Dear ESEE Member,

We are pleased to send you the new edition of the electronic ESEE newsletter.
Supported by the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management the Sustainable Europe Research Institute SERI is able to maintain the website of the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) and publishes this newsletter.

The newsletter is distributed only to members of the European Society for Ecological Economics. To join ESEE or renew your membership please visit www.euroecolecon.org.

If you want to publish interesting news, or information about events, job openings and new publications on the website or in the newsletter, feel free to send an email to esee@seri.at. We are also open for suggestions to improve our communication channels.

1. News from ESEE and its members

• Two New Student reps on the ESEE board

2. Other news

• Launching the 4th edition of the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology
• Nominations sought for Kenneth E. Boulding Award
• Online Encyclopedia Adds Preeminent Climate Change Reports to Its Collection

3. Hot topic

• Which way scientific publishing? - by Janne Hukkinen

4. Events

• Conference: Chasing Eden: Nature, Health and the Politics of Environment
• International Conference: Sustainable development twenty years on: new theoretical interpretations, methodological innovations, and fields of further exploration.
• International Wuppertal Colloquium on „Sustainable Growth, Resource Productivity and Sustainable Industrial Policy"
• HIGRADE Summer School - Ecological-Economic Modelling for Biodiversity Conservation
• ALTER-Net Summer School 2008 "Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services"
• ISEE 2008
• IASC 2008: Governing shared resources: connecting local experience to global challenges
• erscp2008 - 12th European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production
• 3rd Atlantic Workshop on Energy and Environmental Economics CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES AFTER 2012
• Advances in Energy Studies - Towards a holistic approach based on science and humanity

5. Job openings

• Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Iceland - post doctoral fellowship
• Professor of sustainable resource use at the Klagenfurt University in Vienna

6. Publications

• Public and Private in Natural Resource Governance: A False Dichotomy?
• Environmental Values Vol.17 No.2
• Environment & Planning C

Two New Student reps on the ESEE board

After three years as student representative on the ESEE board, Vincent Moreau has moved on. He did a great job getting student together, discussing their concerns and contributing to ESEE decision making. Many thanks for all your efforts, Vincent!

In May a ballot was held and two new student reps have been elected: Charlotte Da Cunha and Albert Merino Saum, both PhD students at the Centre for Economics and Ethics for the Environment and Development (C3ED) at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ). We welcome Charlotte and Albert onto the board and look forward to working with them in the future.

Charlotte is studying economic science, working on the integrated management of biodiversity in the Ile-de-France region through a multi-stakeholders approach. This work takes place in the context of the FRAGILE project, where C3ED is the coordinator of the project with responsibilities to establish ways to structure the interfaces between science and society. Charlotte has participated in different ESEE events, such as the two first Summer Schools in Emerging Theories and Methods in Sustainability Research (THEMES 2006 and 2007) support by the ESEE, and the 7th biennial international conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics (Leipzig, Germany, 2007). She sees her contribution to the ESEE as firstly, to put forward the student point of view with a focus on student networking, trying to raise student representativeness in the society. Secondly, to help students with integration into the ecological economic field, since she feels it is important that students have access to advice from other students and researchers. Cooperation between students and other researchers could also be enhanced for publishing. The aim is to help students learn how to write articles, and to define their publication policy.

Albert is a PhD student in Economics working on an integrated analysis of wildfire risk in the Mediterranean forests. He also works part-time in the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the UVSQ as Assistant Lecturer in Economics and works in the fields of risk governance, fire economics, participative processes and multi-criteria analysis. As student representative Albert would like to work on strengthening and developing networks between the young researchers interested in Ecological Economics and find different ways to facilitate their integration into the ESEE community. He is keen that initiatives like the student camp held in Leipzig before the last ESEE conference be regularly repeated. Furthermore, mobility among students should be fostered between the different institutes working on sustainability and Ecological Economics (at the Master level as well as during PhD research). He is also willing to explore other opportunities for student interaction such as web-forums and informal encounters.

Launching the 4th edition of the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology

Six months after the 2007 Ramon Margalef Prize was awarded to the North American researcher Harold A. Mooney, the fourth edition of this award of international renown is now launched, having elicited the interest of the most prestigious universities and research centres in the world. This has been amply demonstrated by the level of the more than 50 candidates nominated in the past three editions, to compete for the most important prize conferred by the Autonomous Government (Generalitat) of Catalonia.

