systems, this mine will substantially increase Australia's per capita CO₂ emissions, which are already among the highest in the world. Australia’s deepening carbon lock-in can be attributed to the essential economic role played by the coal industry, which gives it structural power to dominate political dynamics. Furthermore, tenacious networks among the traditional mass media, mining companies, and their shareholders have reinforced the politico-economic influence of the industry, allowing the mass media to provide a venue for the industry's outside lobbying strategies as well as ample backing for its discursive legitimisation with pro-coal narratives. To investigate the enduring symbiosis between the coal industry, business interests, the Australian state, and mainstream media, we draw on natural language processing techniques and systematically study discourses about the coal mine in traditional and social media between 2017 and 2020. Our results indicate that while the mine's approval was aided by the pro-coal narratives of Queensland's main daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail, collective public sentiment on Twitter has diverged significantly from the newspaper's stance. The rationale for the mine's approval, notwithstanding increasing public contestation, lies in the enduring symbiosis between the traditional economic actors and the state; and yet, our results highlight a potential corner of the discursive battlefield favourable for hosting more diverse arguments.

In explaining how socio-technical transitions occur, prevailing theories focus on bottom-up processes driven by new entrants, diverse actors and open-ended exploration in small, protected niches. Incumbent firms are frequently portrayed as hampering change, while managerial strategies using traditional public policy instruments remain understudied. Addressing this bias, we examine strategies used by networks of incumbent state and industry actors in China, Japan and California to accelerate the production and diffusion of battery-electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles. We build a comprehensive framework that systematically marries mechanisms of industrial transformation described in developmental-state literature with theories of socio-technical change from transitions scholarship. We then use a vast dataset of secondary documents and interviews to examine the principal strategies employed in each country, identifying variations over two phases of technological diffusion. Findings reveal that the incumbent actor networks in each country have collectively employed multiple but similar strategies. Yet closer inspection of specific policy instruments, such as regulations and performance-based incentives, along with ambitions to phase out vehicles with internal combustion engines, reveals differences across cases. We explain these by considering different motivations for each country’s transition and influencing socio-political conditions. Our study contributes to the enrichment of future transitions research in at least two ways. Theoretically, by integrating literature on transitions and developmental states, we deepen understanding of how incumbent state and market actors can attempt to drive socio-technical change. Empirically, our analysis provides important evidence for understanding the strategies driving top-down transitions outside northern Europe, and the conditions affecting instrument choice.

Climate change continues to affect the availability and quantity of water needed for food production globally. Due to this, authorities have increasingly advocated for the adoption of water-saving practices and technologies such as drip irrigation systems to increase food production as well as efficiently conserve dwindling water resources. Such technologies promise efficiency but pose adoption challenges, especially to farmers as they transition from either rainfed agriculture or other less efficient irrigation technologies. This paper investigated the challenges associated with the adoption of drip irrigation with a focus on the Kenyan context. We employ insights from the sociotechnical systems approach that take into account technology elements such as infrastructures, rationale and meaning, organizational modes, social interactions, and time and space in relation to farmers’ capabilities to transition. The paper elucidates new capabilities that policy should take into account that smallholder farmers require to transition toward drip irrigation technology consequently improving their yields. Relevant and recently published scholarly articles and grey literature, formed the database and were reviewed and qualitatively analyzed. To complement these, eight key informants were consulted. Insights gathered are relevant to practitioners within the drip irrigation field and the method is potentially useful for analysis of other agricultural technology systems.

Surface water flooding poses significant threats to communities and environments. This threat has historically been managed through sewers and combined sewer overflows; however, it is now well recognised that, alone, these legacy systems are insufficient to manage the growing pressures from climate change, population growth and urbanisation. This realisation has led to research and practice developing a broad range of new technologies to enhance the coping capacities of existing sewer systems through capturing and attenuating or reusing surface water across catchments using sustainable drainage systems (SuDS). However, despite technical understanding, industry champions and significant best practice, SuDS remain underutilised, particularly at a synergistic catchment scale where they can be most effective. In this paper we respond to this challenge by developing preliminary screening tools to enhance the visibility of SuDS among the multidisciplinary decision-makers responsible for directing strategic surface water management. We achieve this through upscaling a regional decision support model and demonstrating implementation across a case study in South West England. We find that it is possible to use easily accessible and open-source data to provide initial indications of SuDS opportunities and that this early visibility in the decision-making process can be used to support the consideration of novel and effective surface water management strategies.

Sustainability transitions focus on the fundamental transformation of the existing socio- technical system towards a more sustainable mode of production and consumption. Emerged in Europe two decades ago, this new research field has already exerted impacts on the green transition policy practices of many countries and regions. In recent years, transition studies have increasingly taken geography into account, resulting in a new paradigm of geography of sustainability transitions. This emerging paradigm focuses on the role of spatial embeddedness and multi- scalar interactions in explaining where transitions take place. This article provides a critical overview of the development in the geography of sustainability transitions research, and suggests five promising avenues for future transition research in the Chinese context: 1) to develop concepts and theorize from the Chinese context; 2) to link sustainability transitions with latecomer regions' industry catch-up; 3) to compare the sustainability transitions in cities with different leading industries; 4) to pay more attention to the role of local agency through the lens of multi-scalar interactions; and 5) to explore the impact of digitalization and artificial intelligence on sustainability transitions.

This editorial introduces a special issue with 27 short viewpoints about future research on transition studies, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of this journal.

Theories of policymaking often focus on subsystems within a larger, overarching governance system. However, subsystem identification is complicated by the complexity of governance systems, characterized by multiple, interrelated issues, multi‐level interactions, and a diverse set of organizations. This study suggests an empirical, bottom‐up methodology to identify subsystems. Subsystems are identified based on bundles of similar observed organizational activity. The study further suggests a set of three elementary criteria to classify individual subsystems. In order to prove the value of the methodology, subsystems are identified through cluster analysis, and subsequently classified in a study of Swiss water governance. Results suggest that Swiss water governance can be understood as a network of overlapping subsystems connected by boundary penetrating organizations, with high‐conflict and quiet politics subgroups. The study shows that a principled analysis of subsystems as the interconnected, constituent parts of complex governance systems offers insights into important contextual factors shaping outcomes. Such insights are prerequisite knowledge in order to understand and navigate complex systems for researchers and practitioners alike.

There is a growing demand for public participation in environmental decision-making. However, it is unclear how a large number of citizens can best engage in such complex public policy decision processes. This need from the civil society challenges the OR community to develop online decision-making tools. This article reports on a feasibility assessment of swing weight elicitation, implemented online, for real-world decisions about future wastewater infrastructure. Eliciting weights with the swing method is common in MAVT/MAUT, but not online. A total of 298 affected citizens from the Paris region answered the online swing weight elicitation survey. Another 357 citizens directly rated objectives. Three aspects of learning in the context of MCDA were considered: did participants learn facts about the wastewater topic? Did they comply with the swing elicitation process, i.e. follow the instructions? Did participants learn about their preferences? Factual learning was limited. Process compliance was really low (12%), leading to a number of recommendations for improving the interface for online swing weight elicitation. The collected preferences differed statistically significantly between the compliant and non-compliant participants, and also between the non-compliant and direct rating respondents. This emphasised the effect of the elicitation method on preference construction. Moreover, more participants experienced a strengthening of pre-existing opinions than a change in opinion, and most reported being uncertain about their answers. This calls for better understanding process learning and preference construction. We discuss our developed procedure for online swing weight elicitation, recommend ways to improve swing online surveys, and suggest interesting future research lines that would allow empirically verifying our propositions.

Current Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) models are either purely technical or overly simplified, lacking consideration of urban planning and stakeholder preferences to adequately support stakeholders. We developed the Urban Biophysical Environments and Technologies Simulator (UrbanBEATS), which integrates stormwater management with urban planning to support the design and implementation of WSUD. This study specifically describes and tests UrbanBEATS' WSUD Planning Module, which combines spatial analysis, infrastructure design, preference elicitation and Monte Carlo methods to generate feasible stormwater management and harvesting infrastructure options in greenfield and existing urban environments. By applying UrbanBEATS to a real-world greenfield development case study in Melbourne, Australia (with data sourced from the project's water management plans and design consultants), we explore the variety of options generated by the model and analyse them collectively to demonstrate that UrbanBEATS can design similar WSUD systems (e.g. select suitable technology types, their sizes and locations) to actual infrastructure choices.

During extreme population displacement events, water and wastewater infrastructure systems may be challenged as host communities attempt to provide service to suddenly increased populations. As such, improving the resilience of water and wastewater systems is necessary to provide continuous services to both host and displaced persons. In protracted displacement, infrastructure's resilience is further challenged by the need to transition from short-term humanitarian response to long-term development strategies. This study identifies examples of constraints that create the transitional space of the humanitarian-development nexus. Focusing on the current population displacement in Lebanon, data was collected through 10 semi-structured interviews in 2018 with leadership in local municipalities. Using open coding, the interview content was qualitatively analyzed, and emergent themes related to constraints across the technical, social, economic, and institutional dimensions were revealed. Results indicate that the stress from housing and different water and wastewater-use profiles have impacted each system's capacity to meet the increased demand. Additionally, the ability of municipalities to respond to the increased demand has been stressed by lack of funds for developing new water and wastewater infrastructure projects, as well as discrepancy in stakeholders' priorities in regard to these projects. Findings of this study would better inform the development efforts in providing continuous water and wastewater services to both host and displaced persons.

We review the literature examining collaborative governance processes from a network perspective and evaluate the extent to which it tackles important conceptual and methodological challenges. In particular, we assess whether scholars clearly identify the boundaries of the network, define nodes and the nature of ties, and examine how they deal with missing data, account for tie strength, take tie multiplexity into account, and study networks over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for the collaborative governance literature and ways to address the shortcomings in existing research.

Wie kann die Abwasserentsorgung in einer ländlichen Gemeinde in der Schweiz in Zukunft gewährleistet werden? Welche Bedürfnisse der lokalen Nutzer/-innen muss ein modernes Abwassersystem erfüllen? Das Wasserforschungsinstitut Eawag und das Amt für Umwelt Solothurn (AfU) sind diesen Fragen gemeinsam nachgegangen und zeigen die Ergebnisse in der vorliegenden Studie auf.
In der Schweiz ist die überwiegende Mehrheit aller Einwohner/-innen an ein zentrales, netzgebundenes Abwassersystem angeschlossen. Auch im Kanton Solothurn besitzen alle ländlichen Gemeinden ein solches System aus Kanalisation und Abwasserreinigungsanlage (ARA). Diese Systeme wurden ursprünglich mit Subventionen vom Kanton und vom Bund realisiert. Langfristig müssen diese nach dem Verursacherprinzip durch Gebühren finanziert werden.

How to ensure future wastewater disposal in rural communities in Switzerland? What needs of local stakeholders should a modern wastewater system meet? Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, and the Office for the Environment Solothurn (AfU) have jointly investigated these questions and present the results in this study.
In Switzerland, the vast majority of inhabitants are connected to a centralized, grid-based sewer system. In the canton of Solothurn, all rural municipalities make use of such a system consisting of a sewer network and a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). From the 1960s to the early 1990s, communities initially implemented these systems with subsidies from the cantonal and the federal government. To finance these systems in the long term, legal regulations prescribe fees to be charged according to the polluter-pays-principle.

The literature on catch-up cycles has not yet systematically conceptualized how catch-up dynamics differ between the various industries that are emerging in the green techno-economic paradigm. We address this gap by connecting catch-up cycle theory with an industry typology from global innovation systems (GISs) literature, which distinguishes four generic industry types with footloose, spatially sticky, market-, and production-anchored innovation system characteristics. Catch-up patterns in early industry lifecycle stages are expected to systematically differ between these four industry types. This assumption is explored based on a comparative case study of the solar photovoltaics, wind power, solar water heaters, and membrane bioreactors industries, each of which exemplifies one of the four generic GIS configurations. We find that the speed and disruptiveness of early leadership changes differ significantly between the four industries, and that the effectiveness of capability upgrading strategies and catching-up policies are contingent on the innovation and valuation characteristics of each industry’s underlying GIS type.

This viewpoint takes stock with the 'geography of sustainability transitions' (GOST) as it is presented in the transitions research agenda. GOST has been a relatively recent addition to transition theorizing, addressing the need for greater sensitivity and attention to the scales, spatialities, and context-specific factors that shape transitions. In our view, the agenda represents a rather narrow perspective on GOST, which is geared to two empirical themes, namely urban transitions and transitions in developing countries. While these are relevant and topical issues, the section lacks sufficient acknowledgement of the increasing engagement of geographers with transitions studies and the theoretical approaches they have brought to bear on the field. This short commentary thus aims at complementing the agenda paper by outlining a theoretical research agenda that is emerging in this field, framed around the conceptualization of scales, places and spaces in which transitions unfold.

Vor dem Hintergrund der Pestizidverbots- und der Trinkwasserinitiative, aber auch nach Bekanntwerden neuer Resultate zum ungenügenden Grundwasserschutz, standen 2019 vor allem Fragen zur Qualität der Wasserressourcen und des Trinkwassers im Zentrum der Wasserpolitik. Fortgesetzt wurde das Ringen um mehr Stromproduktion aus Wasserkraft durch Lockerungen beim Gewässer- und Landschaftsschutz und um mehr Ausnahmen beim Ausscheiden des Gewässerraums.

A persistent conundrum for practitioners and researchers in the development context is that, often, newly provided and improved basic services are not maintained by users despite seemingly superior functionality and user convenience. We argue that one major reason for this is an insufficient understanding of the context in which users have to manage their daily lives. We therefore propose an approach to analysing the embedding of basic services that focuses on the users' daily practices. We do so by borrowing insights from 'socio-technical transitions' and 'practice theory' in developing our concept of oscillating domestic spaces. The concept reflects the need for people to constantly respond to quickly changing and precarious circumstances by rearranging their daily practices in time and space and developing a multiplicity of alternative options and partial solutions. We illustrate the analytical approach in a case study of sanitation access in informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya. The analysis shows how the introduction of a container-based toilet resulted in partial embedding. The innovation anchored to only a part of the oscillating domestic spaces and was in disarray with the needs of users most of the time. The conceptual approach contributes to the understanding about how users take part in sustainability transitions as well as the added value of the time-space dimension in analysing practices in highly complex contexts. We conclude by reflecting on the potential applicability of the analytical approach to transition cases in the Global North.

The study evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention to improve complementary food hygiene behaviors among child caregivers in rural Malawi. Formative research and intervention development was grounded in the risk, attitude, norms, ability, and self-regulation (RANAS) model and targeted washing hands and kitchen utensils with soap, safe utensil storage, reheating of leftover food, and feeding of children by caregivers. Longitudinal research was applied at baseline and follow-up surveys among 320 caregivers. Determinants of selected behaviors were found, and interventions were developed based on the behavior change techniques aligned with these determinants in the RANAS model. The intervention was delivered over 9 months through group (cluster) meetings and household visits and included demonstrations, games, rewards, and songs. We randomly assigned villages to the control or intervention group. Follow-up results indicated a significant increase in three targeted behaviors (washing kitchen utensils with soap, safe utensil storage, and handwashing with soap) among intervention recipients. Several psychosocial factors differed significantly between the intervention and control groups. Mediation results showed that the intervention had a significant effect on these three targeted behaviors. For handwashing, feelings, others' behavior in the household, and remembering; for washing kitchen utensils, others' behavior in the household and difficulty to get enough soap; for safe utensils storage, others' behavior in the village and remembering mediated the effect of the intervention on the targeted behaviors. The study demonstrated that targeting food hygiene behaviors with a theory-driven behavior change approach using psychosocial factors can improve the behavior of child caregivers in rural Malawi.

Members of parliament are key actors for the implementation of energy transitions, such as phasing out nuclear power. Before legislators can cast their maybe decisive vote in parliament, they need to run for office and actively strive for election. This paper assesses what political candidates oppose renewable energy transitions and questions whether the energy issue matters in national elections, and thus has consequences for the implementation of new sustainable energy sources. We analyze these questions by first describing the specific characteristics of political candidates. The paper then evaluates the relevance of the energy issue for electoral success in three national elections in Switzerland (2007, 2012, and 2015). Based on candidate data from the voting advice application smartvote.ch, we find that female candidates support ETs more than men do; that especially the French‐speaking part of the country is more in favor of a nuclear phase‐out, and that younger candidates are also more open toward restructuring the energy system than older candidates are. Our models further show that the energy issue does not matter in elections, independently from its salience in the respective election campaigns. Candidates are thus relatively free to choose their position on the issue and do not have to fear consequences at the ballot. However, candidates of center parties, in contrast to the pole parties, are sensitive to the energy issue and reflect public mood in their positions.

Conventional pesticides are associated with numerous human and environmental health risks. Nevertheless, an increasing number of smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries are using conventional pesticides. Adopting safer pest management requires farmers to obtain new information. However, little is known how farmers develop an information need, seek, and use pest management related information, and whether this process differs for organic and conventional pest management strategies. In this qualitative study, we investigated pest-related information behavior in depth, from farmers' own perspective. Using an ethnographic approach, we conducted 46 semi-structured interviews, 15 on-farm observations and 302 structured questionnaire interviews with farmers in Wakiso District, Uganda, in 2017. Our results indicated that farmers develop information needs when adopting new farming practices, or when presented with disruptive information (e.g. when new pests emerged). This prompted farmers to seek information actively, or they received passive information. Whether farmers used the new information depended on successful trial of the new pest management strategy, and on the credibility of the source. Most revealing, our results suggested important differences in information behavior between conventional and organic pest management strategies. Sources of information for conventional pesticides were well-integrated into farmers' daily lives and comprised pesticide dealers and fellow farmers. Conversely, information on organic strategies was provided through external sources (e.g. NGOs), and was not available at times when farmers developed an information need. Our results imply that farmers are most likely receptive to organic pest management information at times when they develop an information need (e.g. when encountering a new pest). To promote safer pest management, information about organic and integrated pest management should be made continuously available in farmers' lives. Furthermore, we recommend leveraging established information channels (e.g. dealers) among pesticide users to promote safer use practices.

