Vår dr. grads stipendiat, Jessica Fuller, har vært i Andenes (Vesterålen, Nord-Norge) over flere uker i perioden 2020–2023 og har intervjuet og samlet inn definisjoner og syn om bærekraft fra fiskere og andre borgere på Andøya. Dette arbeidet har nå blitt vitenskapelig publisert.
Samtidig som Jessica har vært i feltet, har vi utviklet en metode som dykker inn på FN sine Bærekraftsmål på delmål-nivå, for å kunne starte arbeidet med rapportering på bærekraft. Dette er en metode som nå tas i bruk ved SINTEF i Dorothy Dankel sin ny rolle som seniorforsker i forskningsgruppen Klima og Bærekraft ved SINTEF Ocean.
Vi skal oppsummere alt dette i Andenes i en interaktiv Dialogworkshop som holdes tirsdag 13.06.23. Workshop er åpen for alle og vi har lyst å høre fra medborgerne som har lyst å uttrykke seg om forskjellige syn og erfaringer om bærekraft i Andøy Kommune.
Post-pandemic, the #LoVeSeSDG project team continues to map the future direction of sustainable cooperation and development on the coast of Norway.
An exciting new book chapter put forward by a collection of leading researchers in marine sustainability and earth sciences, from the University of Bergen, the Institute of Marine Research, SALT, Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, Uppsala University and Nordland Research Institute, can be found in the new Open Access book Human-Nature Interactions – Exploring Nature’s Values Across Landscapes published by Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-01980-7
In 2015, we saw the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the UN, the first international attempt to implement global sustainability targets across all sectors, using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the guiding framework. But in order to see change on a global scale, we first need to start from the bottom-up. We need to focus on national, regional and local levels.
This book chapter by #LoVeSeSDG Project PI Dorothy J. Dankel, et al., critically analyses the plans and strategies currently in place to protect unique Norwegian ecosystems, and puts forward a selection of marine and coastal case studies in Norway, including Raet National Park on the southeast coast, and Andøy Municipality in the north.
They first looked at the local level, using Elinor Ostrom’s Social-Ecological Systems (SES) as a framework for each study, in order to comprehend the role of institutions and other bodies in this process of development.
The main message of this book chapter is that cross-sectoral management is needed, supported by national drivers and clear communication among people and leaders to move from local to global.
Editor’s Note: This post was written by Imogen Gray, intern working with Dr. Dorothy Dankel at SINTEF Ocean in Bergen. She has be assisting on various projects led by SINTEF and UiB, including #LoVeSeSDG, and Day Zero of the SDG Conference Bergen 2023.
A PhD is a significant challenge for anyone, but even more so when working with a large array of stakeholders during a global pandemic that completely limits your ability to visit your case study or meet with people face-to-face. LoVeSeSDGs PhD Candidate, Jessica Fuller has embraced the challenge head-on and used the opportunity to refine her methods and develop strong community ties.
Jessica Fuller during her research visit in Andøya, June 2020
The main aims of her research are to describe the social-ecological system of Andøya (as a case study for Norwegian communities) and to understand the local cultures of decision-making and their relationships with nature. A significant part of localizing the SDGs is figuring out what the community needs/wants and working with a wide array of stakeholders to build a plan from the ground up. Much like renovating a room in your house the first step is to understand what is already there and how it works together.
In order to understand the cultures of the community, Jessica is using a ‘Q-sort’ methodology. She asks stakeholders qualitative questions about their opinions and experiences and translates these answers into quantitative values. This method has been used since the 1930s but is relatively new in the context of sustainability work. Participants from different sectors (e.g., fisheries, aquaculture, tourism, technology, and government) are asked to sort qualitative statements into a ranking from Agree to Disagree, and by comparing each of these “sortings”, similarities and differences are revealed in how the participants perceive issues. This can then inform discussion-centered dialogue and potentially chart a path forward for inclusive and multi-sector problem-solving. Originally, her in-person Q-sort interviews were planned for 2020, however complete mobility restrictions inside Norway due to the pandemic put a full stop to the idea of fieldwork. Jess was able to harness this delay as an opportunity to do pre-sort interviews to get a robust sense of the existing knowledge about SDGs. This provided an opportunity to build a solid foundation, explain the project to participants, and really anchor her work in the local setting. Ultimately Jess has been thankful for the opportunity to first focus on the description and understanding of Andøya.
