Mountain Governance

• Creation Date: 2017
• Current Phase: Third Phase

Objectives 

• Identify common problems, risks, and challenges that undermine or impede effective governance for sustainability of mountain social-ecological systems;
• Analyse contexts and principles that appear to be associated with governance successes for fostering sustainability of mountain systems, and explore how promising cases are addressing their governance challenges, and to what extent these could be scaled to different mountain regions and their limitations;
• Integrate and enhance the geospatial representation of the socio-ecological data on web-based-GIS platforms to facilitate governance decision-making in the light of human and physical data/patterns.

Research Questions

• Which theoretical framework(s) effectively contextualises mountain governance?
• What are the in/formal multi-level regulatory spaces and instruments which recognises or designates an area as “mountainous”?
• What are the baseline and advanced characteristics for geo-databases/portals to support complex mountain governance decision-making?

Working Group Leads and Members

Working Group Lead

• Ahmed Shams, Durham University; University of Oxford, UK | Visit Webpage | SPR Webpage

Members

• Alexey Gunya, Russian Academy of Sciences

• Carla Lostrangio, AEIDL Association (EU)

• Catherine Tucker, University of Florida

• Elizabeth Jiménez Zamora, Universidad Mayor de San Andres

• Fritz Bayong, Cameroonian Landscape Engineers Association (CALEA)

• Gavin Heath, University of KwaZulu-Natal

• Gina Berrones, University of Cuenca

• Hannes Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

• Irasema Alcántara-Ayala, National Autonomous University of Mexico

• Julia Klein, Colorado State University

• Kerstin Ströbel, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

• Krishan Kumar Yadav, Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA)

• Marco Pütz, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL

• Marta Moschetti, Gran Sasso Science Institute

• Matthias Buchecker, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research

• Sam Kellogg, New York University

• Sara Di Lonardo, National Research Council of Italy

• Willem (van) Schendel, University of Amsterdam

• Xu Jun, Sichuan University & Himalayan University Consortium

Scope / Topics

List of the primary topics and themes the working group focuses on:

• Biodiversity, commons, and ecosystem services

• Mountain governance theoretical framework(s)

• Laws and regulatory spaces, and collaborative governance (in/formal systems)

• Conventions/treaties, regionalism, and autonomy

• Mountains as transitional geographies — transformations, transitions, and spatial strategies

• Adaptive governance, sustainability, and climate change

• Hazards and disaster risk reduction, and watershed management

• Protected areas, open spaces, heritage resources, and tourism

• Geo-databases and geo-visualisation and knowledge production for effective governance

• Governance and spatial planning