The Prize may be awarded to living individuals (the Prize is not awarded posthumously), or to legal entities or groups from anywhere in the world that, through their scientific career and teaching, their thinking, creativity, innovation and discoveries have contributed to the significant development of ecology, as well as to conceptual advancement and its application aimed at the sustainable management of natural resources, or use of the land and sea.

In this fourth call, the candidatures must be presented before June 30th, 2008, by competent qualified representatives of universities, other higher education schools, research centres and academies of science or their scientific subsidiaries. Such presentation of candidates must include a letter or statement of well-reasoned justification indicating the reasons why the career and contributions of the candidate respond to the criteria of the Prize.

For more informations visit www.gencat.net/premiramonmargalef/eng.

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Nominations sought for Kenneth E. Boulding Award

The ISEE Kenneth E. Boulding Award Committee requests nominations for the award as soon as possible so that we can select an individual in early July.

In 1994, the ISEE established the Kenneth Boulding Memorial Award as a tribute to our esteemed colleague, who was a founding member of the Society. This Award is presented, biennially, to an individual (or individuals) who has contributed original and seminarl approaches that have furthered our understanding of the interfaces between the social, ecological, ethical, economic and political dimensions of our world.

In the past this award has been given primarily in recognition of achievements within the domain of ecological economics. Our previous Award holders are Robert Goodland and Herman Daly (1994), Ann-Mari Jansson (1996), Robert Costanza (1998), C.S. (Buzz) Holling (2000), Robert Ayres (2002), Karl Goran-Mäler and Partha Dasgupta (2004), and Richard Norgaard (2006).

Please provide your nominee's

• Name
• Contact information (email and phone if possible)
• Background on why the nominee is deserving of the Boulding Award Curriculum Vitae (if possible)

Please do not self-nominate or inform the nominee of your intent of nominating her or him.

Send nomination to:
Richard Norgaard (norgaard@igc.org)

Other committee members include
Paula ANTUNES
José Eli DA VIEGA
Karin LIMBURG
Brian WALKER

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Online Encyclopedia Adds Preeminent Climate Change Reports to Its Collection

Encyclopedia of Earth adds Nobel-prize winning reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

WASHINGTON, DC, MAY 27, 2008. – The world's most respected scientific reports about climate change are now available through the Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE), an online resource designed to make authoritative information about the environment widely available and easily accessible.

The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were recently added to the EoE’s collection and are now accessible here. A program of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, the IPCC publishes periodic reports on the worldwide scientific consensus about climate change and its potential impacts. The reports are intended to provide decision-makers and interested citizens with the latest objective information about climate change. The IPCC received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its work.

Mohan Munasinghe, Vice-Chair of the IPCC and a member of the EoE's Advisory Board, praised the publishing partnership, noting that the work of the world's foremost authority on climate change is now reaching a much broader audience through one of the most trusted sources of environmental information available on the internet.

"I am delighted that our efforts to link the IPCC and EoE have borne fruit through this publishing agreement," Munasinghe said. " It will make key information on climate change readily accessible to everyone, and bring enormous benefits to stakeholders ranging from high level decision makers, policy analysts and researchers, to students and the concerned public."

Launched in 2006, the EoE is the first free, expert-driven, massively scaleable online information resource about the environment. Hundreds of the world's leading scientists and educators write and edit articles for the encyclopedia on a variety of topics.

"Climate change is now center stage in public awareness and political agendas” noted Cutler Cleveland, Editor-in-Chief of the EoE and professor of Geography an Environment at Boston University. “This collaboration makes the best science about climate change freely available to anyone with access to the Internet."

The Encyclopedia of Earth is one component of the Earth Portal, published by the National Council for Science and the Environment in Washington, D.C. The Earth Portal also includes the Earth Forum, featuring bogs by leading scientists and Earth News, providing links to the latest environmental news from around the world.

For more information, visit www.eoearth.org and www.earthportal.org.

Which way scientific publishing?

Scientific publishing is in turmoil.

In the old days, commercial publishers provided the physical infrastructure for getting journal articles in print and scientific societies secured the intellectual consistency of the published content. The publishers were compensated through subscription fees. Academic authors were compensated by way of gaining academic merits through publishing. The deal had some elements of fairness.

It’s all different now. More and more journals are published both in print and electronically. Some are only electronic. In fact, the academic community does not really need the printed versions any longer. The cost of electronic publishing is much less than that of printed publishing. Yet the subscription fees remain there. The deal has lost its sense of fairness.

