Institutional reforms are crucial to meeting growing transboundary challenges. However, the scholarship recognizes that institutions are often sticky due to path dependencies. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on institutional reform by highlighting the web of processes interacting to enable or prevent change from happening. The paper argues that a framework for understanding prospects for reform must combine perspectives about agency and architecture in order to gain insights into the coming together of the supply and demand of reform proposals. An international institution that faces growing calls for reform is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This paper examines UNFCCC reform options through an interview study with a range of stakeholders. The interviews reveal factors that can advance or block reform. The paper concludes by discussing its findings and implications for understanding the politics of institutional reform.

Operationalizing the indivisibility and integrated nature of the UN 2030 Agenda poses a complex governance challenge. Although research has advanced our understanding of SDG localization and interlinkages, important gaps remain. In this paper, we depart from these two strands of literature by asking how synergies and trade-offs manifest in localized SDG programs and what governance opportunities, challenges, and recommendations this may bring. We find that the SDGs provide a platform to organize and communicate local sustainability work but that organizational realities will drive prioritization of goals considered connected and synergistic, such as SDG4, SDG9, and SDG11, which stand in contrast with global assessments of interlinkages. In line with emerging literature on the strategic effect of the SDGs on governance, we argue that the ethos of indivisibility serves as an important heuristic for civil servants and policy makers beyond prioritizing or reporting progress on global goals.

Tillgång till vädervarningar med information om förväntade konsekvenser av vädret är nödvändigt för god krisberedskap hos myndigheter, kommuner, näringsliv och privatpersoner. Vidareutveckling av varningssystem som fokuserar på förväntade störningar (konsekvensbaserade varningssystem) är därför en viktig komponent i samhällets hantering av klimatförändringar. Forskningsprojektet AI för klimatanpassning (AI4CA) har analyserat möjligheter och hinder med att inkludera AI-baserad text- och bildanalys som stöd till SMHI:s konsekvensbaserade vädervarningssystem och på sikt även stödja långsiktig klimatanpassning. 

In October 2021, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) launched a novel national system for impact-based weather warnings, moving from the traditional format for meteorological, hydrological, and oceanographic warnings towards an assessment process that includes collaboration and consultation with regional stakeholders. For certain types of warnings, joint assessments of the potential impacts of weather events for a specific geographic area and time frame are made in collaboration with local and regional actors. As part of this new system, local and regional administrative efforts are made to create assessment-support documentation which are collated by practitioners at the municipal or organizational level, drawing on local knowledge, and subsequently compiled by the County Administrative Board. This process aims to support the collaborative decision-making processes ahead of the publication and in the evaluation of issued weather warnings. This paper explores the potential of integrating long- and short-term perspectives in societal response to climate change impacts with focus on extreme weather events. We present a case of AI-based technology to support processes linked to the national system for impact-based weather warnings and its integration with local and regional climate adaptation processes. We explore opportunities to integrate an AI-based pipeline, employing AI-based image and text analysis of crowdsourced data, in the processes of the warning system, and analyse barriers and enablers identified by local, regional, and national stakeholders. We further discuss to what extent data and knowledge of historical extreme weather events can be integrated with local and regional climate adaptation efforts, and whether these efforts could bridge the divide between long-term adaptation strategies and short-term response measures related to extreme weather events. Thus, this study unfolds the existing and perceived barriers to this integration and discusses possible synergies and ways forward in risk management and climate adaptation practice.

Chapter 3 assesses the literature and a set of cases on how transformative change occurs. Based on this assessment, it identifies six broad approaches to transformative change and synthesizes key insights for achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity and global sustainability. In combination, these six approaches can promote, accelerate and scale transformative change for global sustainability in diverse contexts. Chapter 3 recognizes that transformative change takes place in a complex world and that navigating such change calls for adaptability, agility, transparency, continuous monitoring, evaluation and adaptive learning across multiple scales. Other elements for navigating transformative change are delineated by the findings of the assessment below.  

