Evelien de Hoop

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic posed an unprecedented public health challenge, causing over one hundred thousand deaths in Germany alone. As elsewhere, policy-makers in Germany sought expert advice to navigate uncertainty and urgency, including through ad hoc advisory committees. We aimed to identify committees operating between 2021-2023, assess their composition, and analyse their work processes with a particular focus on structures, expert deliberations and evidence use. Methods: We conducted a systematic document analysis of government documents and semi-structured interviews with committee members in April/May 2024. We identified documents (parliamentary inquiries and freedom of information requests) through systematic searches in digital government archives; and purposively sampled experts from identified committee member lists. Documents were analysed using abridged content analysis, and interview transcripts were analysed using codebook thematic analysis. Results: We screened 984 documents, analysed 43 documents, and conducted 12 interviews. Ultimately, we identified six ad hoc advisory committees which met our inclusion criteria. These committees advised the German national government and the state governments of Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia. These were dominated by academic experts, especially from bio-medical disciplines. Structure of the advisory process: Consultations were direct (in person/online meeting) or indirect (written reports). Direct consultations typically included short presentations/input, followed by discussions to reach a consensus opinion. Expert deliberations drew on expert opinion, reports, pre-prints, and peer-reviewed studies. Multi-disciplinary exchange was valued but faced time constraints; opinions differed on whether a successful multi-disciplinary exchange was achieved. Reflections: Committee members were aware of the limits of their advisory role but occasionally struggled with the political nature of the work. Conclusion: German policy-makers continued to involve ad hoc advisory committees after the first year of the pandemic. Where it was achieved and meaningful, multidisciplinary work was perceived as valuable. Political decisions deviating from expert advice required justification under certain circumstances.

Research and practice in sustainability transformations often manifest diverging ideas on the nature and origin of sustainability problem(s), their solutions and the division of roles and responsibilities to address these problems. This diversity is underpinned by a plurality of values, forms of knowledge and worldviews. Moreover, these diverging ideas are dynamic, both in interaction with each other and with the sustainability challenges they are addressing. Providing room for these diverse ideas and bringing them into conversation has proven challenging. Based on research revolving around wildfire prevention in the Netherlands, in this chapter we explore a relatively unknown methodology to engage with such diversity: the transdisciplinary walkshop. A transdisciplinary walkshop combines the act of walking and being at the site where there is a sustainability challenge with a workshop in which multiple stakeholders, including researchers, participate. We reflect on ways in which transdisciplinary walkshops may allow diversity to become explicit and to engage with it.

Creating impact in labs oriented at sustainability transformations is challenging. Combining the experiences of ten projects and sharing the insights in “Labbing”, gained through engaging in various activities within transformation-oriented Labs from the fields of agriculture, food, and healthcare, the author team established a Community of Practice at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, to identify impact challenges inductively and recommend practical strategies for addressing these.While the issue of creating impact in real-world labs for experimenting with sustainability transformation has been studied, little is known about how to assess and understand impact in practice. Deciding on “what counts as impact” is challenging as problem definitions and solutions are political and contested. In our research projects for sustainability transformations in fields such as agriculture, food, and healthcare, we encountered typical questions of creating impact in real-world labs. We established a Community of Practice to explore the different challenges pertaining to these impact questions. We identified four overarching challenges related to impact: 1. measuring the impact of Labs, 2. dealing with positionality and power dynamics, 3. fostering impact within and beyond projects, and 4. ensuring impact across different contexts. This paper offers practical strategies for responding to these challenges: 1. tailor-made training for Labbing, 2. reflexively engaging with power dynamics, 3. forging rich, translocal learning and impact. Sharing learnings from our experience with Labbing may broaden the repertoire of fellow Lab practitioners in enhancing and strengthening their impact.