Paradoxically, publishing companies today create barriers to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. And they hold rights to articles whose birth process they have not funded. And they get the material and its reviews for free.

Some scientific communities have divorced themselves from the commercial publishers and established electronic journals of their own. Often they maintain the infrastructure for electronic publishing by collecting fees only from those authors whose articles are published. This enables them to drop subscription fees and thus adhere to the original ideal of open access to academic publications.

But establishing electronic journals independent from commercial publishers is a major endeavor on its own, and many scientific societies simply don’t have the time and resources to do so. So they are torn in two directions. On the one hand, they are stuck with the existing institutions of scientific publishing that do provide the infrastructure for publishing but at the same time violate some of the fundamental ideals of academia. On the other hand, they ought to defend their ideals and keep fighting the institutions with a view on reforming them.

It is a genuine dilemma, with no easy way out. An obvious way to face a dilemma is to accept it. Scientific societies such as ESEE will have to live with the realities of scientific publishing without forgetting their duty to keep up the momentum of institutional reform in the field.

Janne Hukkinen

Conference: Chasing Eden: Nature, Health and the Politics of Environment
at Exeter University and the Eden Project, 4th-5th September

This conference considers new perspectives on the history of environmental politics in the western world since the nineteenth century. Speakers include Harriet Ritvo, Gregg Mitmann, Chris Sellars, Alan MacEachern, Karl Ditt and Thomas Lekan. First deadline for registration, 30 June 2008.

For more details contact
Dr. Tim Cooper, University of Exeter, T.Cooper@ex.ac.uk
or visit www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~eden2008.

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International Conference: Sustainable development twenty years on: new theoretical interpretations, methodological innovations, and fields of further exploration.

An international conference, taking place in Lille (France) from November 20-22, 2008 will deal with issues around the concept of Sustainable Development along 5 axes. More than 200 presentations, quite a few from ESEE members, in the axes Theories, Methods, Actors, Development and Spatial will be given in this bi-lingual conference, supported by ESEE.

More information on www.univ-lille1.fr/clerse.

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International Wuppertal Colloquium on
"Sustainable Growth, Resource Productivity and Sustainable Industrial Policy – Recent Findings, new Approaches for Strategies and Policies"
held September 17 – 19, 2008 at Wuppertal University (Germany) in cooperation with the Wuppertal Institute

The international colloquium shall bring together top experts on sustainable growth and sustainable resource management. It aims to analyse the contribution of increasing resource productivity to sustainability. Having a focus on economics, the international colloquium shall also cover the technological, the environmental and the international dimensions. The number of participants and presentations is strictly limited in order to facilitate discussion.

The international colloquium shall take place in 2008, 2009, and 2010. It accompanies a large research project on “material efficiency and resource savings” which is coordinated by the Wuppertal Institute with some 30 partners on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment. While the first international colloquium intends to assemble the state of the art, the subsequent colloquia in 2009 and 2010 shall also discuss technological potentials and business opportunities as well as options for a sustainable industrial policy. A publication is intended.

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HIGRADE Summer School - Ecological-Economic Modelling for Biodiversity Conservation
7-13 September 2008 in Bad Schandau, Germany

this summer, there will again be a summer school on Ecological-Economic Modelling for Biodiversity Conservation.

The summer school is organized by the Helmholtz Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Environmental Research (HIGRADE) and takes place 7-13 September 2008 in Bad Schandau, Germany.

The target group are PhD-students and young PostDocs.

For more informations click here.

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ALTER-Net Summer School 2008 "Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services"
2-14 September 2008, Peyresq, France

The summer school will be held at Peyresq, Alpes de Haute-Provence, France and is organized by the ALTER-Net Summer School Secretariat at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany.

More information at: www.pik-potsdam.de/alter-net

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ISEE 2008
Nairobi, Aug. 7-11,2008

The conference will highlight the vision, methods and policy adjustments needed for ecological economics principles to be applied to the design and management of environmentally and socially sustainable development processes. The conference seeks to build capacity in this area in developing countries in the face of increasing global change and interdependence.

For more information please visit: www.ecoeco.org/conferences.php

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IASC 2008: Governing shared resources: connecting local experience to global challenges
The 12th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons. July 14-18, 2008

The IASC 2008 global conference will take place in Cheltenham , England. The conference will be hosted by the University of Gloucestershire, with logistical support to be provided by the University's Countryside and Community Research Unit (CCRU).