She’s currently working on transcribing around 20 hours of interviews collected on her month-long stay in Andøya and then will find common themes through analysis. Results are yet unknown, but Jess shared that her preliminary findings are showing that there is more common ground for discussion between the different sectors in Andøya than expected. Ultimately, she believes that everyone in Andøya wants the same thing (a healthy and sustainable community). The sectors are on similar, but parallel paths towards sustainability, and these paths need to merge to find the common ground, which she hopes will facilitate inter-sectoral cooperation and collaboration for sustainability. In the end, Jessica hopes to understand how the SDGs translate from a global to national to local level. The government of Norway has been speaking loudly about their commitment to the SDGs, however, there appears to be little, or uncoordinated, support or guidance for communities and businesses. The SDG targets and indicators are designed to measure the progress of countries but many of them are not relevant on a local scale. For example, part of SDG 14 – Life Below Water is target 14.2:
“By 2020, sustainably manage and protect marine and coastal ecosystems to avoid significant adverse impacts, including by strengthening their resilience, and take action for their restoration in order to achieve healthy and productive oceans”
Many stakeholders have marked this as important, however, progress on this is indicated by the “Number of countries using ecosystem-based approaches to managing marine areas” which is not usable for local actors. So, though SDGs form the foundation of Jess’ work with sustainability in Andøya, in many instances it’s becoming clear that other indicators and pathways are needed to support localization of the large-scale vision of the SDGs.
We’ll have to wait a little longer for more concrete results, but Jess is hoping that the final output of her PhD – in partnership with the whole LoVeSeSDG team – will be a framework of localization for the SDGs that can be adapted to help other communities in Norway determine their own pathways to sustainability.
The LoVeSeSDG Consortium wishes her the best of luck with the next phase of her research!
Ocean Literacy & Sustainability: There is a role for SURFING! People are more likely to protect something they understand. The role of Ocean Literacy is strong in our efforts to reach the action points in SDG14 “Life under Water”. Natalie Fox, #LoVeSeSDG PI Dorothy Jane Dankel, and Jamie Marshall published this past May in the International Journal of Environmental Research.
“Their study explores the idea that, due to their interaction with the ocean and the insights gathered from the constant reading of tides, currents, waves, etc., surfers are inherently ocean-literate and, as such, surfing is a potential mechanism for developing ocean literacy.”
“By conducting an online survey with 249 surfers, as well as a focus group with 6 of the participants, the researchers aimed to “ascertain whether Ocean Literacy Principles are statements surfers agree with and whether surfer variables, such as how often they surf, or their ability, might impact their answers on the Ocean Literacy (OL) Principles.” They found that whilst surfers were well versed in all seven principles, there were gaps in the qualitative results in relation to principles 1, 2, 4, and 7, thus making it impossible to assert that surfing is a reliable and consistent mechanism for ocean literacy. That said, the results corroborated the initial hypotheses that the act of surfing naturally provides ocean literacy, and that surfers have both knowledge of waves and surf breaks as well as knowledge of ocean ecosystems.”
Environment, Coastal, and Offshore (ECO) Magazine has published a special digital issue about the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science, and LoVeSe-SDG has a video feature!
The issue has seven chapters, with each focusing on one of the aspects of ‘the ocean we want’, as outlined by the UN Decade of Ocean Science. The chapters are: A Clean Ocean, A Healthy and Resilient Ocean, A Predictable Ocean, A Safe Ocean, A Sustainable Harvested and Productive Ocean, An Accessible Ocean, and An Inspiring and Engaging Ocean. The issue covers an impressively diverse array of topics including coastal strengthening, emergency preparedness, renewable energy, aquaculture innovation, gender equality, and ecosystem stability – to name just a few!