Horizontal cooperation among political systems is crucial for addressing large-scale and boundary-crossing policy problems. This article introduces and analyzes policy-specific factors that help to explain horizontal cooperation among subnational-governments. It thereby builds on but specifies arguments from the literature on horizontal federalism that has usually been focusing on general institutional and societal factors to explain cooperation. These factors capture how a given policy problem unfolds (problem pressure), the ways in which subnational governments are exposed to and experience its consequences in similar or unequal ways (functional interdependencies and their symmetry), and how the issues are treated domestically (problem awareness). We illustrate the potential importance of these factors by analyzing treaties among Swiss substates in the water domain and relying on network analytic methods. We find that problem awareness and functional interdependencies and their (a)symmetries are important, whereas problem pressure has a mixed influence, depending on the issue area.

Viele Infrastrukturprojekte werden in der Schweiz auf Ebene der Gemeinden geplant und umgesetzt. Diese Projekte zu planen, kann eine Herausforderung sein, vor allem wenn wichtige Anspruchsgruppen einbezogen werden sollen. Das neue digitale Tool PlaNet erlaubt die systematische Identifikation aller relevanten Anspruchsgruppen und kann so die Planung von Infrastrukturprojekten vereinfachen, Transparenz erhöhen und möglicherweise kostspielige Konflikte oder langwierige Verfahren vermeiden.

Despite an increasing number of people exposed to flood risks in Europe, flood risk perception remains low and effective flood risk management policies are rarely implemented. It becomes increasingly important to understand how local governments can design effective flood risk management policies to address flood risks. In this article, we study whether high flood exposure and flood risk perception correlate with the demand for a specific design of flood risk management policies. We take the ideal case of Switzerland and analyze flood risk management portfolios in 18 flood-prone municipalities along the Aare River. We introduce a novel combination of risk analysis and public policy data: we analyze correlations between recorded flood exposure data and survey data on flood risk perception and policy preferences for selected flood risk management measures. Our results indicate that local governments with high flood risk perception tend to prefer non-structural measures, such as spatial planning and ecological river restoration, to infrastructure measures. In contrast, flood exposure is neither linked to flood risk perception nor to policy preferences. We conclude that flood risk perception is key: it can decisively affect local governments' preferences to implement specific diversified policy portfolios including more preventive or integrated flood risk management measures. These findings imply that local governments in flood-prone areas should invest in raising their population’s awareness capacity of flood risks and keep it high during periods without flooding.

The role that emerging economies, and China in particular, play in the global energy transition appears to be transforming. Transition literature to date characterizes the formation of cleantech sectors in emerging economies as being heavily dependent on foreign inputs of knowledge and other key resources. This article argues that in the, currently unfolding, next phase of the global energy transition, Chinese actors may play a more central role in global niche development for high-tech industries, including in constructing innovative and effective socio-technical configurations. This argument is illustrated with a case study of the Chinese Concentrated Solar Power industry, which is found to have developed largely independently of foreign resources. The case is used to highlight a number of specificities of the Chinese environment that set it apart from niche formation environments in OECD countries, and may allow China to open up technological trajectories unlikely to develop in those OECD countries.

During the European Refugee Situation in 2015, Sweden received an influx of forcibly displaced persons seeking asylum, the highest number of asylum seekers per capita among European Union member states. A challenge existed in providing accommodations within the Swedish built environment, in contrast to other housing solutions such as geographically distinct refugee camps. Regulations are one method of maintaining consistent standards of buildings, but they are effective only if they are enforced. During uncertainty, compliance decisions can be based on cognitive understanding (cognitive legitimacy). Otherwise, deterrence-based regulation is rooted in direct consequences (pragmatic legitimacy), and responsive regulation relies on normative motivation (moral legitimacy) for compliance. This study explored the normative aspect of regulatory enforcement through inspections. In 2017, 34 semistructured interviews were conducted with individuals involved with providing temporary accommodations in Sweden during 2015-2016. From these, six interviews with employees of regulatory enforcement agencies were qualitatively analyzed to discover how regulators legitimized. Findings show that regulators justified their inspections predominantly based on what is considered as a socially acceptable approach (procedural legitimacy) and what is understandable based on their personal experience (comprehensibility legitimacy). This study provides practical insight to regulators regarding the benefits for using responsive regulation during institutional responses to mass population displacement in urban communities. Findings will assist in ensuring that the quality of buildings is consistent for the general population and reduces variation in the safety provided by buildings. Additionally, this analysis contributes to the literature addressing mass population displacement and provides new knowledge of organizational legitimacy in technical applications.

Rationale: Open defecation is connected to poor health and child mortality, but billions of people still do not have access to safe sanitation facilities. Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) promotes latrine construction to eradicate open defecation. However, the mechanisms by which CLTS works and how they can be improved remain unknown. The present study is the first to investigate the psychosocial determinants of CLTS in a longitudinal design. Furthermore, we tested whether CLTS can be made more effective by theory- and evidence-based interventions using the risks, attitudes, norms, abilities, and selfregulation (RANAS) model.
Methods: A cluster-randomized controlled trial of 3216 households was implemented in rural Ghana. Communities were randomly assigned to classic CLTS, one of three RANAS-based interventions, or to the control arm. Prepost surveys at 6-month follow-up included standardized interviews assessing psychosocial determinants from the RANAS model. Regression analyses and multilevel mediation models were computed to test intervention effects and mechanisms of CLTS.
Results: Latrine coverage increased pre-post by 67.6% in all intervention arms and by 7.9% in the control arm (p < .001). The combination with RANAS-based interventions showed non-significantly greater effects than CLTS alone. The effects of CLTS on latrine construction were significantly mediated by changes in four determinants: others' behaviour and approval, self-efficacy, action planning and commitment. Changes in vulnerability, severity, and barrier planning were positively connected to latrine construction but not affected by CLTS.
Conclusion: This study corroborates the effectiveness of CLTS in increasing latrine coverage, and additional activities can be improved further. Behaviour change techniques within CLTS that strengthened the relevant factors should be maintained. The study also recommends interventions based on the RANAS approach to improve CLTS. Further research is needed to understand the effects of RANAS-based interventions combined with CLTS at longer follow-up

Research in economic geography has recently been challenged to adopt more institutional and multiscalar perspectives on industrial path development. This article contributes to this debate by integrating insights from (evolutionary) economic geography as well as transition and innovation studies into a conceptual framework of how path creation in emerging industries depends on the availability of both knowledge and legitimacy. Unlike the extant literature, we argue here that not only the former but also the latter may substantially depend on nonlocal sources. Conceptually, we distinguish between multiscalar export, attraction, and absorption of legitimacy. Coupled with conventional knowledge indicators, this approach enables us to reconstruct how not only external knowledge sourcing but also multiscalar institutional dynamics contribute to a region or country’s ability to leverage its potential for path creation in an emerging industry. Methodologically, we develop legitimation indicators from a global media database, which was built around the case of modular water technologies. Cross-comparing the evidence from six key countries (India, Israel, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, the US) with differing path creation constellations for this emerging industry, allows us to hypothesize how multiscalar legitimation influences a country’s prospects for creating a radically new industrial path.

Economic globalization and the modularization of value chains increasingly challenge long-held conceptual models explaining the spatial evolution of industries. This paper seeks to re-interpret early industry life cycle dynamics by disintegrating an industry's value chain into upstream, core and downstream parts and characterizing each part according to its underlying global innovation system (GIS) configuration. We distinguish between firms in parts of the value chain that depend on formalized, science-based innovation and cater for globally standardized mass markets ('footloose' GIS) and firms in parts of the value chain that rely on spatially more stable GIS structures, in which either the innovation activities or the valuation dynamics (or both) depend on spatial embedding in given territorial contexts. Our hypothesis is that firms which occupy parts of the value chain with footloose GIS characteristics will have shorter survival times than firms which operate in spatially more stable GIS types. Demand-side policies will accordingly produce stronger competitive advantages for firms operating in GIS with spatially stable valuation structures. The empirical context of our study is the solar photovoltaics (PV) industry. We analyze market entry and exit of 129 German and 127 Japanese PV firms from 1960 to 2016 using a Cox Proportional Hazards model. The results support the hypotheses that firm survival and policy effects depend on a value chain part's underlying GIS configuration.

Recent developments in high- and middle-income countries have exhibited a shift from conventional urban water systems to alternative solutions that are more diverse in source separation, decentralization, and modularization. These solutions include non-grid, small-grid, and hybrid systems to address such pressing global challenges as climate change, eutrophication, and rapid urbanization. They close loops, recover valuable resources, and adapt quickly to changing boundary conditions such as population size. Moving to such alternative solutions requires both technical and social innovations to co-evolve over time into integrated socio-technical urban water systems. Current implementations of alternative systems in high- and middle-income countries are promising, but they also underline the need for research questions to be addressed from technical, social, and transformative perspectives. Future research should apply a transdisciplinary research approach through socio-technical "lighthouse" projects that apply alternative urban water systems at scale. Such research should leverage experience from lighthouse projects in a range of socio-economic contexts, identify their potentials and limitations from an integrated perspective, and share their successes and failures across the urban water sector.

Rationale: Consistent hand washing with soap can reduce the risk of diarrhea, but changing hand-washing behavior is difficult. Systematic behavior change approaches promise to enhance hand washing with soap effectively, and allow the identification of active intervention ingredients using mediation analysis. This knowledge can then be used to derive hypotheses for systematically refining the intervention.
Objective: We demonstrate this at the example of a behavior change intervention to promote hand washing with soap based on the RANAS approach (risk, attitudes, norms, ability, and self-regulation).
Methods: Sixteen wards of Masvingo province in Zimbabwe were randomly allocated to the RANAS-based intervention or a wait-list control group. Hand washing at baseline and follow-up was observed for 224 randomly selected caregivers of young children. They additionally participated in quantitative face-to-face interviews assessing psychosocial factors.
Results: At baseline, hand washing with soap was <3% on average, and did not differ between groups (p = .526). At follow-up, intervention participants washed hands with soap more frequently than controls (in 29.4% vs. 8.2% of all stool- and food-related situations, B = 1.88, SE = 0.32, OR = 6.6, p < .001). Mediation analyses revealed that the intervention enhanced several of the targeted psychosocial factors; return, descriptive and injunctive norms, action knowledge, action self-efficacy, maintenance self-efficacy, action planning, and remembering. The intervention effect was mediated through increased remembering.
Conclusion: This study supports the efficacy of a systematic approach to behavior change to promote hand washing with soap. The analyses of the mechanisms revealed important insights into the active ingredients of the intervention, which will facilitate its future refinement.

Public policy analysis is interested in how policies emerge and develop in order to address societal problems. Issues related to water, such as the contamination of surface waters, floods, or plastic pollution in oceans are often highly complex, concern different jurisdictions, and require the collaboration of public and private actors. This complexity is addressed through integrated water management principles. However, these principles give room to open questions such as: what are the main challenges of policy analysis (research and practice) in terms of multi-level actor involvement (politics), cross-sectoral solutions (policies), and new institutional arrangements (polity)? To answer these questions, the seven papers of this Special Issue combine approaches borrowed from policy analysis with principles of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). Each article tackles a complex, water-related problem and collectively, the papers present empirical evidence from case studies located around the world. We learn from all these analyses that adopting a policy perspective helps disentangling the procedural components of IWRM (the involvement of actors, the definition of the appropriate management area, the attribution of competences, etc.) from more substantial ones (like the development of a management plan and the implementation of measures). Addressing cross-sectoral and multi-level challenges is a difficult task, and policy analysis can help shedding light on both, the legitimacy of processes, and the effectiveness of their outputs and outcomes.

In this chapter we study the longer-term response of a national government to natural disasters. We are interested in when and how collaborative governance arrangements spark new national flood prevention policies. Our understanding of collaborative governance not only includes public and private actors that are involved in a complex network (see Nohrstedt 2015) but also the larger institutional setting as well as regulations in the domain of flood risk management. In other words, we conceive the full range from politics and polity to policies when defining collaborative risk management (see also Driessen et al. 2012). For national flood prevention this concretely means that decision making and implementation processes are designed multilevel and cross-sectoral, that competences and responsibilities are shared between different jurisdictions and policy subsystems, and that policies and regulations reflect this horizontal and vertical integration of actors and institutions (Ingold et al. 2018; Ingold 2017). [...]

The FANFAR project (reinForced cooperAtion to provide operatioNal Flood forecasting and Alerts in West AfRica), funded by the European Commission (2018-2020), aims to foster reinforced cooperation between key West African and European organisations. The project focuses on developing a system according to West African user needs and priorities, identified through a set of workshops. The third workshop was hosted by the Nigerian Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) and took place at Hotel De Bently (2020.02.10-14), in Abuja, Nigeria. In total, the workshop hosted 58 participants, including the consortium partners. Additionally, two representatives from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), who are FANFAR advisory board members, were present the entire week. At the opening session, the director general of NIHSA, the director general of AGRHYMET, the head of economic cooperation & energy at the EU delegation to Nigeria and ECOWAS, and the Swedish Ambassador to Nigeria were also present. The workshop even made it to the national Nigerian TV and newspapers (AIT news, Nigerian Pilot, Sundiata Post). The representatives from hydrological agencies and emergency management agencies on the regional and national level from 16 countries in West Africa contributed substantially to achieve the project goals. [...]

We describe the co-design process to create a co-adapted, integrated and sustainable FANFAR flood forecast and alert system in West Africa. It is based on a structured Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) framework that guides the participants of four co-design workshops and the FANFAR consortium through problem structuring phases, including stakeholder analysis, agreeing on objectives and options (FANFAR system configurations), eliciting expert predictions and stakeholder preferences and assessing the performance of system options based on these input data. We also introduce interactions with participants in and between the co-design workshops (e.g. rainy season surveys) concerning their experiences with floods in West Africa and with using the FANFAR flood forecast and alert system. This includes feedback on the FANFAR technical system components from hands-on practical sessions in the FANFAR co-design workshops. In this report, we focus strongly on the methods, and also present preliminary results. [...]

The existing empirical evidence shows that both contingent valuation and discrete choice experiment (DCE) methods are susceptible to various ordering effects. However, very few studies have analysed attribute-ordering effects in DCEs, and no study has investigated their potential influence on information-processing strategies, such as attribute non-attendance (ANA). This paper tests for attribute-ordering effects and examines whether the order of attributes describing the alternatives affects respondents' propensity to attend to or ignore an attribute. A split-sample approach is used, where one sample received a DCE version in which the positions of the first and last non-monetary attributes are switched across the sequence of choice tasks compared with the other sample. The results show that attribute order does not affect welfare estimates in a significant way under the standard assumption of full attribute attendance, thus rejecting the notion of procedural bias. However, the welfare estimates for the attributes whose order was reversed and the share of respondents who ignored them differ significantly between the two attribute-ordering treatments once ANA behaviour is accounted for in the estimated choice models. These results highlight the important role of information-processing strategies in the design and evaluation of DCEs.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 have led to a paradigm shift in how urban sanitation is managed. Targets 6.2 (safely managed sanitation and hygiene services) and 6.3 (reducing the portion of untreated wastewater) now put the focus on managing the entire sanitation chain, encompassing containment, emptying, transport, treatment, and safe reuse or disposal. This has major implications for urban areas, which are a major contributor of untreated wastewater, creating hotspots for environmental degradation and public health hazards (both within and outside of cities) impairing social and economic productivity.
While national water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) targets increasingly reflect SDG ambitions, aiming to provide universal coverage and reach higher levels of service, this is proving difficult in the urban context. Recent Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) and Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) reports have underlined uneven progress in sanitation coverage, with progress disproportionally benefiting the wealthy, leaving the urban poor unserved (JMP 2019 update). According to the Joint Monitoring Programme, the gap between the richest and poorest has been reduced in 52 countries but increased in 22 countries - mostly countries emerging from conflict (UNICEF/WHO, 2019, p. 34).

Existing research emphasizes interdependencies between social and ecological systems in climate change adaptation. Ecological systems are often complex and span several issues that are not integrated in the social governance system. In order to increase the fit between social and ecological systems, understanding factors that promote the integration of interdependent issues is crucial. In this paper, we consider 11 issues related to flood risk management, e.g., technical flood protection and habitat loss, which are typically addressed in different policy sectors but exhibit ecological, functional, or geographical interdependencies. We analyze two bases for issue integration: a) political actors connecting issues and, b) the legal framework cross-referencing issues. We propose a network method for systematic comparisons between issue integration based on actors and integration based on laws. For the case of Swiss flood risk management, we find that actor- and law-based issue integration co-vary and might be self-reinforcing. We further find that issue integration mostly rests on laws, although cases exist where actors are the main basis of integration. Results promote our understanding of potential bases for the integration of policy issues, thereby contributing knowledge about adaptive governance capacities in social-ecological systems that buffer the effects of climate change.

