Coproduce Conservation Technology With Conservation Decision Makers and Practitioners to Increase Its Impact

Addressing the biodiversity crisis will mean developing and adopting new resources and methods that effectively improve public conservation efforts. Technologies have a long track record of increasing the efficiency of carrying out time-consuming tasks or even making new feats possible, and if applied thoughtfully, can serve as a key means of strengthening conservation outcomes. Yet technology development sometimes proceeds without clear mechanisms for application and scaling, or key adopters like government agencies are not able to use the technologies. To overcome these discrepancies, we recommend the use of a coproduction model of conservation technology development that starts from detailed knowledge of conservation laws, regulations, policies, and their implementation; identifies choke points in those processes amenable to technological solutions; and then develops those solutions while integrating existing users and needs. To illustrate the model, we describe three tools recently developed to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act. We also highlight several outstanding questions and challenges that the broad conservation technology and policy communities may help address.

The Domestication of Misoprostol for Abortion in Burkina Faso: Interactions Between Caregivers, Drug Vendors and Women

Misoprostol has been hailed as a revolution within global maternal health research and policy communities because of its potential to reduce maternal mortality from post-partum haemorrhage and unsafe abortion, allowing relatively safe abortion in legal and illegal settings. However, we know little about how women who want to use misoprostol access it to induce abortion. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, this chapter describes and analyses how women gain access to misoprostol to induce abortion within a setting where induced abortion is legally restrictive and where the legal use of misoprostol is limited to post-abortion care and post-partum haemorrhage. The findings show that women seeking abortions in Ouagadougou are able to access misoprostol through unofficial channels, specifically through health workers and drug vendors. While this unofficial use of misoprostol is relatively safer, and more affordable than other options, access is not equally distributed and the cost women pay for the drug varies significantly. While women with strong social networks and financial resources can access misoprostol easily, other women who do not have money to buy misoprostol may become victims of sexual violence from men from whom they seek abortion services. In Ouagadougou, access to abortion with misoprostol is shaped by health workers and the social and economic conditions of the women who seek it. The study uses the concepts of ‘pharmaceutical diversion’ and ‘domestication’ as adjacent analytical frameworks to emphasize the changing pattern of access to misoprostol. The chapter introduces the importance of looking at safe access to safe abortion.

Coproduce conservation technology with law and policy experts to increase its impact

Addressing the biodiversity crisis will mean developing and adopting new resources and methods that effectively improve public conservation efforts. Technologies have a long track record of increasing the efficiency of carrying out time-consuming tasks or even making new feats possible, and if applied thoughtfully, can serve as a key means of strengthening conservation outcomes. Yet technology development sometimes proceeds without clear mechanisms for application and scaling, or key adopters like government agencies are not able to use the technologies. To overcome these discrepancies, we recommend the use of a coproduction model of conservation technology development that starts from detailed knowledge of conservation laws, regulations, and policies; identifies choke points in those processes amenable to technological solutions; and then develops those solutions while integrating existing users and needs. To illustrate the model, we describe three tools recently developed to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act. We also highlight several outstanding questions and challenges that the broad conservation technology and policy communities may help address.

The value of participatory urban policy councils: engaging actors through policy communities

Despite considerable literature exploring Brazil’s participatory management, less academic attention focuses on Brazil’s public policy councils ( conselhos gestores de políticas públicas), which are permanent political-institutional structures on a range of policy issues mediating between society and the state. This article analyses urban policy councils in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul State, and Niterói, Rio de Janeiro State, considering whether this participatory planning tool advances democratic inclusion. We approach participatory planning through the lens of policy communities. Through these cases, we demonstrate that these two councils do not, in fact, enable all those affected and interested to influence and define policies. Yet even if the views of the most disenfranchised do not ultimately prevail, these urban policy councils contribute to publicizing urban policy issues and democratizing the range of stakeholders that gain access to the policy community. We conclude by highlighting suggestions for improving public policy councils as mechanisms for participatory planning.