Reducing the climate change-induced risk of uncontrollable fires in landscapes under nature management, with severe impacts on landscape and society, is particularly urgent in densely-populated and fragmented areas. Reducing fire risk in such areas requires active involvement of a wide diversity of stakeholders. This research letter investigates stakeholders’ needs with regard to fire risk reduction in the Veluwe area in the Netherlands. This densely populated landscape is a popular tourist attraction, and it is one of the most fire-prone landscapes of the Netherlands, with abundant fuels and human ignition sources. We draw upon seven in-depth qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in the Veluwe area, which we situate in a wider review of existing literature. Our analysis demonstrates that the rising incidence of uncontrollable fires poses four types of new challenges to these stakeholders in the Veluwe area. First, stakeholders express the need to reshape existing policy tools and develop novel ones that create synergies between existing policy-priorities (e.g. biodiversity conservation) and fire risk reduction. Second, stakeholders argue for a critical rethinking of the value of landscapes in society, and the diverse roles that fire may play in landscape management research and practice. Third, developing such policy tools requires new modalities and platforms for multi-stakeholder and multi-level collaboration, which are currently lacking because the current and expected future risk of uncontrollable fire is unprecedented. And fourth, the development of effective policy tools requires new knowledge that is interdisciplinary, sensitive towards the local social and ecological characteristics of the area, and which approaches current fire risk challenges and their possible solutions dynamically. While our stakeholder analysis is specific to the Veluwe area in the Netherlands, our findings are also likely to be relevant to other fire-prone nature areas in fragmented landscapes, particularly in Northwestern Europe.

Today’s sustainability challenges have major implications for human health and health care. At the same time, the way health care is organized and conducted has major sustainability implications. Sustainable health and sustainable health care approaches in research, which engage with health and sustainability as intertwined phenomena, feature increasingly prominently in various literatures, i.e., (i) literature based on the premise of ‘(un)healthy environments result in (un)healthy people’ (e.g., planetary health); (ii) literature on the implications of ecological change for the sustainability of healthcare systems; and (iii) literature on healthcare systems’ sustainability in view of a range of socio-economic factors. However, an integrative elaboration of the manifold relationships between health and sustainability challenges in these literatures is currently lacking. This review paper therefore maps how these three literatures represent intertwinements between health and sustainability challenges, as well as their suggestions to address these challenges. In addition, we explore which themes and questions are pertinent, meaning they have remained largely unaddressed. By performing a qualitative mapping review, we find that calls for structural attention to inequality, to in-and exclusion, and to stakeholder needs and perspectives cut across these three literatures. Furthermore, we identify three cross-cutting key questions that require future research attention. First, how do divergent ideas on what is and divergent ideas on how can that be known give rise to different health- and sustainability visions and pathways? Second, what do abstract problem statements and solutions presented in agenda-setting work look like in practice in specific and diverse empirical contexts across the globe? And third, how are diverse health and sustainability dynamics historically and spatially interconnected? Moreover, we observe that some voices have so far remained largely silent in scientific debates on health and sustainability intertwinements, namely non-expert voices such as patients and citizens, voices from a variety of social scientific and humanities disciplines, voices from relevant domains beyond (environmental) health, and voices from the global South (from non-experts, social scientific and humanities researchers and domains beyond health). We conclude that a focus on inclusive and equitable engagement with intertwined health- and sustainability challenges is imperative. This requires moving away from developing universal knowledge to address generic problems, to foregrounding plurality in terms of problem statements, knowledge, solutions, and the values embedded therein.

India’s 2009 policy on biodiesel remains controversial to date. It excludes voices of marginalized people such as landless workers and knowledges associated with diverse feedstock cultivation practices. It considers the ‘upscaling’ of biodiesel production to be straightforward, based on easy transferability between diverse socio-material contexts. The policy’s marginalization of the immense diversity of India’s lands, peoples, perspectives, and practices is based on a neglect of socio-material relations and their multiplicity. A relational analysis highlights the need for alternate inclusive policy processes. Such processes include as evidence the diverse knowledges of interested people and relevant things. They recognize that each entity is known differently depending on how its socio-material relations are approached. Inclusive policy processes also highlight the adjustments that are required to translate a policy out of one socio-material setting and into another. Finally, inclusive policy processes help build realities relying not only on the knowledges from policy experts and firms, but also on the marginalized knowledges of grassroots actors such as smallholders and environmental activists.

This paper investigates how participatory knowledge production may contribute to more democratic sustainability governance. It develops an analytical framework in order to perform a systematic analysis of the GammaSense project in the Netherlands, on the measurement of gamma radiation by citizens. The paper first of all concludes that the way in which participation takes place throughout each and every stage of the knowledge production process, including technically complex issues such as the design of the measurement system and analytical toolset, has consequences for (a) which aspects of the gamma radiation decision-making process can potentially be democratized; (b) who gains a voice on the issue; (c) which form of democratization process is potentially facilitated. Secondly, the democratizing effects of setting the purpose of knowledge production, defining the research object and developing the methodological toolset are closely intertwined. Finally, providing space for multiple epistemologies and being attentive towards the role of material objects—the issue at hand and the methodological devices—are of crucial importance to realize the democratizing ambitions that the GammaSense project aimed to contribute towards.