Adaptive co-management and network learning in the Room for the River programme

Adaptive co-management and learning are paramount for integrated flood risk management. Relevant literature focuses on adaptation at the level of physical and societal systems. The level of projects and programmes is largely overlooked, but they comprise interventions that adapt our physical systems and they provide opportunities for learning to contribute to transitions of societal systems. This paper aims to increase understanding on how learning takes place and can be stimulated within a programme. The mixed-method case study of Room for the River, a €2.3 billion programme for flood risk management, shows that a programme can be organised using various governance arrangements to stimulate learning and be a means for adaptive co-management to deliver upon environmental objectives.     

Towards a governance of sustainable consumption transitions: how institutional factors influence emerging local food systems in Belgium

System innovations and transitions in the realm of sustainable consumption policies will seldom emerge automatically from the present socio-political and socio-technical contexts. This paper explores a set of perspectives related to the governance of transitions and develops their application to the relatively unexplored governance of sustainable consumption transitions. Empirical material stems from an extensive case study which analyses a food consumption niche in the form of collectively organised local food systems (LFS) in Belgium. More specifically, we analyse and discuss the institutional contexts and socio-political configurations within which the investigated system innovation cases are embedded. The results explore the role of governmental interplay in fostering innovative consumption practices for a transition towards a more sustainable, autonomous, citizen-based, LFS.     

Post‐tsunami relocation of fisher settlements in South Asia: evidence from the Coromandel Coast,India

The tsunami that struck the coasts of India on 26 December 2004 resulted in the large‐scale destruction of fisher habitations. The post‐tsunami rehabilitation effort in Tamil Nadu was directed towards relocating fisher settlements in the interior. This paper discusses the outcomes of a study on the social effects of relocation in a sample of nine communities along the Coromandel Coast. It concludes that, although the participation of fishing communities in house design and in allocation procedures has been limited, many fisher households are satisfied with the quality of the facilities. The distance of the new settlements to the shore, however, is regarded as an impediment to engaging in the fishing profession, and many fishers are actually moving back to their old locations. This raises questions as to the direction of coastal zone policy in India, as well as to the weight accorded to safety (and other coastal development interests) vis‐à‐vis the livelihood needs of fishers.     

Could wastewater analysis be a useful tool for China? — A review

Analysingwastewater samples is an innovative approach that overcomesmany limitations of traditional surveys to identify and measure a range of chemicals that were consumed by or exposed to people living in a sewer catchment area. First conceptualised in 2001, much progress has been made to make wastewater analysis (WWA) a reliable and robust tool for measuring chemical consumption and/or exposure. At the moment, the most popular application of WWA, sometimes referred as sewage epidemiology, is to monitor the consumption of illicit drugs in communities around the globe, including China. The approach has been largely adopted by lawenforcement agencies as a device tomonitor the temporal and geographical patterns of drug consumption. In the future, themethodology can be extended to other chemicals including biomarkers of population health (e.g. environmental or oxidative stress biomarkers, lifestyle indicators or medications that are taken by different demographic groups) and pollutants that people are exposed to (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, perfluorinated chemicals, and toxic pesticides). The extension of WWA to a huge range of chemicals may give rise to a field called sewage chemical-information mining (SCIM) with unexplored potentials. China has many densely populated cities with thousands of sewage treatment plants which are favourable for applying WWA/SCIM in order to help relevant authorities gather information about illicit drug consumption and population health status. However, there are some prerequisites and uncertainties of the methodology that should be addressed for SCIM to reach its full potential in China.