This paper examines factors shaping the reconfiguration capacity of regional innovation systems (RISs). 'System selectivity' is introduced as a concept to understand how factors such as regional imaginaries, power relations and directionality shape how RIS reconfiguration plays out. A comparative case study illustrates the conceptual arguments, investigating industrial change in two Swedish regions (the automotive industry in West Sweden and the digital games industry in Scania). The findings exemplify the influence of system selectivity on agents' strategy formulation for RIS reconfiguration and highlight the importance of considering structure–agency dynamics to move beyond a stylized view of enabling or constraining RISs.

The purpose of the article is to contribute to conceptual and empirical understandings of institutional agency in path transformation. Previous studies of links between institutional change and industrial transformation have focused mainly on the institutionalization of new practices and influence of territorially defined institutional preconditions, leaving a need to disentangle different types of institutional agency and the rationales behind actors' activities. The author elaborates on different dimensions of the institutional environment in which path transformation occurs and proposes a new analytical framework for investigating the role of institutional agency in path development. The framework identifies different types of institutional agency, respectively targeting the 'legitimation', 'anchoring' and 'enabling' of new paths. It is applied to a case study of the automotive industry in the NUTS2 region West Sweden, based on the development of self-driving cars. The analysis reveals that actors utilized the relationship between existing institutions when formulating strategies, rather than primarily targeting institutional change. The author concludes that actors deploy a combination of different types of institutional agency that exhibit varying spatial patterns, and discusses the implications for how the relationship between the past, present and future is understood in path development research.

Over the past decades open innovation (OI) practices have gained prominence among both scholars and practitioners as a mean to accelerate time-to-market and reduce development costs of innovations. Thereby scholars have nearly exclusively focused on cross-boundary knowledge flows between the focal firm and (its) external collaborators. This paper argues that such a focus limits our understanding of how multi-business firms with a diverse knowledge base profit from internally applied open innovation practices that in turn provide complementary benefits to OI. We build on the current literature by investigating and describing OI activities that are conducted within the boundaries of the multi-business firm. Based on a multiple case study of 23 collaboration practices conducted across 14 firms, our findings reveal 5 archetypal forms of internally applied open innovation activities. We draw on the literature of cross-divisional innovation and crowdsourcing to highlight how these archetypes differ in terms of their purpose and underlying managerial processes. Multi-business firms regularly rely on internal practices due to lower transaction costs and for stimulating a collaborative culture. We conclude that internally applied OI practices are effectively stimulated by a combination of non-monetary reward systems and purposive integration mechanisms.

Numerous pesticide policies have been introduced to mitigate the risks of pesticide use, but most have not been successful in reaching usage reduction goals. Here, we name key challenges for the reduction of environmental and health risks from agricultural pesticide use and develop a framework for improving current policies. We demonstrate the need for policies to encompass all actors in the food value chain. By adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, we suggest ten key steps to achieve a reduction in pesticide risks. We highlight how new technologies and regulatory frameworks can be implemented and aligned with all actors in food value chains. Finally, we discuss major trade-offs and areas of tension with other agricultural policy goals and propose a holistic approach to advancing pesticide policies.

Social network analysis (SNA) is a versatile and increasingly popular methodological tool to understand structures of relationships between actors involved in governance situations. Given the complexity of the set of stakeholders involved in the governance of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and the diversity of their interests, this article proposes SNA to the WASH sector. The use of SNA as an appropriate diagnostic tool for planning Citywide Inclusive Sanitation is explored. Missing data is a major problem for SNA in the studies of governance situations, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Therefore, a novel validation methodology for incomplete SNA data, relying on information from internal and external experts is proposed. SNA and the validation method is then applied to study the governance of decentralized wastewater treatment in four cities of India. The results corroborate key differences between mega and secondary cities in terms of institutions, community engagement and overall sanitation situation including aspects of decentralized wastewater treatment plants, based on the city types.

Water systems are experiencing dynamic societal demands and extreme environmental changes. The integration of modular water systems into existing centralized infrastructures, creating hybrid systems, could mitigate these challenges by enabling more resilient water management. However, the existence of technological alternatives has not changed the continuous reliance on centralized water infrastructure. Supportive policy instruments are key to foster the operation of modular technology within hybrid water systems. This article focuses on the role of substantive and procedural policy instruments for the successful operation of modular water systems within a hybrid water infrastructure. Based on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we can confirm the claim in the literature that relying on regulatory instruments is relevant for operating modular technology within hybrid systems. However, we also find combinations of policy instruments where regulatory instruments do not matter. Furthermore, we find that procedural instruments emphasizing stakeholder participation interplay with different substantive policy instruments to support the successful operation of modular systems.

Developed to be interconnected by design, the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and their 169 targets have attracted a growing scientific community committed to exploring the systemic interactions inherent to the 2030 Agenda. Understanding which SDGs influence one another (positively or negatively) is critical to prioritize and implement policies that maximize synergies between goals while navigating trade-offs. In this way, the need for informed decision-making urgently requires knowledge of context-specific SDG interactions. Drawing on an extensive literature review (including scientific reports and scholarly articles), we collected, synthesized, and analyzed data about negative and positive interactions among SDG goals and targets. Based on this unique dataset, our analysis focused on three key elements of the resulting network of SDG interactions: First, we identified the most dominant SDGs in the network. Second, we identified systemic multipliers, defined as nodes with higher weighted amounts of outgoing than incoming influence. Third, we identified critical sub-networks of strongly interconnected SDG targets, highlighting possible virtuous cycles that could serve as concrete entry points to realize the 2030 Agenda. Building on our results, a collaborative effort to add and refine data on behalf of an open-knowledge platform could provide a solid basis for further analysis and enhanced usability in concrete contexts.

The implementation of the Agenda 2030 and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) requires collaboration between actors from different sectors. One way of facilitating exchange between different actors are forums. This article investigates the contribution of different types of forums for SDG implementation. We use the case of Switzerland's implementation of SDG 6 in the Global South to explore this question and rely on a small-N comparison of four forums. Based on a broad set of different empirical sources such as interviews, document analysis, and survey data, we characterize the forums according to important dimensions emphasized in forum research and use the forum characteristics to explain three types of first-order forum outputs: participation patterns, information exchange, and trust and procedural fairness. We observe that a mix of different forum characteristics accounts for different forum outputs. One forum that is actively promoting networking opportunities, for example, manages to reach many participants that are not reached by other forums. Furthermore, our results indicate that new types of forums that focus more on the implementation of the Agenda 2030 in general rather than single SDGs might become crucial to foster information exchange among actors.

How does the spatial context shape early innovation trajectories and how will this influence the directionality of transitions? We elaborate these questions for the case of transitions in personal mobility, focusing on emerging trajectories of electric vehicles and autonomous driving. We analyze how the dynamics depend on whether innovation and transition strategies are primarily geared towards urban or rural contexts. In order to identify potentially diverging trajectories, we specify socio-technical regime structures at two levels: the level of service regimes (i.e. rules that relate to specific means of transport, like the car) and the level of the sectoral regime (i.e. rules that regulate the interplay between the different service regimes). We will show that depending on whether the early innovation strategies are oriented at rural or urban contexts, quite different directionalities can result both regarding the technological trajectory of the new service option, but also regarding the overall sector configuration.

In many countries, the lock-down due to the COVID-19 pandemic triggered discussions on the use of digital interaction formats for academic exchange. The pace with which researchers adopted digital formats for conferences, lectures, and meetings revealed that currently available tools can substitute many of the physical interactions in the workplace. It also showed that academics are willing to use digital tools for scientific exchange. This article sheds light on scholars' experiences with digital formats and tools during the pandemic. We argue that digital interaction formats increase the inclusivity of knowledge exchange, reduce time and costs of organizing academic interactions, and enable more diverse workspaces with geographical and temporal flexibility. However, we also observe that digital interaction formats struggle to reproduce social interactions such as informal discussions, raise new concerns on data security, and can induce higher stress levels due to the blurring of the boundaries between work and private spaces. We argue that digital formats are not meant to substitute physical interactions entirely, but rather reshape how research communities operate and how academics socialize. We expect hybrid formats to emerge, which combine digital and physical interaction formats, and an increase in digital interactions between geographically distant working groups. We conclude that the time has come for digital interaction formats to be part of a new regime in the field of academic exchange.

Carbon lock-in hampers the realisation of sustainable energy systems. It occurs when carbon-intensive technologies, markets and institutions co-evolve and become wedded to historical trajectories despite environmentally superior technologies being available. Multiple material and non-material causes are discussed in literature on socio-technical or energy transitions and carbon lock-in. However, these are yet to be synthesised into a comprehensive framework to guide the empirical identification of lock-in factors. Also, empirical understanding into how various causes of lock-in can interact is limited. To deepen understanding into the various types of socio-technical lock-in affecting energy transitions, we develop an encompassing analytical framework accounting for material, human, non-material and exogenous factors. In addition to carbon lock-in and path dependency, we synthesise diverse literature encompassing sustainability transitions, energy policy, innovation and firm management, economics and political economy. The resultant framework provides a finer-grained and more comprehensive understanding of lock-in than previous studies. Using Japan as a case study, we then apply this framework with two questions in mind: (i) What factors are contributing to the perpetuation of coal power in Japan? and ii) What opportunities emerge to overcome these? The empirical analysis is informed by triangulated data involving 46 semi-structured interviews and diverse documents. Our findings reveal a wide array of interacting factors that contribute to the perpetuation of coal-power in Japan and several emerging opportunities to tackle these. They also demonstrate our framework's utility as a heuristic that scholars could apply to other cases to increase empirical understanding into the multiple causes of socio-technical lock-in.

The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D. Lasswell's goal for the policy sciences to offer insights into unfolding phenomena, this commentary draws on the lessons of the policy sciences literature to understand the dynamics related to COVID-19. We explore the ways in which scientific and technical expertise, emotions, and narratives influence policy decisions and shape relationships among citizens, organizations, and governments. We discuss varied processes of adaptation and change, including learning, surges in policy responses, alterations in networks (locally and globally), implementing policies across transboundary issues, and assessing policy success and failure. We conclude by identifying understudied aspects of the policy sciences that deserve attention in the pandemic’s aftermath.

The concept of “advocacy coalitions” is the bedrock of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), one of the most established and successful approaches for understanding policy processes across the globe. This article revisits and sharpens the conceptual definition of advocacy coalitions. We summarize the lessons from its theoretical emphases under the ACF and specify its five attributes (policy actors, shared beliefs, coordination, resources, and stability). Through this specification, we identify the ideal coalition type and several coalition subtypes. We then clarify and make a distinction between how we think about coalitions as a concept and how we approach coalitions empirically. This article sharpens the lens for describing and explaining coalitions toward better observations, theorizing, and measurements. It ends with next steps for further deepening and broadening knowledge about advocacy coalitions.

The transformation of urban basic service sectors towards more sustainability is one of the 'grand challenges' for public policy, globally. A particular urgent problem is the provision of sanitation in cities in low-income countries. The globally dominant centralised sewerage approach has proven incapable to reach many of the urban poor. Recently, an increasing number of actors in international development cooperation has started to develop alternative safely managed non-grid approaches. We approach their efforts as an emerging 'global innovation system' and investigate how its development can be supported by systemic intermediaries. We analyse the activities of the 'Sustainable Sanitation Alliance', an international network that coordinates activities in the sanitation sector and thereby supports this innovation system. The findings show how demand ing it is to fulfil an intermediary role in a global innovation system, because of the need to consider system processes at different scales, in each phase of system building.

In north-eastern Madagascar, maintenance of biodiversity competes with expansion of land for agriculture and mining. The concept of "telecoupling" provides a framework for analysis of distant actors and institutions that influence local land use decisions. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the extent of telecoupling of land governance in north-eastern Madagascar and a lack of evidence regarding its role in driving land use change and land competition. Using a descriptive Social Network Analysis, we disentangled distant interactions between actors in terms of flows and institutions. Our findings show that the domains of economic and environmental interactions are dominated by actors from different sectors that have claims on the same land but generally do not interact. Distant influences occurring via remote flows of goods, money, and institutions serve to reinforce local land competition. Balancing economic and environmental land claims for more sustainable regional development in north-eastern Madagascar requires collaboration between actors across sectors, scales, and domains.

This study analyzes Swiss water governance as a network of interrelated issues. It compares how organizations reflect relations between governance issues in their activity with the way issue relations are depicted by the media (issue attention-activity fit). To do so, a media data analysis, supported by machine learning, is combined with a nation-wide survey. Prominent areas of misfit relate to the coordination between water saving measures and drought risks; the exploitation of subterranean resources and drinking water protection; and issues of micropollutants. The study demonstrates that comparing organizational activity with media attention is particularly well suited to recognize newly emerging, currently neglected areas of governance.

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) requires a critical step, namely to elicit individual preferences. On the basis of learning theories, we formalize preference construction as learning about facts and values, and as a process; we also conceptualize an online preference elicitation survey that offers learning loops to increase factual learning and support preference construction. Another originality is gamification. Game elements (a narrative and non-player characters as motivational affordance) keep respondents engaged in the demanding task of weight elicitation. Our tool enables broad public participation in MCDA, allowing reliable online preference elicitation. The survey concept was tested with 107 students and a control treatment. Quantitative and qualitative data indicate that the concept works. Participants’ factual knowledge increased. The survey helped students to learn about their own preferences concerning the importance of objectives. The practical implication is that weighting can be reliably elicited by online surveys. Participants reported a positive experience; further ways to improve it are thoroughly discussed.

Most of the literature on serious games and gamification calls for a shift from evaluating practices to using theories to assess them. While the former is necessary to justify using game-based approaches, the latter enables understanding “why” game-based approaches are beneficial (or not). Based on earlier review papers and the papers in this special issue of Water entitled “Understanding game-based approaches for improving sustainable water governance: the potential of serious games to solve water problems”, we show that game-based approaches in a water governance context are relatively diverse. In particular, the expected aims, targeted audience, and spatial and temporal scales are factors that differentiate game-based approaches. These factors also strongly influence the design of game-based approaches and the research developed to assess them. We developed a framework to guide and reflect on the design and assessment of game-based approaches, and we suggest opportunities for future research. In particular, we highlight the lack of game-based approaches that can support “society-driven” sustainable water governance.

Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Network approaches for conceptualizing and analysing these interdependencies offer one promising solution. Here, we present two advances we argue are needed to further this area of research: (i) a typology of causal assumptions explicating the causal aims of any given network-centric study of social–ecological interdependencies; (ii) unifying research design considerations that facilitate conceptualizing exactly what is interdependent, through what types of relationships and in relation to what kinds of environmental problems. The latter builds on the appreciation that many environmental problems draw from a set of core challenges that re-occur across contexts. We demonstrate how these advances combine into a comparative heuristic that facilitates leveraging case-specific findings of social–ecological interdependencies to generalizable, yet context-sensitive, theories based on explicit assumptions of causal relationships.

Ein extrem trockener Sommer, Vorstösse zur Wasserversorgungssicherheit, Positionsbezüge zur Trinkwasserinitiative und zu Pestiziden im Wasser sowie das Bemühen, die Nutzung der Wasserkraft über Subventionen und Abstriche beim Gewässerschutz zu erleichtern – das alles hat die Schweizer Wasserpolitik 2018 geprägt. Dieser Artikel präsentiert eine Übersicht über die Entwicklungen zum Thema Wasser in den verschiedenen politischen Arenen wie Parlamenten oder Verwaltung.

Governments in countries across the world increasingly adopt the “green growth” discourse to underline their ambition for the greening of their economies. The central tenet of this narrative is the economic opportunities rather than challenges arising from the pursuit of environmental sustainability. Our paper synthesises insights from 113 recent scientific articles, dealing with both environmental issues and economic growth, as well as innovation. Our ambition is exploratory in attempting to take stock of heterogeneous contributions across the spectrum of social science. The articles have been reviewed with a focus on six themes, derived from current discussions in economic geography and transition studies: skills, technology, physical resources, markets, institutions and policies. Four major implications emerge from the review. First, green growth requires competences that allow for handling complex, non-routine situations – in both the private and the public sector. Second, technological progress should be directed towards greener technologies, to avoid investments funds being channelled to brown technologies for short-term returns. Third, our knowledge of the opportunities for achieving green growth must base upon a joint assessment of market failures, structural system failures and transformational system failures. Finally, greater attention should be devoted to the geography of green growth processes at different scales.

Despite being preventable, foodborne diseases remain a global health challenge. Poor food hygiene practices such as improper handling of kitchen utensils are among the major causes of diarrhea transmission. A formative study was conducted in Malawi to inform an intervention design to promote complementary food hygiene practices. An assessment of contextual and psychosocial factors for behavior change was conducted using Risk, Attitude, Norms, Ability, and Self-regulation model. We conducted 323 household surveys with caregivers of children aged 6 to 24 months. Analysis of variance was used to estimate difference between doers and non-doers of three targeted behaviors: washing utensils with soap, keeping utensils on a raised place, and handwashing with soap. Analysis of variance analyses revealed that literacy level, ownership of animals, and presence of handwashing facility and dish racks were contextual factors predicting storage of utensils on an elevated place and handwashing frequencies. Psychosocial factors, such as time spent to wash utensils with soap, distance to the handwashing facility, and cost for soap, had an influence on washing utensils and handwashing practices. Perceived vulnerability determined effective handwashing and storage of utensils. Perceived social norms and ability estimates were favorable for the three targeted behaviors. Promotion of already existing targeted beneficial behaviors should be encouraged among caregivers. Risk perceptions on storage of utensils and handwashing practices should be increased with motivational exercises such as paint games. Caregivers’ technical know-how of local dish rack and tippy tap construction is essential.
 