The whole issue can be found online for free here:
But of course, of most interest to this site is the feature on the LoVeSe-SDG project! Our article gives an overview of what our large project goals are and the video outlines the main methods and approaches we use to achieve them. This is a great resource to learn the basics of our project, share our work with colleagues, and get inspired for future projects. Use the link below to jump right to our article
Join #LoVeSeSDG on Day Zero at SDG Conference Bergen 2021!
by E. Zoe Walker
Mark off February 10 – 12 on your calendar to ensure you can attend SDG Conference Bergen! It promises to be an immersive, all-digital experience where you can learn new things, meet new people, update your current knowledge, or first dip your toes into the world of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The conference highlights the impact of global social and economic inequality on environmental sustainability, what influence COVID-19 is expected to have on our ability to reach long-term goals, and how science and society come together in the real world.
The digital conference kicks off with a bang on February 10th with Day Zero – a festival of sustainabilityaction. The event is free and open to everyone (Register here: https://possibility.eventsair.com/sdg-2021/sdg/Site/Register) , so you can hop between the 31 workshops (hosted in three 90 minute session blocks throughout the afternoon) without even having to leave your chair. Though the list is expansive, there’s one workshop you won’t want to miss:
Talk to Action: Practical use of SDGs in local planning (from 1330-1500 on Feb 10).
Karin Berentsen (left) & Dorothy Dankel will discuss digital workshops for localizing SDG Action during Day Zero 2021.
The workshop features a talk by #LoVeSeSDG’s very own Dorothy Dankel and Karin Berentsen who will be reflecting on their ongoing work mapping SDG target goals across sectors in Andøya. They will discuss their recent success uniting previously disconnected stakeholders in the region through interactive workshops and establishment of common SDG target goals. This is a great time and place to get an overview of their innovative target tracing method and ask important questions about the challenges and opportunities it poses.
Other speakers in this workshop will be Carlo Aall of the Western Norway Research Institute with, “Looking back and learning from history: Nothing new under the sun?” and Aase Kristine Lundberg from Nordland Research Institute with, “Putting the SDGs to work: Experiences and challenges from on-going work to localize the SDGs in Norwegian municipalities and counties.”
Some other sessions relevant to LoVeSeSDG are suggested below:
· Positioning ourselves in relation to the SDGs: Exploring our roles as early-career researchers at the interface between science and policy (10.02, 1100-1230)
· Universities and the SDGs: the end of research autonomy? (10.02, 1530-1700)
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to meet in person, but we are VERY excited that our local company APRIIL is the digital producer of this conference and has designed GREAT interfaces for networking throughout all three days of the conference. There are a number of networking breaks where we look forward to meeting you! Remember the hashtag #SDGbergen21 🙂
As we navigate our pandemic holiday season, we all find ourselves wondering – Who am I seeing? How regularly? Who do my contacts meet besides me? How meaningful or intense is this interaction? What impact might this socializing have on my community? And even more importantly – who am I not seeing, and why? Monitoring and observing our behaviour in this way means we are practicing the fundamentals of Social Network Analysis!
Never before has social consciousness on this type of discussion been so prevalent in the public domain, but it has been an important research methodology since well before the pandemic.
Dorothy Dankel and Jessica Fuller join Ørjan Bodin (bottom) at the Stockholm Resilience Centre with Harry Strehlow from Thünen Institute in January 2020 to review social networks in the ICES network.
Social Network Analysis uses a qualitative assessment of inter- personal and institutional relations to visualize ‘clusters’ of connectivity within a community (be it geographic, research, industrial, etc.). This provides insight into community dynamics, network resiliency, and connectivity between stakeholders, on the basic premise that more connectivity between people and groups means more resilience and integrity. Understanding the structure of social networks in small towns (and communities of all sizes, for that matter) is important because it has been shown to have an influence on governance decisions and outcomes (Bodin et al. 2016). In order to localize the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – as is a primary goal of the LoVeSe-SDG project – we must work with and within existing social networks (such as academic and industrial collaborators in local fisheries) to integrate organized movement towards achieving select SDG targets with local scale interests and motivations.
