Michael Böcher

Malaria remains the most prevalent endemic disease in Cameroon, with the highest incidence recorded in the East Region, a zone characterised by dense tropical rainforest and communities that depend substantially on forest-based medicinal resources for primary healthcare. This article examines how the Baka and Bantu communities of the East Region of Cameroon produce, transmit, and apply traditional medicinal plant knowledge in the management of malaria, locally known as “Diwo'o” among the Baka. Drawing on approximately 65 semi-structured interviews and 10 focus group discussions conducted across health districts in Abong-Mbang and Yokadouma between April 2024 and May 2025, the study employs the Research, Integration, Utilisation (RIU) framework to analyse systemic barriers to knowledge integration and power dynamics between state health governance and indigenous healing structures. Findings reveal a sophisticated ethnobotanical pharmacopoeia involving species such as Lomboh, Bamboh, Epoue and Gouga, transmitted through intergenerational oral learning and legitimised through ancestral and spiritual authority. Despite demonstrable community efficacy and growing pharmacological evidence, traditional knowledge is systematically marginalised by bureaucratic exclusion, conservation enclosures, and the absence of standardised clinical validation pathways. The article argues for inclusive governance frameworks that bridge traditional and biomedical knowledge systems, drawing on the Nagoya Protocol to ensure benefit sharing, and proposes co-production platforms that can advance community health security while conserving the forest biodiversity underpinning these healing systems.

Policy incoherence is an omnipresent challenge in public administration. Focusing on the joint implementation of the European Water Framework Directive and the Habitats Directive, we analyze how administrative fragmentation hampers river restoration projects at the sub-national level in Germany. By shifting the analytical focus to institutional and administrative factors, we reveal barriers at institutional, processual and individual levels. We find that the failure of river restoration projects stems not only from practical hurdles, such as lack of resources, information, or manpower, but also from more fundamental flaws in the administrative arrangements. Based on a multi-stakeholder consultation, we argue that both bottom-up and top-down approaches can support better coordination and a local mandate for joint implementation. In particular, state-level planning can help reduce local coordination costs in the short term. The analysis highlights the critical role of individual actors and leadership, reframing and cross-sectoral coordination for policy integration.

The amended German Climate Protection Act of 2021 is seen as an essential step towards fulfilment national climate protection targets and as a sign of mainstreaming climate protection in German politics. However, at the regional level, where many climate protection measures are implemented, there is a strong fragmentation in terms of priorities, policy instruments, actor constellations and resources. Moreover, the implementation of climate protection measures is under increasing pressure in the face of crises, such as the management of the Covid 19 pandemic or the energy crisis. We therefore ask: Under what conditions does regional climate protection succeed in times of crisis? Drawing on the regional governance concept and a comparative analysis of ten German counties, we explain differences in subnational climate governance. For our study, very different, but always rural districts were selected, as the importance of rural regions is often neglected in the study of local climate policy. Based on a qualitative document analysis in combination with observations and interviews with climate protection managers, we identify factors for the success of climate protection activities in times of multiple crises. We argue that structural factors are central to the success of regional climate protection measures in times of crisis, as they provide the framework conditions for the actions of actors.

The National Climate Initiative (NKI) in Germany provides a strong incentive for local governments to apply for funding to engage in climate protection activities. Yet, the latest evaluation of the NKI confirms that there is a great disparity in the distribution of funding across regions. Taking this regional fragmentation as a starting point, we ask the following: How can we explain disparity in the amount of funding across counties and cities? We draw on climate policy literature pointing to the role of socioeconomic and political determinants and the settlement structure to answer this question. We study all 400 cities and counties to test hypotheses concerning disparity in the likelihood and amount of climate funding, using data from the German Ministry for the Environment and further regional statistics. Running different multilevel regression models, we show that local climate funding is more likely in cities and more urbanized counties than in rural counties with less population and oftentimes also with less young and educated people. We argue that despite the increasing number of local governments getting active in climate protection in Germany, there is important unused potential for climate change mitigation in rural counties. Therefore, we conclude by proposing a new research agenda focusing on climate change mitigation in rural areas.

Climate policy is expected to consider the current state of science. As populist radical right parties (PRRP) become elected members of parliaments, they have a greater influence on integration processes between science and politics. The aim of the paper is to show that instead of generally rejecting climate science, PRRPs appeal to ‘alternative expertise’ and politicize scientific knowledge. With our empirical analysis of public hearings, plenary meetings and press statements discussing Germany’s Climate Package between 2018 and 2020, we show that the AfD uses expertise that suits their political interests very selectively and arbitrarily supporting either scientific outsider positions or positions that only pretend to be scientific. We argue that populist strategies weaken trust in scientific expertise by undermining democratic institutions for knowledge integration in climate governance. Therefore, a clear separation between research and politics together with transparent and formal scientific knowledge integration processes are needed.

In the public debate on climate change in Europe, aviation transport has become a bone of contention and thus also a target of political regulation. While the actual available policy instruments, their designs and effects have been extensively studied, their political economy has remained a rather blind spot of research. Therefore, in this article we explore factors accounting for the instrument choice in aviation policy. Revealing most different evolutions in this matter, the Netherlands and Germany represent appropriately illustrative cases for a comparative exploration. Based on the Political Process-inherent Dynamics Approach, we shed light on a highly complex and limiting institutional environment for aviation policy-making and ultimately identify diverging conceptions of problem structures as well as different configurations of party competition as main explanatory factors for instrument choice and aviation policy evolution.

The concept of the bioeconomy has risen to great popularity with governments around the world as a new paradigm for a sustainable economy. However, it is still highly contentious what the bioeconomy actually is or should be, which results in a certain vagueness of bioeconomy policy strategies. European bioeconomy policy is a prime example of this. Despite two dedicated bioeconomy strategies, it appears to be highly fragmented and heterogeneous when it comes to concrete political processes and measures. Against this backdrop, we aim to find patterns of European bioeconomy policy by applying the political process-inherent dynamics approach (PIDA) to the three sub-areas of bioplastics, biofuels and bioenergy. Aggregating the respective results, the overarching pattern of European bioeconomy policy is rather shaped by the interplay of specific problem structures, institutional frameworks and actor constellations in its policy sub-areas than by the ambiguous umbrella concept of the bioeconomy.