The clock is ticking and just a little more than 10 years remain to meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Enhanced political and public awareness, inter- and transdisciplinary engagement, new partnerships, and multisectoral collaborations are required to foster knowledge-and-action societies in order to tackle the complex issues that are inherent to sustainable development. A one-day symposium held in Basel, Switzerland, in November 2018 offered a venue for open exchange on how to stimulate dialogue for co-creating innovative ideas and scalable action to address some of the most pressing challenges of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In polycentric governance systems, actors interact in different venues, such as forums which foster cross-sectoral interaction. This analysis centres on water forums in Switzerland and on actors with multiple forum memberships, creating interactions throughout the entire forum network. Findings show that the central actors in the entire water forum network are predominantly from the public administration sector, even though members from the private sector are most numerous. Despite an emphasis on the bottom-up and self-organizing character of polycentric governance systems in the literature, this analysis shows that public administration actors still play a crucial role as network managers and brokers.

Governance networks describe the complex relations among different types of actors involved in the governance of a policy issue. Here, we ask how different institutional and socioeconomic contextual conditions influence the structure of these networks and result in more horizontal or hierarchical types of governance networks. To answer this question, we study Vietnam’s sanitation sector and compare two different provinces, Hanoi and Ben Tre. More specifically, we analyze networks of information exchange among key actors based on face-to-face interviews and prestructured questionnaires. We find that in the highly urbanized capital city of Hanoi, which serves as a national leader of innovation, where national and international actors are present, and where local actors have high capacities, information exchange tends to follow horizontal network structures. In the more rural, typical province of Ben Tre, hierarchical structures dominate.

This article investigates whether linkages between members of parliament (MPs) and interest groups influence MPs' activities of co-sponsoring legislative proposals. Based on statistical models for network data, the study builds on classical explanations of co-sponsorships highlighting the role of similar ties between MPs, such as party membership, legislative committee assignments, electoral district or gender. It shows that, on top of these traditional forms of homophily, MPs' ties to interest groups matter as well. MPs with ties to a similar type of interest groups are more likely to co-sponsor their respective proposals. The same holds for MPs with ties to groups active in the same policy domain. These findings have implications for the study of groups' lobbying, legislative behaviour and representative democracy.

Actors within an ecology of games in a polycentric governance system have to choose from a large number of forums they could participate in. This article analyzes why given types of forums are important to actors, as compared to other forums. It shows that functions of an ecology of games, such as cooperation, learning, and resource distribution, influence the importance that actors attribute to forums. The empirical analysis focuses on cross‐sectoral forums, a particular type of forum that is specialized in coordination among actors from different societal sectors, such as government, private interest, or science. Analysis of survey data from eight cross‐sectoral forums in Swiss habitat and land use governance and their 159 members shows that cross‐sectoral forums are comparatively important to actors that perceive their forum to contribute to learning and resource distribution.

Recent years have seen unparalleled efforts by the Swatchh Bharat Mission (SBM) to make India open defecation free. While latrine coverage has been boosted very successfully, latrine use has remained low in many areas of the country. Consequently, the aim of this study was to use robust psychological theory to develop and rigorously evaluate low-cost and scalable behaviour change interventions to promote latrine use in rural India.
This study reports findings from a cluster-randomized controlled trial (N=1945) conducted in rural Karnataka, India, from January 2017 to February 2019. The evaluated behaviour change interventions were developed using the risks, attitudes, norms, abilities, and self-regulation (RANAS) approach.
Results showed that latrine use changed by more than 15% in both treatment and control arms. The intervention triggered an additional, statistically significant increase in latrine use of approximately 5% to reach 97% use at endline.
The results suggest that external factors had a strong influence on latrine use, with intensive efforts by SBM likely to be among these. The added value of the campaign was to increase latrine use to almost complete uptake and to successfully tackle the most change-resistant individuals. This intervention or selected components could complement future latrine use promotion in India.

The outbreak of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) from 2014 to 2016 is over. However, several outbreaks of contagious diseases have already arisen and will recur. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of EVD prevention promotions in the Gambia and to assess the psychosocial factors that steer three behaviors: handwashing with soap, calling the Ebola Hotline, and not touching a person who might be suffering from EVD. In 2015, data were gathered from 498 primary care providers. The questionnaire was based on psychosocial factors from the risks, attitudes, norms, abilities, and self-regulation (RANAS) model. Three promotional activities were significantly associated with psychosocial factors of handwashing and, thus, with increased handwashing behavior: the home visit, posters, and info sheets. Norm factors, especially the perception of what other people do, had a great impact on handwashing with soap and on calling the Ebola Hotline. The perceived certainty that a behavior will prevent a disease was a predictor for all three protection behaviors. Commitment to the behavior emerged as especially relevant for the intention to call the Ebola Hotline and for not touching a person who might be suffering from EVD. Health behavior change programs should rely on evidence to target the right psychosocial factors and to maximize their effects on prevention behaviors, especially in emergency contexts.

By studying servitization processes and service competencies in the wind-to-energy industry in European regions, this paper provides a framework for territorial servitization. The framework resonates with the concepts of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) and industry life cycles, and its elements can be embedded into concepts of regional development (e.g., lead-market models, sustainability transitions, territorial innovation models). The framework suggests that regions benefit from servitization processes via the interplay of generating employment opportunities, enabling an efficient allocation of technology resources, opening up new markets, strengthening territorial competitiveness, raising the odds of securing employment in the consolidation period and enabling technological leaps.

Decision-making about flood protection is surrounded by outcome uncertainty. In this paper we look at the influence of individual risk attitudes on flood protection decisions. To this end, we combine the results of a lottery game with the findings from a discrete choice experiment focusing on flood risk reduction measures. We find that the inclusion of non-linear probability weighting increases the explanatory power of the choice model. The result is however sensitive to behavioral assumptions about decisions under uncertainty, as well as whether the lottery was played in the loss or gain domain. Including risk attitudes in the probability weighted model decreases marginal willingness to pay for measures with a low to intermediate flood risk reduction capacity and increases marginal willingness to pay for measures with a very high flood risk reduction effect. This has important implications for the social acceptability of flood reduction measures under different baseline conditions.

Good decision-making requires the joint consideration of two aspects: knowledge about consequences of decision alternatives and knowledge about values, which can be expressed as decision objectives and preferences. Obtaining information on potential consequences and on stakeholder values, structuring this information, and integrating it in a meaningful way presents challenges for environmental decisions. Traditionally, natural and engineering sciences are concerned with improving the prediction of potential consequences. In this dissertation, the focus is on values, with the aim of a better integration of both aspects: How can we improve the inclusion of subjective values, expressed as objectives and preferences, in decision-making? [...]

Um gute Entscheidungen zu treffen, müssen zwei Aspekte betrachtet werden: Zum einen braucht es Wissen über die Konsequenzen der Entscheidungsalternativen, zum anderen müssen Werte, die in Form von Zielen und Präferenzen ausgedrückt werden können, einbezogen werden. Informationen zu den möglichen Konsequenzen und zu den Werten von Akteuren zu sammeln, sie zu strukturieren und schlussendlich zusammenzuführen, sind Herausforderungen für die Entscheidungsfindung im Umweltbereich. Natur- und Ingenieurswissenschaften bemühen sich traditionellerweise vor- wiegend darum, die Abschätzung von Konsequenzen zu verbessern. In dieser Dissertation liegt der Fokus auf den Werten, mit dem Ziel einer besseren Integration dieser beiden Aspekte für die Entscheidungsfindung: Wie können wir den Einbezug subjektiver Werte - Ziele und Präferenzen - in Entscheidungen verbessern? [...]

Identifying objectives is essential for decision making, but individuals have difficulties stating their important objectives. In public and environmental decisions, the diverse views of stakeholders should be included, but eliciting a broad set of objectives is challenging. We (1) study the effectiveness of individual brainstorming for eliciting objectives in a real-world setting; (2) test three interventions to support individuals in generating objectives; (3) investigate which and how many stakeholders are necessary to generate a comprehensive set of objectives; and (4) develop a feasible elicitation procedure for practice. In an experimental test, 71 stakeholders participated in five decisions about regional wastewater infrastructure planning in Switzerland. Three interventions were tested with an online survey procedure: (i) providing category cues, (ii) a perspective-taking task, and (iii) providing a predefined master list of objectives. In simple brainstorming, participants stated few objectives (M = 3.3) associated with 2.9 different categories on average. Participants consistently missed objectives they later considered important. Providing a master list was the only intervention that substantially increased the number and breadth of objectives (M = 12 objectives in M = 5.3 categories). With the help of our survey, participants generated between 30 and 38 distinct objectives for each decision case. Between five and nine participants were sufficient to generate these; more participants did not contribute new objectives. Most decision makers need help generating their objectives; combining simple brainstorming with a master list is a straightforward improvement that does not require a facilitator. An online process is promising for involving a large group of stakeholders.

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) requires an accurate representation of the preferences of decision-makers, for instance in the form of a multi-attribute value function. Typically, additivity or other stringent assumptions about the preferences are made to facilitate elicitation by assuming a simple parametric form. When relaxing such assumptions, parameters cannot be elicited easily with standard methods. We present a novel approach for identifying multi-attribute value functions which can have any shape. As preference information indifference statements are used that can be elicited by trade-off questions. Instead of asking one indifference statement for each pair of attributes, we ask for multiple trade-offs at different points in the attribute space. This allows inferring parameters of complex value functions despite the simplicity of the preference statements. Parameters are estimated by taking into account preference and elicitation uncertainty with a probabilistic model. Statistical inference supports identifying the most adequate preference model out of several candidate models through quantifying the uncertainty and assessing the need for non-additivity. The approach is elaborated for determining value functions by hierarchical aggregation. We apply it to an assessment of the ecological state of rivers, which is used to support environmental management decisions in Switzerland. Preference models of four experts were quantified, confirming the feasibility of the approach and the relevance of considering non-additive functions. The method suggests a promising direction for improving the representation of preferences.

Decision-making in environmental management requires eliciting preferences of stakeholders and predicting outcomes of decision alternatives. Usually, preferences and predictions are both uncertain. Uncertainty of predictions can be tackled by multi-attribute utility theory, but the uncertainty of preferences remains a challenge. We demonstrate an approach for including both uncertainties in a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), using utility theory and the concept of expected expected utility. For a decision regarding a regional merger of wastewater infrastructure in Switzerland, we constructed preference models for four stakeholders. These models also allowed for non-additive interactions between objectives. We evaluated the performance of eleven decision alternatives for which we predicted potential outcomes. Even though uncertainties were high, we could draw conclusions based on the expected expected utility of alternatives. Building a pipeline to discharge treated wastewater to a larger river emerged as a potential consensus alternative to mitigate the problem of micropollutants in a small stream. We investigated the robustness of the findings with sensitivity analysis regarding the preference parameters and the included objectives. In their actual decision, the stakeholders partly preferred other alternatives than those proposed by the model. Their choices could be explained by reduced decision models in which only few objectives were included. This may indicate the use of simplified choice heuristics by the stakeholders. The presented approach is feasible for supporting other difficult environmental or engineering decisions in practice, for which we give a number of recommendations.

Finding regional solutions for water infrastructure and other environmental management challenges requires coordination, communication, and a shared understanding among different stakeholders. To develop a more versatile and collaborative decision-making process for nutrient management in the San Francisco Bay Area, we used a mixed-methods approach consisting of stakeholder analysis with cluster analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), and scenario planning. These methods allowed us to identify agreements and disagreements in stakeholder objectives and preferences, clarify ways in which different options could meet the goals of diverse stakeholders, and elucidate how scientific uncertainty about technical performance and future conditions could affect management strategies. Results of the analysis indicate that several non-conventional nutrient management options like constructed wetlands and increased water recycling for irrigation met the goals of many stakeholders under a variety of future scenarios. A comparison of MCDA results with a more traditional 'cost-efficiency' measure (i.e., optimizing for the lowest cost per mass of nutrients removed) revealed little correlation between the two methods for stakeholders who expressed a preference for co-benefits of management options such as increased water supply and nutrient recovery for fertilizer use. The method also allowed us to identify key areas of disagreement (e.g., the relative importance of constructing infrastructure that would not be affected by sea level rise) that should find regulatory or professional consensus before advancing with decision-making. This mixed-methods approach is time-consuming and requires specific expertise that is not always available to stakeholders. The development of more efficient preference elicitation and interaction procedures would increase the likelihood that decision-makers would make the extra effort required to use this potentially powerful method. Nonetheless, the mixed-methods approach had several important advantages over more traditional strategic planning methods including its ability to stimulate discussions amongst stakeholders who do not regularly interact, support collaborative planning, and encourage multi-benefit solutions.

Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is an approach to improving sanitation to combat open defecation (OD). OD is a health threat to children under five. CLTS promotes the construction of latrines with the goal of declaring communities open defecation free. However, which factors of the implementation process are most important for the success has yet to be ascertained. The analysed sample comprised of 94 communities in rural Ghana, where CLTS was implemented and factors describing the implementation process of CLTS were assessed. Additionally, monitoring data from the implementation process were used. Multiple regression analysis revealed that latrine coverage was significantly related to attendance at the CLTS meeting, the number of supportive community leaders, the expectation of participants of receiving an incentive, and the number of follow-up visits. Implementers of CLTS should direct their attention to the processes following the community meeting. The success of CLTS can be improved by investing in follow-up visits, the support of local leaders, and the careful application of incentives.

Unsafe sanitation practices are a major source of environmental pollution and are a leading cause of death in countries of the Global South. One of the most successful campaigns to eradicate open defecation is "Community-Led Total Sanitation" (CLTS). It aims at shifting social norms towards safe sanitation practices. However, the effectiveness of CLTS is heterogeneous. Based on social identity theory, we expect CLTS to be most effective in communities with stronger social identification, because in these communities individuals should rather follow social norms. We conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial with 3,216 households in 132 communities in Ghana, comparing CLTS to a control arm. Self-reported open defecation rates and social identification were assessed pre-post. Generalized Estimating Equations showed that CLTS achieved lower open defecation rates compared to controls. This effect was significantly stronger for communities with stronger average social identification. The results confirm the assumptions of social identity theory. They imply that pre-existing social identification needs to be considered for planning CLTS, and strengthened beforehand if needed.

This paper focuses on cooperation among organizations in a common‐pool resource (CPR) problem situation. Cooperation is particularly challenging in settings where resource degradation is produced by a variety of different sectors and parts of the population; and where the problem, as well as public responsibilities, transcend borders and jurisdictions. Focusing on transboundary water quality management in the Rhine catchment area, we ask: What drives two actors in a CPR problem situation to cooperate with each other? We argue that the degree of threat to a CPR is an important driver for collective action, and focus on actors' exposure to and perception of a threat to a CPR. Furthermore, we rely on applications of the ecology of games framework (EGF), taking into account the larger institutional context of CPR management. This allows us to test whether actors' participation in forums, such as regional and international water body associations, helps to overcome the CPR problem by further enhancing interactions among actors. Based on survey data and applying advanced network statistics (exponential random graph models [ERGM]), we conclude that although problem exposure is one factor that enhances joint cooperation, participation in forums plays an even bigger role for cooperation in a CPR problem setting. Our study contributes to research on cooperation in CPR problem settings, highlights the need to more systematically include the effects that CPR problems have on actors when analyzing CPR problem settings, and stresses the function of forums as triggers for cooperation in CPR problem situations.

本文重点关注公共池塘资源（CPR）问题下的组织合作。当资源退化的“始作俑者”来自各类不 同群体，且CPR问题和公共责任超越了司法管辖范围时，合作会很困难。我们将焦点放在莱茵河流域 的水质管理上，并提出如下问题：在面临CPR问题的情况下，什么因素会驱动两个行为者进行合作？ 我们认为，对CPR的威胁是集体行动的驱动因素，因此，我们关注了行为者对CPR威胁的接触以及感 知。我们依赖于生态博弈框架（EGF），来考虑CPR管理背后更大的制度背景。我们检验了行为者参与 论坛是否会有助于增强行为者之间的互动，进而克服CPR问题。根据调查数据，我们采用了社会网 络高级统计分析方法（指数随机图模型，ERGM），并得出结论：对威胁问题的接触可以促进共同合 作；此外，参与论坛对于CPR问题环境下的合作更为重要。该研究有助于对CPR问题环境下的合作进 行探索，突出了在分析CPR问题时系统考虑其对行为者的影响的必要性，并强调了论坛引发合作的 这一功能。

Research and policy processes in many fields, such as sustainability and health, are increasingly relying on transdisciplinary cooperation among a multitude of governmental, nongovernmental, and private actors from local to global levels. In the absence of hierarchical chains of command, multistakeholder governance may accommodate conflicting or diverse interests and facilitate collective action, but its effectiveness depends on its capacity to integrate systems, transformation, and target knowledge. Approaches to foster such governance are nascent and quickly evolving, and methodological standards to facilitate comparison and learning from best practice are needed. However, there is currently no evaluation approach that (i) comprehensively assesses the capacity for knowledge integration in multistakeholder governance, (ii) draws on the best available knowledge that is being developed in various fields, and (iii) combines a systematic and transferable methodological design with pragmatic feasibility.

We brought together 20 experts from institutions in nine countries, all working on evaluation approaches for collaborative science–policy initiatives. In a synthesis process that included a 2-day workshop and follow-up work among a core group of participants, we developed a tool for evaluating knowledge integration capacity in multistakeholder governance (EVOLvINC). Its 23 indicators incorporate previously defined criteria and components of transdisciplinary evaluations into a single, comprehensive framework that operationalizes the capacity for integrating systems, target, and transformation knowledge during an initiative’s (a) design and planning processes at the policy formulation stage, (b) organization and working processes at the implementation stage, and (c) sharing and learning processes at the evaluation stage of the policy cycle. EVOLvINC is (i) implemented through a questionnaire, (ii) builds on established indicators where possible, (iii) offers a consistent and transparent semiquantitative scoring and aggregation algorithm, and (iv) uses spider diagrams for visualizing results. The tool builds on experience and expertise from both the northern and southern hemispheres and was empirically validated with seven science–policy initiatives in six African and Asian countries.