Karin Berentsen, Dorothy Dankel, Anoek Meijer and Jessica Fuller (from Left), discuss networks in Lofoten with SALT in January 2020.
Of course, human relationships are much more complex than just ‘who talks to who’, it’s also about what they’re saying, what they mean by what they’re saying, and the perspective of the person saying it. So, to further qualify the Social Network Analysis, we are using Q methodology (or Q-sort, similar to Cultural Consensus Analysis) to explore the extent to which beliefs are shared between a group of people – for example, how do individual people define ‘sustainability’, and how similar is that to other people they work with? We are also conducting ethnographic studies to better understand how local conditions and social context (such as gender, age, education, and geography) influence collaborative efforts towards environmentally and socially sustainable development. Appreciating the unique perspectives of individual people and institutions is a critical component to understanding and acting/researching responsibly within a local context.
By combining these research methods we are actively and responsibly constructing an understanding of how social networks (who’s talking to who), cultural consensus (what do they mean by what they say), and social context (how does individual perspective influence this), resolve on a local scale.
You will likely be doing the basic form of Social Network Analysis over the holiday, but you can even better understand your social groups connectivity by trying to combine it with Q-sort and ethnographic observations 🙂
Happy Holidays from the #LoVeSeSDG network to yours, may we connect even more meaningfully in the New Year!
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Bodin, Ö., G. Robins, et al. 2016. Theorizing benefits and constraints in collaborative environmental governance: a transdisciplinary social-ecological network approach for empirical investigations. Ecology and Society 21(1):40.
It takes a lot of dedication to be an ERASMUS+ intern these days. First of all you have to make the decision whether or not to travel to a foreign country, where you know nobody, in the uncertain times during a global pandemic. Second of all, when you make that decision, you have to isolate and quarantine yourself for 10 days in a 1-room “apartment” with a shared bathroom and kitchen.
Such was the start of Anna’s internship with the #LoVeSeSDG project. And it’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride with a sharp upturn after the initial quarantine, moving into the extra desk in Dorothy’s office at BIO (Dept of Biological Sciences) at University of Bergen Marineholmen campus and first interactions with the #LoVSeSDG “lab” with Jessica, PhD candidate. Jessica and Anna even bought plane tickets and rented an apartment on Airbnb in Andenes in Vesterålen for the next round of fieldwork. Things were on the up and up!
But when the new wave hit Bergen in November 2020, the nose of the rollercoaster started pointing down again…plane tickets cancelled and back in the “home office” 1-room student-housing simplicity.
Luckily, the social science fieldwork was able to be rescheduled to a digital format. And now, after a week of stakeholder interviews with folks in Andøya, Anna is starting to get some meat on the bone. Here is a picture from her weekly supervisor meeting with Dorothy, with her showing her notes on SDG Target reports from the national level, and the knowledge gaps in the local reporting.
Anna is also currently designing the method of “SDG Relevance Tracing” to be performed in digital workshops with stakeholders from Andøya. Hopefully these workshops will occur before Christmas.
So congratulations to Anna, first for her determination and second for the fruit that her internship is starting to bear!
The second annual Ocean Sustainability Bergen conference went hybrid this year, with #LoVeSeSDG project leader Dorothy Dankel in the “From Pins to Action” panel. Dorothy was “in studio” in the University Aula and gave a 5 minute presentation on the on-going work in #LoVeSeSDG.
The Main message of her talk was that we must harness the detail of the SDG Targets in order to capitalize on local SDG reporting: There are on-going activities in communities that already are doing some of the grunt-work described in the SDG Targets. But we have to link these activities TO the targets. This is what current students Jessica Fuller and Anna Blome are doing in their work in the #LoVeSeSDG project through interviews and workshops with stakeholders in Andøy Kommune in Vesterålen, Northern Norway.
Over 450 people registered for the conference, which was this year free and open to the public. The conference used the platform Hopin and included a lively embedded chat. The Twitter hashtag #OSB2020 was also heavily used, and was trending #1 in Norway for over a half-hour!