Studies of transformative change have been making headway in understanding the complexity of societal transformation processes. Yet, we lack understanding of how people’s lived experiences of transformations both shape and are shaped by meaning-making processes. In addressing this gap, we make two assumptions: Firstly, change processes comprise interactions between social actors that shape the way they are made sense of and experienced by the people involved in such interactions. Secondly, such change processes involve transformative experiences, which can bring to light previously taken-for-granted dimensions of lived experience. To address this research gap, we describe two complementary tools for analysing transformations: dialogical sense-making and critical phenomenology. These approaches share a focus on the experiential and sense-making dimensions, yet ask distinctly different kinds of questions and use different methods. Dialogical sense-making explores how people create meanings around transformations through various social interactions. Critical phenomenology analyses subjectivity, lived experience and structures that make possible and help shape experience. When brought into dialogue with each other, they allow for richer analyses of how the sense or meaning of transformations is constituted in experience.

This paper presents an idea analysis of AI in the policy documents and reports of the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Economic Forum. The three organisations expect AI to contribute to sustainability and a prosperous future with better data analysis, greater amounts of quantitative knowledge, and by making economic and social activities less wasteful and more energy efficient. Several challenges are also named: ethics, human rights, cybersecurity, access to reliable data, transparency, and the digital gap. The solutions presented are multi-stakeholder collaboration, cohesive but flexible governance frameworks, but also taking the lead to push for ethical and value-based AI and making sure AI is sustainable. Ideas about AI appear to stem from discourses of ecological modernisation and green governmentality. This framing turns political and structural challenges into technical issues to be solved with more data, greater collaboration, and technical progress. The similarities in ideas between the EU, the UN, and the World Economic Forum also suggest that ideas about AI and sustainable development have reached discourse institutionalisation. Ideas about AI are therefore likely to reinforce already existing institutional and discursive settings.

Policy coherence is crucial in the 2030 Agenda's transformative ambitions and heralded as of paramount importance to ensure the successful implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and climate policy targets. Despite political efforts to achieve policy coherence, apparent trade-offs and goal conflicts have emerged – even in a proclaimed ‘front-runner’ country like Sweden. This paper examines the role of ideas in proposing and legitimising policy options and achieving policy coherence in the light of the Swedish recovery debate in 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic. Ideas of a green economic recovery put forward in the public debate are examined through thematic text and frame analysis. We show that ideas of a green transition, boosted by economic recovery spending, draw on a synergistic frame in combining social, environmental, and economic policy options, carrying a potential for coherency. However, the absence of a discussion on power, as in who stands to gain what under which circumstances, coupled with an inherent understanding of a temporal hierarchy of policy priorities does not only impact the ability to design coherent policies but may have considerable impacts on the prospects of achieving sustainability transformations.

The Return of Malthus is the first comprehensive analysis of the post-war fear of scarcity. Linnér traces the development of an international discourse of crisis through the influence of such thinkers as William Vogt, Fairfield Osborn and Georg Börgström, labelled ‘neo-Malthusians’ for their emphasis on an impending clash between population growth and resource limits, after the manner of the nineteenth-century father of scarcity economics. The book analyses the role of science and technology in securing food supply, the transmutation of older ideas about preserving nature into a new conservation ideology based on sustainable use, and the preoccupation of the industrialised nations with forestalling communism and controlling power relations.First published by The White Horse Press in 2003. Even more relevant today, this revised edition charts perceptions of and prescriptions for crises of population growth and resource shortage, which have had profound influence on agricultural, population and security policies from the Second World War to the present.

Inclusion of indigenous knowledge and voices is paramount if societal transformations relative to climate change are to be fully and appropriately considered. However, much of the research in this area still uses Western-based research methodologies rather than methodologies driven by the local Indigenous communities. Therefore, it is highly likely that large numbers of affected communities remain excluded from global discussions and decisions around climate change solutions and policy. This article presents talanoa, a qualitative culturally centred research methodology used in many Pacific Island countries. As non-Indigenous researchers, we present our exploration of Indigenous research methods and talanoa experiences in a framework that confirms the importance of relationships when conducting research with Indigenous communities. We also propose that talanoa is a crucial component for qualitative research as it can help facilitate knowledge exchange and understanding among Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.