As a generalized framework, EVOLvINC thus enables a structured reflection on the capacity of multistakeholder governance processes to foster knowledge integration. Its emphasis on dialog and exploration allows adaptation to contextual specificities, highlights relative strengths and weaknesses, and suggests avenues for shaping multistakeholder governance toward mutual learning, capacity building, and strengthened networks. The validation suggests that the adaptive capacity of multistakeholder governance could be best enhanced by considering systems characteristics at the policy formulation stage and fostering adaptive and generic learning at the evaluation stage of the policy cycle.

Recent empirical studies show a persistent gap between 'socially robust' knowledge produced by transdisciplinary research projects and its ability to promote change on a large scale. Current discourses about the 'project-to-science-and-practice-at-large gap' have focused mainly on exploring various conditions that need to be fulfilled to produce 'socially robust' knowledge. Yet, those discourses have rarely built on the broader literature of knowledge utilization, which Greenhalgh and Wieringa (2011) emphasize acknowledges 'the fundamentally social ways in which knowledge emerges, circulates, and gets applied in practice.' Their insights are helpful in advancing our understanding of why transdisciplinary research projects do or do not contribute to sustainability on a large scale. Expanding Jahn et al. (2012)'s model of transdisciplinary research, we present a revised conceptual model of an ideal-typical, interactive and iterative transdisciplinary research process that adds two new phases from the field of knowledge utilization to their original three-phase model and accounts for the social and relational nature of knowledge utilization. The revised model includes five phases through which transdisciplinary projects operate in different order: (i) defining sustainability problems, (ii) producing new knowledge, (iii) assessing new knowledge, (iv) disseminating new knowledge in realms of both science and practice and (v) using new knowledge in both realms.

Citizens are the target group of sustainability policies, and their acceptance and subsequent behavioral change are key in transition processes. But what drives citizens to accept new instruments that will be added to a pre-existing instrument mix? To answer this question, we suggest an innovative combination of sustainability transitions and social acceptance research, and examine the case of Swiss energy turnaround. We rely on data from a representative sample of the Swiss resident population. By estimating logistic multi-response models, we disentangle individual and context-related factors that drive instrument preferences in a instrument mix situation. We conclude that it is mainly individual factors (values in favor of nuclear phasing out and climate mitigation) that positively impact the acceptance of instruments that promote the larger energy transitions through renewables. Additionally, the self-contribution of citizens (energy pro-sumers) seems to shape preferences more than current policies of their own jurisdiction.

The base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) concept plays a prominent role among the market-based perspectives for poverty alleviation. Previous literature reviews discuss the evolution of the BoP concept as a research domain; however, several major research streams that approach the phenomenon from distinct angles have been overlooked. To address these shortcomings, we continue these reviews and formulate recommendations for theoretical and empirical advancement by considering emerging research domains. We use the problematization method to identify in-house and field assumptions shared across research domains and test them through critical empirical and theoretical interrogation. Therefore, we extend the original BoP concept by considering emerging research domains that have been neglected in earlier studies, including corporate social responsibility, inclusive business, microfinance, nonprofit expansion, social entrepreneurship, and subsistence marketplaces. We also revise the BoP business model idea and develop a framework that highlights key dimensions for management research in BoP markets. These dimensions include business ecosystems, financial viability, innovativeness, resource scarcity, role of the poor, and scalability. For each dimension, we develop future research questions.

Die Schweiz hat den schrittweisen Ausstieg aus der Kernenergie im Jahre 2011 beschlossen, diesen Entscheid 2017 in einer Volksabstimmung bestätigt und so den Weg für einen grundlegenden Strukturwandel des Energiesystems freigemacht. Dieser Beitrag untersucht, wie direkte Demokratie, Föderalismus und Konkordanz – d. h. die Kerninstitutionen der schweizerischen Konsensdemokratie – auf den Entscheid zur Transformation der schweizerischen Energiepolitik wirken. Dabei werden die für das politische System der Schweiz charakteristischen Strukturen der Machtteilung, welche insbesondere auf den drei Kerninstitutionen direkte Demokratie, Föderalismus und Konkordanz sowie auf deren fallspezifischen losen Kopplungen basieren, dargestellt und ihre Wirkung auf die Transformation der schweizerischen Energiepolitik chronologisch nachgezeichnet. Aus der qualitativen Prozessanalyse zeigt sich erstens, dass keine der drei machtteilenden Institutionen der schweizerischen Konsensdemokratie, weder isoliert noch lose gekoppelt, eine ausschließlich transformationshemmende Wirkung entfaltete. Zweitens schien deren Zusammenspiel insbesondere in der vorparlamentarischen Phase (Konsultation) und im Vorfeld der Volksabstimmung bedeutend. Die Analyse zeigt auf, dass institutionelle Aspekte, welche in vielen Policy-zentrierten Studien vernachlässigt werden, eine ebenfalls relevante Erklärungsgröße für Politikwandel ausmachen.

Switzerland's government decided to phase out nuclear power in 2011. In 2017, the Swiss people accepted this decision in a popular referendum and made way for fundamental structural change in the energy system. This article analyzes the effect of Swiss consensus democracy's core institutions (i.e. direct democracy, federalism, consociationalism) on the transformation of Swiss energy policy. It considers three core institutions of the Swiss political system constituting the distinct structures of power separation: consociationalism, federalism, and direct democracy, and describes their casespecific coupling as well as their relevance in the course of the Swiss energy transformation. We show with our qualitative process analysis that none of the three institutions of the Swiss consensus democracy or their loose coupling had a purely constraining effect on the transformation of Swiss energy policy. Moreover, the coupling of institutions seemed to be considerably relevant during the consultation phase and prior to the public vote. The analysis shows that institutional aspects, which are neglected in many policy-centric studies, are also a relevant factor in explaining policy change.

By acknowledging the full complexity of the phenomenon of servitization and its manifold drivers and outcomes, we extend the current literature through a configurational perspective, the aim of which is to understand the interplay between the drivers (conditions) that lead to certain equifinal outcomes of servitization. The present study aims to take stock of the servitization literature by utilizing the contingency theory of strategy as our foundational theory and the strategy–structure–environment approach as our primary framework to systematically review and analyze the identified configurational servitization studies. We identify commonalities and gaps in the literature, and we set directions for future research.

Theories of behaviour change and health behaviour change interventions are most often evaluated in between-person designs. However, behaviour change theories apply to individuals not groups and behavioural interventions ultimately aim to achieve within-person rather than between-group change. Within-person methodology, such as N-of-1 (also known as single case design), can circumvent this issue, though has multiple design-specific challenges. This paper provides a conceptual review of the challenges and potential solutions for undertaking N-of-1 studies in health psychology. Key challenges identified include participant adherence to within-person protocols, carry-over and slow onset effects, suitability of behaviour change techniques for evaluation in N-of-1 experimental studies, optimal allocation sequencing and blinding, calculating power/sample size, and choosing the most suitable analysis approach. Key solutions include involving users in study design, employing recent technologies for unobtrusive data collection and problem solving by design. Within-person designs share common methodological requirements with conventional between-person designs but require specific methodological considerations. N-of-1 evaluation designs are appropriate for many though not all types of interventions. A greater understanding of patterns of behaviours and factors influencing behaviour change at the within-person level is required to progress health psychology into a precision science.
Video abstract: Supplementary Material 1.

Multiple actors across different institutional levels play a role in water governance. The coordination of these actors is important for effective water governance. However, the joining together of multiple actors can have several implications, such as a redistribution of power across actors, a change in democratic control and citizen influence as well as shifting accountability structures. These implications can involve different barriers and bridges that might impede or foster coordination. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, we assess the following barriers and bridges for coordination: (1) reputational power in terms of who is perceived as important for coordination in the water sector; (2) democratic legitimacy in terms of actors' value of local control of water services; and (3) accountability in terms of the regional actors' capacity to steer in the water sector. This article focuses on three cases in a Swiss region that has experienced water provision challenges due to its highly fragmented water supply structures. We find that reputational power serves as a bridge in our three cases: when the actors responsible for water supply regard potential coordination partners as important, then we observe coordination. In contrast, we do not find conclusive evidence to support the assumption that a fear of losing local control is a barrier for coordination. Instead, our results indicate that accountability, in the form of vertical steering by the regional actors, serves as a bridge for coordination, and that this could help mitigate some of the potentially negative effects of democratic legitimacy perceptions: through convening local actors or providing positive incentives to municipalities to work together, regional actors can foster coordination.

This article presents a review of over 100 studies relying on the Institutional Research Regime (IRR) framework. We base the review on a set of 13 elements that cover categories concerning research focus, research design and results. The article first presents the development of IRR studies over time by showing and discussing how different elements of the IRR framework are more or less popular in the literature, and how this popularity develops over time. For example, we have identified a trend in the IRR literature to focus more on actors and activities, while the resource focus predominates across time. Second, the article analyses how different elements of the IRR framework are combined in the existing literature and thus identifies three groups of IRR studies, that is, complex IRR studies, bottom-up IRR studies, and top-down IRR studies.

Our society is facing serious environmental challenges related to climate change, pollution, diminishing resources, and biodiversity loss. Such problems are often ill-defined and are characterized by high uncertainty. Environmental decisions have strong impacts on society and demand clear and transparent trade-offs across values and priorities of stakeholder groups. This Feature Issue on Environmental Decisions includes papers focused on important environmental applications approached through various disciplinary backgrounds. The papers highlight advanced–often interdisciplinary–methodological approaches and include the perspectives of different stakeholders in the process of environmental decision-making. A wide range of methods are explored, ranging from a comprehensive review (for sustainable transport by Marleau Donais et al.) to an opinion paper proposing the use of Records of Engagement and Decision-making (RoED; by Cockerill et al.). Stakeholder engagement and preference elicitation required the development of new aggregation models for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA; by Reichert et al.). The integration of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) with MCDA was found to be necessary in practice (by Liu et al.; Marleau Donais et al.). MCDA was extended to include the spatial dimension by integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS; by Guay et al.; Schito et al.). The importance of considering the resilience of systems to better respond to and recover from unpredictable risks was emphasized (by Leyerer et al.; Mustajoki and Marttunen). These papers demonstrate the richness of approaches to environmental decision-making. Environmental issues offer ample exciting research opportunities to a broader scientific community. We encourage the readers of this Feature Issue - and of EJDP - to engage in environmental decision-making projects to support emerging societal needs.

Switzerland plans to restore 4000 km of rivers by 2090. Despite the immense investment costs, river restoration benefits have not been valued in monetary terms, and a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) does not exist for any river restoration project in Switzerland. We apply stated preference methods to elicit public preferences and willingness to pay for restoring two specific but representative river sites. The benefits of restoration are compared with its costs. Upscaling the results to the national level shows that the government budget allocated for river restoration (CHF 1200/m) is insufficient to cover the costs of local restoration projects. However, the surveyed local populations are willing to pay substantially more for restoring rivers in their area of residence than they are legally obliged to do. The CBA results demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the costs in the two case studies, and hence that restoration efforts are justified from an economic point of view. A sensitivity analysis shows that the main results and conclusions do not change when we change some of the key assumptions underlying the CBA.

Mit der fortschreitenden Digitalisierung gilt es heute als Stand der Technik, Messdaten über das Abwassersystem zu erheben, auszuwerten und zu archivieren. Wie der Wert von Messdaten für Betrieb, Planung und Leistungsüberprüfung ausgeschöpft werden kann, ist jedoch unklar. Um einen einheitlichen Einsatz von Messtechnik, z.B. an Regenüberlaufbecken, sowie einen guten Umgang mit erfassten Messdaten in der Schweizer Praxis zu schaffen, sind Anpassungen auf organisatorischer Ebene notwendig.

Environmental monitoring covers many different management domains. They range from biodiversity conservation to water protection, natural hazard prevention, impact assessment, resource use, or environmental restoration. The need for clear objectives has long been emphasized in the management literature, but has often received only little attention in monitoring design. This is partly due to the lack of systematic approaches for setting objectives. In this paper, we present a formal approach based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), namely relevancy analysis, to prioritize management objectives. We demonstrate its use for a river restoration monitoring program in Switzerland comprising 35 physical and biological objectives. The relevancy of an objective is based on two main components, the general importance of the objective, and the problemspecific impact range. The general importance of an objective is used to identify the most important management objectives from a hierarchy within the national program (i.e. objectives to be monitored). The impact range is used to understand which management objectives are more important to monitor for different river restoration measures (i.e. sub-selection of the objectives specifically for the restoration measure). The general importance of a management objective was determined based on the frequency an objective is mentioned in selected policy documents, and the legislative power and temporal persistency of each document. The impact ranges were identified from a questionnaire involving 15 Swiss river restoration professionals. Hereby, we assumed that the impact range increases as the anticipated impact of the restoration measure on a specific management objective increases, and as the uncertainty to anticipate this impact increases. For simplicity, we applied the approach only to one restoration measure, namely river widening. Six management objectives scored high in relevancy in terms of both impact range and general importance – channel structure and diversity, structure and diversity of the banks and floodplains, sediment dynamics, longitudinal connectivity, lateral connectivity, and vertical connectivity. Hence, these objectives are both important national objectives for river monitoring (according to the legislation) and are objectives that are potentially highly impacted by a river widening project. We performed sensitivity analyses related to the calculation of the general importance, the impact range, and the relevancy of the objectives. The practice-oriented approach can be transferred to a broad diversity of decision situations where there is a need for systematic evaluation of the importance of objectives. It could be a useful tool for social learning and finding group consensus about the priority of the objectives.

Building a well-structured objectives hierarchy is central to multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). However, in the absence of a systematic methodology to support the process, this task has been described as "more art than science". Objectives hierarchies often tend to become large and constraining the size of a hierarchy can be challenging. This paper proposes and illustrates the use of a set of methods to support the simplification of the hierarchies in contexts that are "data rich" and characterised by many objectives. The aim of using the proposed approach is to support decision analysts in developing an appropriately concise decision model for the further interactions with the stakeholders. Using data from two completed environmental cases we show retrospectively how qualitative (means-ends networks), semi-quantitative (relevancy analysis) and quantitative (correlation analysis, principal component analysis, local sensitivity analysis of weights) methods, used alone or in combination, can inform hierarchy development. We evaluate the potential benefits and challenges of each method and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the simplification of an objectives hierarchy. Questionnaire-based relevancy analysis can be a useful method to identify and communicate important objectives in the early phases of an MCDA process with stakeholders, while correlation analysis can help to identify overlapping objectives, particularly in cases having many objectives and alternatives. It is intended that the methods support a facilitator in developing a clear understanding of the problem and also prompt deeper thinking about and discussion of the appropriate structure and content of an objectives hierarchy with the stakeholders involved.

Das Nachhaltigkeitsziel 6 (SDG 6) der Vereinten Nationen (Uno) verlangt die «Verfügbarkeit und nachhaltige Bewirtschaftung von Wasser und die Sicherstellung sanitärer Einrichtungen für alle». Der Artikel analysiert, wieso die Schweiz bei den internationalen Verhandlungen um das SDG 6 eine wichtige Rolle spielen wollte und konnte. Seit der Verabschiedung setzen sich zwischen 50 und 100 Schweizer Akteure mit der Umsetzung des SDG 6 im globalen Süden auseinander. Wie vernetzt sie sind, und welche Herausforderungen dabei bestehen, wird ebenfalls nachfolgend aufgezeigt.

This study investigates choice certainty, choice consistency, and choice monotonicity and their underlying common and idiosyncratic determinants in discrete choice experiments. We test the equality of choice behaviour between respondents who differ with respect to these concepts. Our results suggest that there are significant differences in the choice behaviour between certain and uncertain, as well as consistent and inconsistent, respondents. The hypothesis of equality of choice behaviour between samples with and without a self-reported choice certainty follow-up question cannot be rejected. We identify a variety of idiosyncratic determinants of choice certainty, consistency, and monotonicity, but only the time spent reading informational pages and gender are identified as common drivers. We find that female respondents are less certain about their choices, but display a higher degree of monotonicity and consistency in their choice behaviour.

Avec une valeur de remplacement de 230 milliards de francs, les infrastructures d’approvisionnement en eau et d’élimination des eaux usées sont parmi les plus précieuses de Suisse. Les canalisations vieillissantes, l’évolution démographique et l’urbanisation croissante nécessitent d’investir 130 milliards de francs ces 30 prochaines années. Au niveau mondial, l’OCDE estime à 900 milliards de francs les fonds alloués chaque année à la gestion des eaux urbaines. Ce grand besoin d’investissements et la pression internationale accrue pour trouver de nouvelles approches favorisent des solutions innovantes. La recherche de pointe menée en Suisse dans ce domaine et la nécessité de renouveler les infrastructures confèrent un potentiel inexploité de marché pilote à notre pays. Un programme d’impulsion national permettant de coordonner les décisions d’infrastructure fragmentées des communes est néanmoins nécessaire.