Second Workshop report: Mobilising the science community in progessing towards a sustainable and inclusive ocean economy

Through a programme of activities from January to July 2021, this Scottish Universities Insight Institute (SUII) project focussed on accelerating progress towards the ‘Just Transition’ for an environmentally sustainable, resilient and equitable economy and society in Scotland, within the framework provided by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through a series of activities to support dialogue between the scientific and policy communities in Scotland, the programme aimed to: 1. Develop our understanding of interdependencies between marine and cross-cutting policy themes to promote policy coherence, promoting synergies and managing trade-offs. 2. Mobilise the science and policy communities in co-developing knowledge for policy impact, including understanding data and evidence needs for innovation and measuring progress.

(Russian) Deterrence, we hardly know ye…

This paper provides the epistemic equivalent of an 'MRI' scan of the English and Russian literature on deterrence in an international security context. Using a variety of different recent datasets and -tools, the paper exposes a surprisingly high number of glaring weaknesses and holes. The paper’s first, more ‘technical’, section presents compelling evidence that the volume, velocity, collegiality and uptake of publicly available scientific insights into ‘security deterrence’ remain decidedly suboptimal – also compared to the other scientific disciplines that have examined human deterrence. The data on the scientific thoroughness of this field also paint a discomfortingly bleak picture, albeit less conclusively so. The paper’s second, more substantive section equally painfully highlights what it calls the field’s unbearable empirical lightness; conceptual confusion and cacophony (even within language domains); as well as multiple major (highly relevant) epistemic holes and other weaknesses. The paper concludes with some recommendations on how the epistemic community working on these issues as well as the academic and policy communities that fund much of this research can build on uniquely promising new developments in the access to (especially also textual) data to build and validate more granular and trustworthy datasets; in humans’ newfound ability to interact with machine algorithms to semantically parse texts to discover and validate ‘knowledge’ in unprecedented ways; but also – in a more mundane mode – to start incentivizing more organically collaborative ways of knowledge building.

Workshop report: Driving the transition to a resilient and inclusive future: the role of the ocean and policy coherence

Through a programme of activities from January to July 2021, this Scottish Universities Insight Institute (SUII) project seeks to accelerate progress towards the ‘Just Transition’ for an environmentally sustainable, resilient and equitable economy and society in Scotland, within the framework provided by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The programme aims to: 1. Develop our understanding of interdependencies between marine and cross-cutting policy themes to promote policy coherence, promoting synergies and managing trade-offs. 2. Mobilise the science and policy communities in co-developing knowledge for policy impact, including understanding data and evidence needs for innovation and measuring progress.

Evidence use in E-cigarettes debates: scientific showdowns in a ‘wild west’ of research

Background Against a backdrop of declining tobacco use, e-cigarette markets are growing. The UK now has a higher percentage of e-cigarette users than any other European country. These developments have prompted fierce discussions in scientific, advocacy and policy communities about how best to respond. This article is one of the first to examine the role of evidence in these debates. Methods We analysed 121 submissions to two Scottish policy consultations on e-cigarettes (in 2014 and 2015) and undertook interviews with 26 key informants in 2015–2016, following up with a sub-set in 2019–2020. All data were thematically coded, and our analysis was informed by insights from policy studies and the sociology of science. Results First, we affirm previous research in suggesting that e-cigarettes appeared to have triggered a breakdown of old public health alliances. Second, we demonstrate that, amid concerns about research quality and quantity, actors are guided by normative outlooks (and/or economic interests) in their assessments of evidence. Third, we show that, despite describing e-cigarette debates as contentious and polarised, actors engaging in Scottish policy debates exhibit a spectrum of views, with most interviewees occupying an uncertain ‘middle ground’ that is responsive to new evidence. Fourth, we suggest that the perceived divisiveness of e-cigarette debates is attributed to recurrent media simplifications and tensions arising from the behaviours of some actors with settled positions working to promote particular policy responses (including by strategically enrolling supportive evidence). Fifth, we argue that the actions of these actors are potentially explained by the prospect that e-cigarettes could usher in a new tobacco ‘policy paradigm’. Finally, we show how scientific authority is employed as a tool within these debates. Conclusions E-cigarette debates are likely to reconcile only if a clear majority of participants in the uncertain ‘middle ground’ settle on a more fixed position. Our results suggest that many participants in Scottish e-cigarette debates occupy this ‘middle ground’ and express concerns that can be empirically assessed, implying evidence has the potential to play a more important role in settling e-cigarette debates than previous research suggests.