Mit einem Wiederbeschaffungswert von 230 Milliarden Franken zählt die Wasserversorgung und Abwasserentsorgung in der Schweiz zu den wertvollsten Infrastrukturbauten. Alternde Leitungen, steigende Bevölkerungszahlen und zunehmende Urbanisierung verlangen in den nächsten 30 Jahren Investitionen von insgesamt 130 Milliarden Franken. Auf globaler Ebene schätzt die OECD die Investitionen in die Siedlungswasserwirtschaft auf jährlich 900 Milliarden Franken. Dieser hohe Investitionsbedarf und der global steigende Druck, neue Ansätze zu finden, bieten einen Spielraum für innovative Lösungen. Die Schweiz hat mit ihrer Spitzenforschung in diesem Bereich und dem aktuellen Bedarf an Infrastrukturerneuerung ein ungenutztes «Lead-Market»-Potenzial. Dazu braucht es aber ein gesamtschweizerisches Impulsprogram, das die fragmentierten Infrastrukturentscheide der Gemeinden koordiniert.

Users are increasingly acknowledged as important actors fostering those fundamental socio-technical innovations needed to achieve a sustainable society. In the literature, users have so far been portrayed mostly to play a role in early phases of technology formation. However, more recently users have become important players in the upscaling of various innovations. With the advent of new social media, users may interact effortlessly across large distances, exchange knowledge and so increase their contribution to upscaling. We investigate the new potential of virtual user communities. Conceptually, we build on recent insights from socio-technical transition studies to identify different upscaling dimensions. We conduct an internet ethnography of a large virtual community that formed around the Electric Vehicle (EV). Based on these data, we present virtual community characteristics and core mechanisms of participation in upscaling. We find that the community plays an important and distinctive role in fostering electric vehicle use.

In many resource governance systems, representatives of resource-related organizations gather in forums to discuss and develop solutions to policy problems. Forums often deal with interdependent policy problems, giving rise to institutional externalities: instances where decisions made in one forum either decrease (negative institutional externality) or increase (positive institutional externality) the rate by which current policy outputs in other forums resolve their prescribed policy problems. In this article we argue that forum-specific factors can impact the direction of such externalities. We theorize that forums with more diverse memberships in terms of both the issues that participants care about and types of organizations represented are better equipped to incorporate more holistic, ecosystem-based perspectives, which promote the generation of positive institutional externalities. Our study utilizes survey data collected from forum participants in the California Delta. Results from a series of cross-nested regressions demonstrate a positive association between forum diversity and positive externalities.
 

Open defecation is still a major health problem in developing countries. While enormous empirical research exists on latrine coverage, little is known about households' latrine construction and usage behaviours. Using field observation and survey data collected from 1523 households in 132 communities in northern Ghana after 16 months of implementation of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), this paper assessed the factors associated with latrine completion and latrine use. The survey tool was structured to conform to the Risk, Attitude, Norms, Ability and Self-regulation (RANAS) model. In the analysis, we classified households into three based on their latrine completion level, and conducted descriptive statistics for statistical correlation in level of latrine construction and latrine use behaviour. The findings suggest that open defecation among households reduces as latrine construction approaches completion. Although the study did not find socio-demographic differences of household to be significantly associated with level of latrine completion, we found that social context is a significant determinant of households' latrine completion decisions. The study therefore emphasises the need for continuous sensitisation and social marketing to ensure latrine completion by households at lower levels of construction, and the sustained use of latrines by households.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of two decades of published research that applies different economic approaches to address forested watershed management decisions. The review takes stock of the applied integrated economic and ecohydrological modeling approaches and assesses the way these approaches capture the complexities involved when linking ecohydrological and economic systems. The implications of integrating watershed services into forest management decisions are discussed, lessons are drawn from existing approaches and future research needs identified. Existing modeling approaches are categorized from independent modular models with a unidirectional flow of information to fully coupled holistic models, and are analyzed, among others, in terms of the efficiency improvement that forest-based investments achieve in watershed services provision. The review shows that the number of studies investigating the relationship between forest management and watershed services in economic decision-support models is very limited. Only 14 studies that were identified examine these relationships for water supply, while 9 studies were found to focus on the impact on water quality, 2 of which addressed water quality in combination with water supply. A shortcoming is that about half of the studies do not clearly specify baseline conditions to test the incremental value of the evaluated forest management actions in terms of watershed services provision, which undermines evaluating their cost-effectiveness or economic efficiency. A promising finding is nevertheless that in 8 of the 10 studies where these relationships were evaluated in terms of their costs and benefits compared to a specified baseline alternative, forest conservation or forest management is shown to be an economically efficient nature-based solution to supply the watershed services of interest. The limited availability of geo-referenced data and information, including the often complex and confidential nature of cost and price data, and the high data demands of more advanced spatial econometric models are among the main barriers to address relevant forest and water economic interactions. Important future extensions of existing integrated approaches include the further coupling of more detailed ecohydrological models and multi-sectoral hydro-economic models that are able to account for the different risks (floods, droughts, wildfires) and uncertainties under climate change and their impact on watershed services and water security.

A decrease in net benefits from market-based forest products over the last three decades seems to be connected to the increasing abandonment of forestland in Mediterranean areas of Europe. In this paper, we estimate spatially distributed probabilities of continuing with forest management practices in mainly native pine and oak forests in Andalusia (southern Spain). The continuation of active forest management encompasses landowners' investment in operations that promote the recruitment of new individuals of the same species once a stand reaches its rotation age. On the contrary, abandoning forestry investment involves natural self-regeneration including tree densification, shrub encroachment and forest species replacement. We estimate the long-term effects of alternative scenarios of forest management on carbon sequestration and water provisioning services (blue water, i.e. surface discharge and ground water recharge). We examine the effect of payments for carbon sequestration, or alternatively for increasing blue water, on forest management decisions. Results are provided as spatially disaggregated values over different time frames up to 2100 and consider the sensitivity of forest investment decisions to a wide range of price levels and discounting rates.

Julie Thompson Klein’s contributions to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research have enriched the way collaboration is discussed and handled by introducing concepts of boundary work and boundary crossing from the field of Science and Technology Studies. In recent years, she has been integrating those concepts into crossdisciplinarity, an effort culminating in the development of a framework for a forthcoming book (Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Boundary Work, Collaboration, and Communication in the 21st Century). With her permission, we have used an earlier version of her framework to analyze boundary work and boundary crossing in transdisciplinary sustainable water management projects in Australia and Switzerland. The aim of using the framework has been twofold: to explore and assess the heuristic value of the framework, i.e. how it improves our conceptualization of boundary work in the two projects, and to examine the framework itself, i.e. whether some of the seven concepts involved are hard to work with or should be further developed.

Servitization describes the addition of services to manufacturers' core product offerings to create additional customer value. This study aims to identify the key themes and research priorities in this body of literature over thirteen years from 2005 and 2017, based on four major research streams (general management, marketing, operations, and service management). Prior multi-theme literature reviews have focused on operations journals, overlooking important work in other streams, particularly marketing. Informed by a systematic literature review of 219 papers, the study identifies five main themes: service offerings; strategy and structure; motivations and performance; resources and capabilities; service development, sales, and delivery. Within each theme, gaps in the literature are identified and eleven research priorities presented. The review shows that the literature has evolved significantly in recent years, becoming increasingly diverse. A recent noteworthy topic is the use of digital technologies, which indicates the increasing relevance of technological developments to manufacturers' service activities. Our review highlights that there are still some fundamental aspects of servitization that warrant further research, primarily the need to replace the focal-manufacturer perspective with a multi-actor perspective that highlights the important role of relationships with existing and potentially new actors as a result of technological developments.

Social-ecological network (SEN) concepts and tools are increasingly used in human-environment and sustainability sciences. We take stock of this budding research area to further show the strength of SEN analysis for complex human-environment settings, identify future synergies between SEN and wider human-environment research, and provide guidance about when to use different kinds of SEN approaches and models. We characterize SEN research along a spectrum specifying the degree of explicit network representation of system components and dynamics. We then systematically review one end of this spectrum, what we term 'fully articulated SEN' studies, which specifically model unique social and ecological units and relationships. Results show a larger number of papers focus on methodological advancement and applied ends. While there has been some development and testing of theories, this remains an area for future work and would help develop SENs as a unique field of research, not just a method. Authors have studied diverse systems, while mainly focusing on the problem of social-ecological fit alongside a scattering of other topics. There is strong potential, however, to engage other issues central to human-environment studies. Analyzing the simultaneous effects of multiple social, environmental, and coupled processes, change over time, and linking network structures to outcomes are also areas for future advancement. This review provides a comprehensive assessment of (fully articulated) SEN research, a necessary step that can help scholars develop comparable cases and fill research gaps.

Incubators are essential for a range of culture-based microbial methods, such as membrane filtration followed by cultivation for assessing drinking water quality. However, commercially available incubators are often costly, difficult to transport, not flexible in terms of volume, and/or poorly adapted to local field conditions where access to electricity is unreliable. The purpose of this study was to develop an adaptable, low-cost and transportable incubator that can be constructed using readily available components. The electronic core of the incubator was first developed. These components were then tested under a range of ambient temperature conditions (3.5 °C - 39 °C) using three types of incubator shells (polystyrene foam box, hard cooler box, and cardboard box covered with a survival blanket). The electronic core showed comparable performance to a standard laboratory incubator in terms of the time required to reach the set temperature, inner temperature stability and spatial dispersion, power consumption, and microbial growth. The incubator set-ups were also effective at moderate and low ambient temperatures (between 3.5 °C and 27 °C), and at high temperatures (39 °C) when the incubator set temperature was higher. This incubator prototype is low-cost (< 300 USD) and adaptable to a variety of materials and volumes. Its demountable structure makes it easy to transport. It can be used in both established laboratories with grid power or in remote settings powered by solar energy or a car battery. It is particularly useful as an equipment option for field laboratories in areas with limited access to resources for water quality monitoring.

The FANFAR project (reinForced cooperAtion to provide operatioNal Flood forecasting and Alerts in West AfRica), funded by the European Commission (2018-2020), aims to foster reinforced co-operation between key West African and European organisations. The project focuses on devel-oping a system according to West African user needs and priorities, identified through a set of workshops. The first workshop took place at the AGRHYMET Regional Center (2018.09.17–20), in Niamey, Niger. Representatives from hydrological agencies and emergency management agen-cies on the regional and national level from 17 countries in West Africa contributed substantially to achieve the project goals. In this workshop, the main objective was to co-design the flood forecast-ing and alert system in West Africa by: 1) clarifying user objectives, needs, and preferences, 2) receiving feedback on the currently available FANFAR forecast and alert system prototypes, and 3) on acknowledging which stakeholders should be involved. Therefore, several activities were performed. To identify which objectives are important for the participants for developing a flood forecasting and alert system; several exercises were performed and allowed us to prioritize the following objectives by order of preference: High accuracy of data and information outputs, Timely dissemination of flood alerts, High Reliability, Clear definition of alert thresholds, and Reliable ac-cess to data & information outputs. The activities performed to understand the matching between expectations and the current development status of the FANFAR prototype systems for the flood forecast production (Hydrology-TEP) and visualization portal, allowed to focus on identifying pos-sible system options (how the system should be configured to meet the objectives) through key questions or drivers: 1) the easiest-to-use system, 2) the most attractive system for West-Africa, and 3) the most robust system; i.e. that works in all West Africa. To conclude, an exercise was developed to identify key stakeholders to be involved in the continued development process of the system. A social science framework was used to identify stakeholders that would desire to continue their involvement in co-design activities and those that may be interested in participating in future co-design activities. The results obtained are very promising and allow us to look forward to con-tinuing the co-design process and improve the FANFAR system in the next workshops.

The FANFAR project (reinForced cooperAtion to provide operatioNal Flood forecasting and Alerts in West AfRica), funded by the European Commission (2018-2020), aims to foster rein-forced cooperation between key West African and European organisations. The project focuses on developing a system according to West African user needs and priorities, identified through a set of workshops. The second workshop was hosted by the Hydrological Services Department of Ghana and took place at the Ange Hill Hotel (2019.04.09-12), in Accra, Ghana. Representatives from hydrological agencies and emergency management agencies on the regional and national level from 17 countries in West Africa contributed substantially to achieve the project goals. In this workshop, the main objectives regarding work package 2 were to further co-design the flood forecasting and alert system in West Africa by: 1) consolidating user objectives and preferences; 2) assessing the progress done on the FANFAR prototype systems since workshop 1; and 3) preparing the participants to test the system in 2019. Therefore, several activities were per-formed. To consolidate which objectives are important for the participants for developing a flood forecasting and alert system and how important those objectives are, several exercises were per-formed that allowed us to better understand the preferences. Regarding objectives, special im-portance was given to: high accuracy of information; clear flood risk information; reliable access to information; and timely production, distribution and access to information. The activities performed to understand the matching between expectations and the current develop-ment status of the FANFAR prototype systems for the flood forecast production; the (Hydrology-TEP), interactive visualization portal, integrated support systems, and flood risk communication features, allowed to focus on identifying possible improvements. The results obtained are promis-ing and we look forward to continuing the co-design process and improve the systems in the next workshops.

Background: Mental disorders, particularly depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, are common long-term psychological outcomes in emergency contexts arising from conflicts, natural disasters, and other challenging environmental conditions. In emergencies, people suffer not only from the lack of external resources such as drinking water and food but also from poor mental health. Mental disorders can substantially impair daily activities in vulnerable individuals. However, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) behaviors are daily activities that require effort, time, and strong internal motivation. Therefore, questions arise: whether there is a relationship between mental health and safe water behaviors, and if so, whether the motivational drivers of these behaviors are affected by mental health.
Methods: Our cross-sectional study conducted face-to-face interviews with 638 households in rural Malawi. We used a quantitative questionnaire based on the risks, attitudes, norms, abilities, and self-regulation (RANAS) approach to measure motivational psychosocial factors. Mental health was assessed using the validated Chichewa version of the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20). Results. Almost a third of the respondents reported poor mental health. We found significant negative association between mental health and self-reported safe water collection (p = .01, r = −.104) but not between safe water transportation and storage behavior. The moderation analysis revealed significant interaction effects of mental health with some psychosocial factors and therefore on WASH behaviors. Poor mental health changed the influence of three psychosocial factors—perceived others’ behavior, commitment, and remembering—on safe drinking water collection behavior. The influence on water transportation and storage behavior of the perceived severity of contracting a disease, the belief that transporting and storing water requires substantial effort, and others’ approval depended on the mental health condition of the respondent.
Conclusions: These results imply that populations with a significant proportion of individuals with poor mental health will benefit from interventions to mitigate mental health before or parallel to behavioral change interventions for WASH. Specific population-level interventions have been shown to have a positive effect on mental well-being, and they have been successfully applied at scale. This research is especially relevant in emergency contexts, as it indicates that mental health measures before any WASH interventions will make them more effective.

One major challenge of water quality management is that the source of pollution and its effects might be spatially disentangled. This cause-effect misfit has large implications on how surface water in a hydrological catchment area is managed and regulated. We argue in this paper that such misfit can best be addressed through interconnected and multilevel collaborative arrangements that support institutional capacity building. In line with recent literature, we presume that social-ecological fit can be enhanced through direct collaboration among actors managing the same or interconnected ecosystem units. To study the social-ecological fit, we analyze three subcatchments of the international river basin of the Rhine. Our data on actor collaboration, on inter-related subcatchments, and on actor and subcatchment connections are analyzed through network analysis and motif counts. Our results show social-ecological fit to emerge in less complex comanagement situations, e.g., when one resource unit lies in the competence of two actors, or if one actor is responsible for two units. To a lesser extent, there is also evidence for more complex, multilevel collaboration arrangements among actors.

In this chapter we advance the argument that regulatory policies can have a far-reaching impact on the organizational capabilities and, ultimately, on the performance of public utilities. Once capabilities are lost, it may be hard to regain them in the short term. Our insights are based on a qualitative-comparative analysis of capability-losing processes at Eskom, South Africa's national electric utility. South Africa experienced severe power outages between 2005 and 2008, which are commonly explained as having been caused by inadequate generation capacity, badly maintained power plants and insufficient coal supply. In this chapter, we go a step further and examine the underlying reasons at the organizational level. We show that a variety of new regulations led to a substantial loss of critical competences and skills at Eskom. This caused a deterioration of planning, operation and maintenance procedures, and made swift reactions to the crisis difficult. The 'capability perspective' presented in this chapter complements traditional theoretical explanations of utility and sector performance.

Transitioning economic sectors towards more sustainable futures is a major global challenge, in particular for non-OECD countries. Policymakers in these countries are confronted with a double challenge: how to implement cleaner technologies and infrastructures while at the same time promoting rapid industrial development. In catch-up studies, this trade-off has been increasingly interpreted as providing windows of opportunity for gaining strong leadership in new generations of cleantech industries. In this paper, we maintain that in order to specify how these windows of opportunity can be endogenized, a deeper understanding is needed about whether, how and by whom the directionality of innovation systems can be influenced. For this purpose, we propose an analytical approach that draws on the technological innovation system framework extending the current understanding of directionality in two ways: first, we complement the prevalent top-down perspective with a bottom-up view exemplified by the institutional entrepreneurship literature. Second, we posit that the focus has to be shifted from the manufacturing of single technologies to the transformation of entire socio-technical systems. The presented framework is validated by a case study on recent shifts in the dominant technology in China's urban water management sector. Major changes in the country's sectoral selection environment led membrane bioreactor technology to become the dominant design in urban water management - a development that is unmatched in any other country in the world. Owing to these transformations, China's technology firms outcompete multinational players and therefore they show strong potentials for industrial leapfrogging. However, although the promise to solve environmental problems played a decisive role in the shaping of the selection environment, it remains unclear whether the observed transformation leads the way to a more sustainable sector structure in the longer run. The case, however, still enables us to specify how windows of opportunity can be endogenized through the interplay of different actors trying to shape different layers of the selection environment in a specific sector.

The provision of basic services is falling short in informal settlements of cities in the Global South. In particular, public utilities have had difficulties expanding their services to the urban poor. Why is this the case despite utilities having improved their capabilities substantially over the last years? This paper investigates how innovation strategies of utilities are aligned or misaligned with the broader contexts in informal settlements, which are populated by different socio-technical regimes. We propose a framework to identify new capabilities needed by utilities to deal with these different regimes. The paper reconstructs pro-poor initiatives of a water and sewerage utility in a large East-African city and explains why they tended to fail in terms of livelihood improvement. We show how the alignment between capability portfolios and specific regime structures have set limits to the success of pro-poor innovation strategies in informal settlement contexts.

The provision of basic services suffers from a multitude of sustainability challenges in many cities of low-income countries. Sanitation provision faces particular challenges in the form of environmental contamination, high costs, and large inequalities among urban residents. In recent years an increasing number of innovations in on-site systems have been developed, which have not yet evolved into fully functional alternatives to the existing regimes. We study three prominent recent on-site sanitation initiatives in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya that aimed at developing entire "sanitation value chains", which we conceptualize as an emerging Technological Innovation System (TIS). The analysis leads us to propose alternative governance modes for the TIS to overcome system failures such as capability, coordination and institutional barriers. Conceptually, the paper extends conventional TIS analyses towards entire value chains, enabling a wide range of transition processes to be addressed beyond informal settlements and low-income countries.

Fragmentation across scales in natural resource governance can impede coordinated action and decrease innovation capacity. Bridging actors who connect others within governance networks helps to overcome this challenge. We analyze two bridging positions for actors in governance networks. First, periphery connectors integrate otherwise unconnected actors and provide access to new knowledge. Second, central coordinators efficiently connect actors at the center of the network and thus facilitate coordinated action. We propose a way to identify periphery connectors and central coordinators within governance networks and formulate expectations about types of actors that are likely to occupy these positions. An analysis of three actor networks in the water supply sector in Switzerland suggests that periphery coordinator positions are more likely to be occupied by organizations at higher jurisdictional levels. Central coordinator positions are more likely to be occupied by governmental actors as compared to nongovernmental actors. Thus, in addressing challenges of fragmentation, higher level governmental actors continue to play an important role, even when they delegate responsibilities to lower level and private actors.

Serious games and gamification are nowadays pervasive. They are used to communicate about science and sometimes to involve citizens in science (e.g. citizen science). Concurrently, environmental decision analysis is challenged by the high cognitive load of the decision-making process and the possible biases threatening the rationality assumptions. Difficult decision-making processes can result in incomplete preference construction, and are generally limited to few participants. We reviewed 43 serious games and gamified applications related to water. We covered the broad diversity of serious games, which could be explained by the still unsettled terminology in the research area of gamification and serious gaming. We discuss how existing games could benefit early steps of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), including problem structuring, stakeholder analysis, defining objectives, and exploring alternatives. We argue that no existing game allows for preference elicitation; one of the most challenging steps of MCDA. We propose many research opportunities for behavioral operational research.

Ist in der Zukunft ein Einfluss des Klimawandels auf die für die Dimensionierung der Siedlungsentwässerung relevanten Starkregen erkennbar? Untersuchungen zeigen kein erkennbares Klimasignal, weder für die nahe (2035–2064) noch für die ferne Zukunft (2070–2099). Dies gilt für die Wiederkehrintervalle 5, 10 und 30 Jahre mit je drei Dauerstufen (10 Min., 60 Min., 24 Std.) und für die vier Niederschlagsregionen in der Schweiz, repräsentiert durch 22 MeteoSchweiz-Wetterstationen.

Direct potable water reuse (DPR), the injection of highly purified wastewater into drinking water systems, is among the newest, and most controversial, methods for augmenting water supplies. DPR is garnering increasing interest, but does not come without risks. This paper examines the notion that emerging regulation of DPR may lack sufficient attention to a particular class of risks: catastrophic risks with low probabilities of occurrence, but high consequences. It may be instructive for proponents of DPR that such consequences have materialized in other industries, with damage to human welfare and to the industries themselves. We develop brief histories of risk regulation from the aviation, offshore oil, and nuclear industries, drawing out relevant lessons for the emerging DPR field.We argue that proponents of DPR could benefit from proactively developing a safety culture in DPR utilities and establishing an effective industry-wide auditing organization that investigates unanticipated system failures. Developing independent oversight for DPR operation could ensure that stringent quality and management requirements are set and enforced, and that any system failures or "near misses" are investigated and adequately responded to.

New industries emerge in increasingly complex spatial patterns that challenge existing explanations of industrial path creation. In particular, the case of latecomer regions building up industries in fields that are unrelated to their previous industrial capabilities is not well understood in the literature. This paper aims to address this gap by expanding on an analytical framework that draws on innovation studies and catching-up literature to characterize unrelated diversification processes in latecomer contexts. A case study in the Chinese solar photovoltaics (PV) sector reveals an industry formation process that differs from traditional models of industry formation. The PV industry emerged from a highly internationalized entrepreneurial project in which Chinese latecomer firms directly mobilized knowledge, markets, investment and technology legitimacy developing outside China and combined them with the country’s generic capabilities in mass-manufacturing. In some industries, globalization thus enables a new model of industry formation that heavily draws on extra-regional system resources.

The norm of reciprocity shapes social interactions over time and should therefore be analyzed using longitudinal designs. This paper examines the temporal dynamics of reciprocity in the setting of legislative cosponsorship in the 113th U.S. Congress (2013–2015). Rather than aggregating cosponsoring events into network snapshots, cosponsoring events are ordered in time and reflect an event sequence of members supporting bills at distinct points in time. The norm of reciprocity is tested to see if it affects (a) new collaboration clusters emerging over time or (b) the time-to-cosponsoring. Findings suggest that receiving cosponsoring support recently, leads to future collaborations. However, this finding holds only for Republican members of Congress. Furthermore, reciprocity demands do not expedite cosponsorship support and members do not react faster to favors they received, calling mitigating effects of reciprocity on collective action into question.

Improving groundwater quality is expected to yield direct use benefits to society (e.g. clean and safe drinking water) and groundwater dependent ecosystems. Ten years after the adoption of the European Groundwater Directive (GWD), policymaker and public understanding of the societal value of groundwater protection is still rather limited. This is partly due to the invisible and intangible nature of groundwater resources and the sheer lack of valuation studies. This study contributes to the limited number of groundwater valuation studies in Europe by estimating the public benefits from improved groundwater quality in the Aveiro Quaternary Aquifer (AQA) in Portugal. This is the first and only economic valuation study of groundwater in Portugal. In order to communicate the various benefits provided by groundwater resources in easy understandable terms to lay people, and to assess public perception and willingness to pay (WTP) for groundwater protection, a groundwater quality ladder was developed based on the threshold values proposed in the GWD. The ladder reflects the different use and non-use values of groundwater quality improvements and accounts for natural background levels of chemicals in groundwater. The large-scale survey targets a representative sample of residents in the AQA. Split samples are used to assess the impact of framing groundwater protection in a broader regional water resources management context, giving part of the sample furthermore time to think about their WTP for the different groundwater threshold levels. Although use values dominate public WTP for the different groundwater threshold values, substantial non-use values are also found. Public WTP is considerable, varying between 20 and 30% over and above the current water bill residents pay for safe drinking water quality and natural background levels, respectively. Giving respondents time to think and framing groundwater protection as part of the improvement of all water resources in the region results in a more conservative WTP estimate. Public WTP is higher for better informed private well owners in rural areas. Aggregated across the entire aquifer the estimated total economic value is 1.5 million euros annually for safe drinking water quality and 3.5 million euros annually for groundwater containing natural background levels only.

Die Förderung und der weitere Ausbau der Wasserkraft, die Auswirkungen von Pflanzenschutzmitteln auf die Wasserqualität und die Ausscheidung des Gewässerraums waren die prägenden Themen in der Schweizer Wasserpolitik im Jahr 2017. Dieser Artikel präsentiert eine Übersicht über diese und weitere Entwicklungen in verschiedenen politischen Arenen wie Parlament oder Verwaltung.

Due to shortcomings in sewage treatment systems and the availability of a large number of cement pit latrines without good maintenance and service planning, an informal sector of micro business ventures named "honey suckers" has emerged to fulfil the market need for on-site sanitation services. "Honey suckers" is the term given to the businesses that pump the waste out of pit-latrines, septic tanks and other types of on-site wastewater treatment plants. These businesses have been successful in exploiting this opportunity for the past few years and Bangalore now has an estimated 300 of such businesses. The primary market is where honey suckers collect fecal sludge from pit latrines for a fee. The sludge is then disposed of either at an approved site (rarely) or more typically it is dumped illegally on open lands or into drains. A secondary market has emerged in which the honey suckers deposit the sludge on farmlands at the farmer's demand, either in pits or directly on designated sites. There is usually no fee but the farmer may tip the driver. The sludge is used as a fertilizer and in some cases for the water content. The value for household is the clean removal of fecal sludge to ensure a working water closet and a clean property and environment. The value for farmers resides in obtaining nutrient-rich manure for free or for a very low fee. This model works well, because no other fast, reliable, high-quality pit cleaning service is available. The model works best when the cleaning service is easily combined with the dumping service, for which a smart network with farmers is required. The socioeconomic and environmental benefits can be significant, with the creation of jobs, reduction of wild sludge dumping and associated health and environmental problems, improved sanitation and living comfort. However, risks have to be controlled and the informal nature of honey suckers and 'illegal' aspect of the business (i.e. the supply of collected fecal sludge to the farmers) prevents monitoring of the practice.

We address a key puzzle in policy studies: why don't major differences in political systems and policy produce major differences in policy processes, outputs, and outcomes? We show why key aspects of fracking policy are similar in the UK and Switzerland despite the UK majoritarian government being 'all out for shale' and Switzerland’s consensus democracy favouring moratoriums. We use the 'advocacy coalition framework' and new survey data to show why differences in UK and Swiss processes are subtle. In both cases, actors cooperate and compete with each other by sharing information within and across coalitions.

A Theory of Change (ToC) is an approach to map programmes aimed at inducing change in a specific context, with the goal of increasing their impact. We applied this approach to the specific case of handwashing and sanitation practices in low- and middle-income countries and developed a ToC as part of a systematic review exercise. Different existing sources of information were used to inform the initial draft of the ToC. In addition, stakeholder involvement occurred and peer review took place. Our stakeholders included methodological (ToC/quantitative and qualitative research) and content experts (WASH (Water, Sanitation, Hygiene)/behaviour change), as well as end-users/practitioners, policy-makers and donors. In conclusion, the development of a ToC, and the involvement of stakeholders in its development, was critical in terms of understanding the context in which the promotional programmes are being implemented. We recommend ToC developers to work with stakeholders to create a ToC relevant for practice.

Urban water management represents a core economic sector exposed to global water-related challenges. Recently, small modular system configurations have been identified to enable a potential sustainability transition in this lasting and rather conservative sector. The identification of current market potentials of decentralised wastewater treatment is a first step to assess whether decentralised treatment technologies could potentially be deployed on a larger scale in Europe, which would allow current decentralised wastewater treatment technologies to develop and mature. The paper elaborates a method to assess the market potential for decentralised wastewater treatment systems by starting from a raster-based geospatial modelling framework, to determine the optimal degrees of centralisation for the case of Switzerland. The resulting market potential is shown to be twenty times higher than the current market share of decentralised systems. In order to extrapolate these findings to other countries, the calculated optimal degrees of centralisation were correlated with different spatial density measures to determine a reliable and widely available proxy: population density. Based on this indicator, the European market potentials for decentralised treatment systems are estimated to be about 100,000 units per annum serving around 35 million population equivalents. The paper concludes by discussing implications for future sustainability transitions in urban water management by large-scale installation of small modular wastewater treatment systems.

Rationale: Consistent hand hygiene prevents diarrheal and respiratory diseases, but it is often not practiced. The disease burden is highest in low-income settings, which need effective interventions to promote domestic handwashing. To date, most handwashing campaigns have focused on promoting frequent handwashing at key times, whereas specifically promoting handwashing techniques proven to be effective in removing microbes has been confined to healthcare settings.
Methods: We used a cluster-randomized, factorial, controlled trial to test the effects of two handwashing interventions on the behavior of primary caregivers in Harare, Zimbabwe. One intervention targeted caregivers directly, and the other targeted them through their children. Outcome measures were surveyed at baseline and six weeks’ follow-up and included observed handwashing frequency and technique and fecal hand contamination before and after handwashing.
Results: Combining the direct and indirect interventions resulted in observed handwashing with soap at 28% of critical handwashing times, while the corresponding figure for the non-intervention control was 5%. Observed handwashing technique, measured as the number of correctly performed handwashing steps, increased to an average of 4.2, while the control averaged 3.4 steps. Demonstrated handwashing technique increased to a mean of 6.8 steps; the control averaged 5.2 steps. No statistically significant group differences in fecal hand contamination before or after handwashing were detected.
Conclusions: The results provide strong evidence that the campaign successfully improved handwashing frequency and technique. It shows that the population-tailored design, based on social-cognitive theory, provides effective means for developing powerful interventions for handwashing behavior change. We did not find evidence that children acted as strong agents of handwashing behavior change. The fact that the microbial effectiveness of handwashing did not improve despite strong improvements in handwashing technique calls for critical evaluation of existing handwashing recommendations. The aim of future handwashing campaigns should be to promote both frequent and effective handwashing.

There has been a proliferation in the development of diet-related smartphone applications (mHealth) that support diet monitoring and can provide health-beneficial interventions. With these developments, the collection of accurate dietary consumption data is becoming an important field in mHealth, as less automated data collection techniques (DCT's) are often associated with underreporting, ineffective or non-tailored interventions, and self-selection of motivated users and/or high attrition rates. Interventions that incorporate more automated or passive DCT's have been linked with greater potential for user adoption and engagement, it remains unclear however what DCT's exist and to what extent mHealth apps incorporate such techniques. As such, the purpose of this study is to investigate the presence of DCTs in well-adopted dietary apps and provide an overview of existing and emerging approaches.

This paper addresses the question why socio-technical transitions follow similar trajectories in various parts of the world, even though the relevant material preconditions and institutional contexts vary greatly between different regions and countries. It takes a critical stance on the implicit methodological nationalism in transition studies' socio-technical regime concept and proposes an alternative 'global' regime perspective that embraces the increasingly multi-scalar actor networks and institutional rationalities, which influence transition dynamics beyond national or regional borders. By drawing on globalization theories from sociology and human geography, we show that socio-technical systems often develop institutional rationalities that are diffused via international networks and thus become influential in various places around the world. In so doing, we shed light on the multi-scalar interrelatedness of institutional structures and actors in socio-technical systems and elaborate on the implications for the conceptualization of transition dynamics. The paper illustrates this with the case study of an unsuccessful transition in the Chinese wastewater sector. Recent studies indicate that key decisions on wastewater infrastructure expansion were not only influenced by path-dependencies stemming from China's national context, but equally (or even more critically) by the dominant rationality of the water sector's global socio-technical regime. We conclude by discussing the contours of a new research agenda around the notion of global socio-technical regimes.

Providing socially beneficial services to people living close to the poverty line is an exceptionally complex task, due to limited disposable income for such services and little knowledge to understand the actual service benefits. In addition, service providers face capability constraints to provide these types of services. This article examines capabilities for providing services to consumers in low-income markets. Based on a multiple case study on providing drinking water as a service, we show that service providers require three capabilities: (a) adapting the service operation model, (b) converting latent customer needs into value-added services, and (c) extending the customer portfolio. These capability descriptions advance previous capability descriptions about services for low-income consumers.

Sadia is one of the world’s leading producers of chilled and frozen foods with approximately 10,000 integrated poultry and pork farms, which supply raw material to its industrial plants. In order to abate the environmental impacts associated with its swine production farms and to institute sustainability into the pork meat supply chain, Sadia designed and implemented the Program for Sustainable Swine Production (3S Program) in 2003. The 3S Program provides swine producers with bio-digesters and is designed to reduce GHG emissions from the more than 3,500 swine producers in Sadia’s supply chain and to qualify the emission reductions as a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project. Sadia installs the bio-digesters on its swine producers on a B&T (Build and Transfer) basis. The program seeks to bring sustainability to the company’s supply chain by providing additional revenue from carbon credits and better working conditions for swine producers, while reducing the environmental impact associated with swine production. The biogas generated at the swine farms is used on-site and thus significantly saving operational costs for the swine farms. The program contributes to improving the local environmental condition by improving quality of water and reducing soil pollution and foul odors. Moreover, the 3S Program is expected to help disseminate environmental education among swine producers and the surrounding community. Through the design and implementation of the 3S Program, Sadia has incorporated environmental sustainability into its revenue design.

Over the past decade, water professionals have begun to focus on a new paradigm for urban water systems, which entails the recovery of resources from wastewater, the integration of engineered and natural systems, and coordination among agencies managing different facets of water systems. In the San Francisco Bay Area, planning for nutrient management serves as an exemplary model of this transition. We employed a variety of methodological approaches including stakeholder analysis, multi-criteria decision-making weight elicitation, and document analysis to understand and support decision-making in this context. Based on interviews with 32 stakeholders, we delineate goals that are considered to be important for achieving the new paradigm and we highlight management strategies that can help reach these goals. We identify and analyze the social, institutional, and technical impediments to planning and implementing multi-benefit wastewater infrastructure projects and identify strategies to overcome some of these challenges. Transitioning to a new paradigm for urban water infrastructure will require stakeholders to proactively forge collaborative relationships, jointly define a shared vision and objectives, and build new rules to overcome limitations of current institutional policies.

Background: Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is a widely used, community-based approach to tackle open defecation and its health-related problems. Although CLTS has been shown to be successful in previous studies, little is known about how CLTS works. We used a cross-sectional case study to identify personal, physical, and social context factors and psychosocial determinants from the Risks, Attitudes, Norms, Abilities, and Self-Regulation (RANAS) model of behavior change, which are crucial for latrine ownership and analyze how participation in CLTS is associated with those determinants.

Methods: Structured interviews were conducted with 640 households in 26 communities, where CLTS had been completed before and compared to 6 control communities, all located in northern Mozambique in 2015. To identify crucial factors for latrine ownership, logistic regression analysis were conducted and mediation analysis were used to analyse the relationship between CLTS participation and latrine ownership mediated by factors identified by the logistic regression analyses.

Results: Mediation analysis reveal that the relationship of CLTS participation with probability of owning a latrine is mediated by social context factors and psychosocial determinants. Data analysis reveal that the probability of building a latrine depends on existing social context factors within the village, the behavior of others in the community, the (dis)approval of others of latrine ownership, personal self-confidence in latrine building, and a precise communication of the benefits of latrine ownership during a CLTS triggering event.

Conclusions: By including activities to focus on the mentioned factors, CLTS could be improved. Exemplary adaptations are discussed.

This study tested the effects of exercise on eating. The transfer hypothesis proposes that exercise leads to generalization of healthy behavior and therefore improved diet. The compensation hypothesis assumes that exercise leads to increased calorie intake to "compensate" for the energy expenditure. We tested these hypotheses both for actual and imagined exercise. Female University members (N = 227) were randomized to three experimental groups: actual exercise vs. imagined exercise vs. control. After baseline, participants engaged in a 5-minute experimental task. Thereafter, they were left alone with unhealthy snacks. Participants who imagined themselves exercising (M = 101, SD = 128 kcal) consumed significantly fewer calories than controls (M = 129, SD = 142 kcal), consistent with a transfer effect. Participants who engaged in actual exercise but were distracted from thinking about exercise consumed similar quantities (M = 127, SD = 111 kcal) as controls. This study suggests that transfer effects are underpinned by psychological processes, such as goal activation, which should be investigated in the future.

Background: Coping planning, the formation of plans to overcome behavioral barriers is assumed to promote health behavior maintenance, but the literature on this is inconsistent. In this study, we aimed to investigate the mechanisms of a coping planning intervention that adversely affected maintained safe water consumption. We also explored perceived behavioral difficulty as a potential moderator of coping planning interventions. Methods: In the second phase of a cluster-randomised trial, households (N = 177 analyzed) were randomly allocated to a coping planning intervention or a comparison group (repetition of interventions from first intervention phase). Safe water consumption, the mechanisms of coping planning, and perceived difficulty were measured pre-post. The data were analyzed using mediation and moderated mediation analysis. Results: Changes in behavioral intention mediated the intervention effects on behavioral maintenance (b = -0.36, 95% CI [-0.91, -0.03]). Changes in perceived coping planning (b = 0.08, 95% CI [-0.12, 0.34]), and maintenance self-efficacy (b = -0.13, 95% CI [-0.45, 0.01]) did not mediate the effects. Prior perceived difficulty moderated the coping planning intervention effects on maintenance via intention. Conclusions: Coping planning may decrease motivation for health behavior maintenance for persons who experienced few barriers prior to the planning intervention.

One open question in environmental sciences is whether effective management of natural resources depends on the fit between the bio-physical and the governance system. To address this question, we investigate water quality in transboundary rivers and ask to what extent a fit between the area covered by the physical extent of pollution and the area in which this pollution is addressed through management and policy regulation can be observed. We adopt a spatial approach and argue that the visualization of social-ecological overlap and misfit supports science and practice when taking decisions about how best to explain or address ineffectiveness and cause-effect mismatches in transboundary river management.
We focus on drinking water supply in the international river basin of the Rhine focusing on micropollutants. These persistent trace compounds have potential toxic effects on humans and ecosystems, which makes them a relevant type of pollution that needs to be taken into consideration. Based on a combination of mass flow and social network analysis, we can conclude that the Rhine River is characterized by large social-ecological overlap, but that some parts of the catchment area still lack integration.

Environmental problems are often multi-faceted and complex by nature, consisting of diverse, intertwined dimensions. In this article, we argue that environmental problem characteristics have consequences for the selection of appropriate governance modes, and finally on policy effectiveness. We rely on an in-depth literature review to proceed in two steps. First, we outline three key environmental problem characteristics: uncertainties, cause-effect mismatches and norm plurality. We then outline six different governance modes capable of producing policies and solutions to tackle challenges arising from the three problem characteristics. Next, through empirical illustrations, we demonstrate the relevance of linking governance modes to these characteristics via the introduction and articulation of the concept of ‘connectivity’, i.e., linking actors, issues, sectors and scale levels towards realizing effective policy solutions for complex environmental problems.

Our investigation draws on a qualitative study, which explores the anomaly of Born Solution Providers. Compared to the traditional assumption that product companies shift toward solutions during the maturity phase, companies can already offer solutions in the market development phase. We investigate the dynamic capabilities for providing solutions in the market development phase. Our findings reveal a microfoundation of dynamic capabilities. This microfoundation is structured into 10 dimensions along sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring activities. Within these 10 dimensions, we disaggregate the dynamic capabilities into individual skills and organizational routines. Interestingly, organizations utilize routines underlying the options for each dimension (e.g., routines for sensing internal and external opportunities, seizing standardization, and customization), but they tend to stick to routines for one of these options. Individual skills enable organizations to balance the options. Our results suggest that these individual skills evolve through higher-order processes, namely, single- and double-loop learning activities.

In the wake of the COP21 conference in Paris, the transition to a low-carbon energy supply remains a central issue on the political agenda. The deployment of renewable energies is often challenged by multiple issues (e.g., public acceptance, landscape protection, and so forth). Political actors try to overcome such challenges with various measures; however, the policy instruments used vary greatly in their strength. This article questions what factors lead to the adoption of strong policy instruments promoting hydroelectricity. Explanatory factors are derived from Kingdon's multiple streams framework and are analyzed with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis within the Swiss cantons. The findings show that the strength of policy promoting hydroelectricity depends on the conjunction of mainly two factors: ambitious climate targets and an already well-established hydroelectricity sector that generates large tax revenues for the cantons. Depending on the context, the strength of left-wing and green parties as well as the current level of exploitation play an important role with the aforementioned factors.

This paper is about stakeholders' acceptance regarding regulatory instruments in energy policy. We expect that today's introduced instruments not only correspond most to technocratic principles and what elected officials prefer, but that they correlate with the preferences of a wider number of public and private actors in policymaking. We therefore compare the already introduced policy instruments to instrument preferences of the public administration, elected officials, but also NGOs and utilities. In doing so, we contribute to the question of whether or not the instruments already introduced today correspond to technocratic or democratic principles, or to the preferences of the larger governance arrangement involving other public and private actors. We compare three cantons in Switzerland and gather data through a systematic literature review, expert interviews, and surveys. The comparison of the data suggest that the currently selected policy instruments correspond to technocratic principles, but that they also and often correspond to the preferences of public and private actors. More concretely, whereas in one canton, NGO preferences align with the introduced instruments, in another canton, this is the case for utilities. In the third canton, all different actor types display similar preferences very much in accordance with the currently employed instrument mix. We thus conclude that depending on the region, different principles and preferences are reflected in the current policy mix.

This paper analyzes factors that lead to opposition towards policies in Switzerland that promote a clean energy transition. During legislative processes, both the elite and general citizens can develop resistance towards such policies. The article considers those two perspectives and determines, on both levels, factors that explain opposition. We also specifically take into account whether climate change skepticism, i.e., questioning that climate change is real and human-induced, is a key factor that leads to opposition. Furthermore, we employ structural equation models to account for interactions between the elite and general citizens. The results show that political actors who reject the idea of man-made climate change also oppose the promotion of a clean energy transition, and more generally that elite actors influence how citizens think about the issue. At the citizen level, an increase in climate change skepticism has a negative impact on levels of support for clean energy policy. The link is mainly determined by party affiliation. We conclude that potential strategies for achieving a clean energy transition should focus on motivating citizens because they generally seem to be less polarized and partisan, and thus less opposed to new solutions, than the elite, who tend to be more constrained in their actions.

Worldwide, an estimated 700 million people rely on unimproved drinking water sources; even more consume water that is not safe to drink. Inadequate drinking water quality constitutes a major risk factor for cholera and other diarrheal diseases around the globe, especially for young children in developing countries. Household water treatment and safe storage systems represent an intermediate solution for settings that lack infrastructure supplying safe drinking water. However, the correct and consistent usage of such treatment technologies rely almost exclusively on the consumer's behavior.
This study targeted at evaluating effects of a behavior change campaign promoting the uptake of household drinking water chlorination in communities along the Chari and Logone rivers in Chad. The campaign was based on formative research using health psychological theory and targeted several behavioral factors identified as relevant. A total of 220 primary caregivers were interviewed concerning their household water treatment practices and mindset related to water treatment six months after the campaign. The Risks, Attitudes, Norms, Abilities, and Self-regulation (RANAS) model was used to structure the interviews as the RANAS approach had been used for designing the campaign.
Results show significantly higher self-reported drinking water chlorination among participants of the intervention. Significant differences from a control group were identified regarding several behavioral factors. Mediation analysis revealed that the intervention positively affected participants' individual risk estimation for diarrheal disease, health knowledge, perceived efforts and benefits of water treatment, social support strategies, knowledge of how to perform chlorination, and perceived ability to do so. The campaign's effect on water treatment was mainly mediated through differences in health knowledge, changes in norms, and self-efficacy convictions. The findings imply that water treatment behavior can be successfully promoted using health psychological theory. However, they also indicate opportunities for improvement in the campaign design and implementation.

A novel discrete choice experiment (DCE) design allows testing of substitution effects based on the framing of, and distances to, substitute sites. The same ecosystem services and biodiversity provided at different sites are valued independently in single- site DCEs and simultaneously in a multiple- site DCE, using an identical experimental design. Site-specific utility functions are estimated with and without controlling for spatial preference heterogeneity. Framing choices as alternative projects at single or multiple sites significantly influences substitutability between sites, choice behavior, and welfare estimates. Distance decay displays significant heterogeneity in different directions from the valued sites and between urban and rural areas.

An increasing number of knowledge brokers work at the interface between research, policy and practice. Their function is to facilitate processes to foster mutual learning among research, policy and practice. For some knowledge brokers, practical methodologies to assess the quality of their work is an important concern. While frameworks exist for assessing research impact at the level of a project or program, few are available for assessing contributions of individual knowledge brokers. In response to this, we have compiled a set of indicators to measure the quantity and quality of the contributions of individual knowledge brokers to projects, programs or platforms at the interface between research, policy and practice. The set is based on a review of the literature and the experience of a group of knowledge brokers active in water research and management in Switzerland, including the co-authors of this article. The set can be used by knowledge brokers to identify ways to improve the effectiveness of their practices and to demonstrate the benefit of their work to their employers and other stakeholders. Our approach is flexible enough that it can be applied where there are limited resources available for assessment.

Forums are organizations that facilitate coordination among actors from different societal sectors such as government, interest groups, and research. Forums can serve various purposes that we represent on two dimensions. The first dimension, sector orientation, assesses the degree to which a forum serves the needs of a specific societal sector. The second dimension, advocacy orientation, refers to the extent to which a forum is oriented toward advocating the shared interests of its members. The empirical application to a set of 36 forums in Swiss habitat and land use policy shows that both orientations capture important differences between forums. An improved understanding of these differences contributes to answering some key questions of forum research, such as those related to forum outputs, the role of forums in governance systems, or actors' incentives of forum participation.

The Treaty of Lisbon strengthened the role of national parliaments in the European Union. It introduced an 'early warning system', granting parliamentary chambers the right to reject legislative proposals by the European Commission. Previous studies assumed independence between the decisions of parliaments to reject a legislative proposal. We apply recent advances in inferential network analysis and argue that parliamentary vetoes are better explained by conceptualizing parliaments' veto actions as a temporal network. Network effects can be observed along the dimension of party families. Based on a new permutation approach, we find that parliaments with similar party majorities influence each other over the course of the decision period ('social influence'), rather than basing their decisions independently on joint prior partisanship ('selection').

Although CSOs are expensive infrastructures, which are important to reduce pollution from urban areas during wet weather, they are often not operated effectively. Despite of technical difficulties, major problems in CSO monitoring and performance assessment are caused by non-technical bottlenecks. Through a policy analysis we identified organisational and political problems as the biggest obstacles to the effective operation of CSOs. In addition, we investigated effective measures or incentives to overcome organisational and political obstacles. Our results suggest that a surprisingly high 84% of the CSOs operated by Swiss wastewater associations are monitored. In most cases the information is used to improve operation, but not for better planning or for regulatory performance assessment. The most desirable instrument seem to be legislative performance targets, which is preferred by both wastewater associations and cantonal stakeholders. From a political point of view, the cantonal authorities also consider a transfer of competences from the municipalities to the wastewater associations to be effective, i.e. wastewater associations should operate CSOs instead of municipalities. In contrast, Swiss associations prefer financial incentives, such as a one-off subsidy for the installation of CSO monitoring equipment. Before implementing certain instruments, and in particular regulatory instruments, we highly recommend to assess their impact on overall policy processes and individual stakeholders. In the long term, only the implementation of a carefully balanced, uniform strategy can overcome organizational and political barriers and thus can lead to effective success in water protection.

Während für Kläranlagen gesetzlich festgelegte Einleitbedingungen existieren und Betreiber umfangreiche Jahresberichte an Behörden weiterleiten, sind über die Leistungsfähigkeit der Entwässerungsnetze und Sonderbauwerke in der Schweiz, trotz technischer Möglichkeiten durch die fortschreitende Digitalisierung, kaum Informationen vorhanden. Da es keine Eigenkontrollverordnungen gibt, wird der Einfluss von Mischwasserentlastungen aus Regenüberlaufbecken (RÜB) auf die Gewässerqualität bisher hauptsächlich modelliert und nur selten anhand von Messdaten tatsächlich überprüft. In dieser Studie fragen wir deshalb Abwasserverbände und kantonale Fachstellen, welche Informationen in der Schweiz vorhanden sind und wie sie mit Messdaten umgehen. Wir untersuchen zuerst, welche organisatorischen und politischen Hindernisse einem effektiveren Betrieb von RÜB entgegenstehen. Zweitens diskutieren wir wirksame Maßnahmen oder Anreize zur Überwindung dieser Hindernisse. Unsere Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass in der Schweiz bereits 84% der RÜB, die sich im Betrieb von Abwasserverbänden befinden, messtechnisch überwacht werden. Leider werden diese Messdaten hauptsächlich zur Betriebsoptimierung erhoben und weder als Entscheidungsgrundlage verwendet, z.B. in dem sie ausgewertet, geprüft und anschließend archiviert werden, noch zur Erfolgskontrolle an Behörden weitergeleitet. Um langfristig eine vollständige Ausschöpfung des Werts von Messdaten zu erreichen, sollte eine einheitliche Strategie, wie z.B. die Einführung von Zielvorgaben für das Entlastungsverhalten von RÜB, entwickelt werden, damit keine „Daten-Müllberge" entstehen, sondern Messdaten sinnvoll genutzt und so zu einem verbesserten Gewässerschutz bei Regenwetter beitragen können.

Procedural and behavioural biases have received little attention in recent Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) research. Our literature review shows that most research on biases was done 15–30 years ago. This study focuses on biases that are introduced at an early stage of MCDA when building objectives hierarchies and their effect on the weights. The main objective is to investigate whether prior findings regarding such biases, which were mostly based on laboratory experiments, can be found in real-world applications. We conducted a meta-analysis of the objectives hierarchies and weight elicitation procedures in 61 environmental and energy MCDA cases. Relationships between the structural characteristics of the objectives hierarchy and assigned objectives’ weights were analysed with statistical tests. Our main research questions were: (i) How does hierarchy size and structure affect the objectives’ weights? (ii) How are weights distributed across economic, social and environmental objectives? (iii) Is there support for the equalising bias? Our findings are mostly aligned with earlier research and suggest that the hierarchy structure and content can substantially influence weight distributions. For example, hierarchical weighting seems to be sensitive to the asymmetry bias, which can occur when a hierarchy has branches that differ in the number of sub-objectives. We found no evidence for the equalising bias. We highlight issues deserving more attention when developing objectives hierarchies and eliciting weights. The research demonstrates the potential to use meta-analysis, which has not previously been used in this way in the MCDA field, to learn from a collection of applications.

In policymaking, actors are likely to take the preferences of others into account when strategically positioning themselves. However, there is a lack of research that conceives of policy preferences as an interdependent system. In order to analyse interdependencies, we link actors to their policy preferences in water protection, which results in an actor-instrument network. As actors exhibit multiple preferences, a complex two-mode network between actors and policies emerges. We analyse whether actors exhibit interdependent preference profiles given shared policy objectives or social interactions among them. By fitting an exponential random graph model to the actor-instrument network, we find considerable clustering, meaning that actors tend to exhibit preferences for multiple policy instruments in common. Actors tend to exhibit interdependent policy preferences when they are interconnected, that is, they collaborate with each other. By contrast, actors are less likely to share policy preferences when a conflict line divides them.