For detailed information visit: www.iascp.org/iasc08/iasc08.html

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erscp2008 - 12th European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production

From 23 - 25 September 2008, the 5th BMBF-Forum for Sustainability will present the 12th European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production (erscp2008) in parallel to the traditional fora of the BMBF-Framework programme "Research for Sustainability".

The conference will be part of the 5th BMBF-Forum for Sustainability held in Berlin in September 2008 and will provide time and space for an exchange of ideas between actors from politics, science, and industry and services.

For detailed informations visit: www.fona.de/erscp2008

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3rd Atlantic Workshop on Energy and Environmental Economics CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES AFTER 2012

The Research Group in Economics, Business and the Environment (rede) of the University of Vigo (Spain) announces the 3rd Atlantic Workshop on Energy and Environmental Economics. The workshop will be held on the island of A Toxa (near Vigo, in Galicia) on the 4-5 of July 2008 and will be appealing to researchers, policy makers and other agents interested in the economic aspects of climate change policies.

Further information can be found at the workshop website: http://rede.uvigo.es/toxa

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Advances in Energy Studies - Towards a holistic approach based on science and humanity
6th Biennial International Workshop: Invitation, June 29 to July 2, 2008, Graz University of Technology, Austria

This series of workshops – now at its 6th edition - aims at bringing together experts from different disciplines for the discussion of the latest results in research regarding energy technologies, energy systems and their political, social and economical impacts. We aim at sharpening the scientific focus and building a critical mass and collaborative network among scientists researching energy issues. We will discuss the question of future energy scenarios and their implications in a circle of open minded people representing different approaches in order to gain new momentum in these years as societal attention once again shifts toward policy debates and decisions concerning sustainable use of energy and resources and their relationship to the economics of humanity and the future of the plant as a convenient habitat.

For more details visit www.aes.tugraz.at

Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Iceland - post doctoral fellowship

The University of Iceland offers a two year post doctoral fellowship in fields associated with the science and management of the environment and natural resources.

The University of Iceland offers cross disciplinary graduate studies in the field of the environment and natural resources (see umhverfi.hi.is). The programme is organised by three of the University's schools.

The University seeks applications from individuals that are interested in obtaining postdoctoral research experience in fields associated with the science and management of the environment and natural resources, and to participate in building our newly established programme. The successful applicant will collaborate with the programme director and the programme board, advising and teaching masters students and have the freedom to conduct own research.

The two year position, with a possibility of one year extension, is intended for those that intend to pursue an academic career in fields associated with the science and management of the environment and natural resources.

Applicants must hold a PhD. degree in a discipline associated with the science and management of the environment and natural resources. Practical experience in an associated field is a plus. The successful applicant must have good communication skills, be independent and demonstrate teaching skills.

The application should contain a full curriculum vitae, a statement of research and teaching experience in addition to a statement of teaching and research interests and upto 3 reference letters to: Employment office, University of Iceland, Adalbygging at Sudurgata, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland marked Postdoctoral Fellow Environment and Natural Resources, or electronically as email attachments in PDF format to starfsumsoknir@hi.is. All applications will be responded to and applicants will be informed when the position is filled.

Further information is given by Brynhildur Davidsdottir (bdavids@hi.is), associate professor at the University of Iceland.

For more details about the programme click here.

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Professor of sustainable resource use at the Klagenfurt University in Vienna

The Institute of Social Ecology at Klagenfurt University in Vienna, Austria invites applications for the position of a Professor of sustainable resource use.

The position will be a full professor (according to § 98 UG) for an initial period of three years that may then be transformed into an unlimited contract.

The successful candidate for this position requires, on the basis of a natural science background (preferably biology), a thorough understanding of approaches from social sciences and the humanities and experience in directing interdisciplinary research projects in the field of sustainability science. He or she is expected to contribute to an existing team by developing formalized methods for the empirical analysis of system interrelations and long term trajectories in the societal use of materials, energy, water and land. The new position will be instrumental to advance research into integrated socioecological analysis and modelling and foster the integration of biophysical variables into macroeconomic models as part of international collaboration. The professor should help to establish international master and doctoral programmes in Human and Social Ecology by offering courses in English and by raising funds for doctoral candidates. Candidates should be able to teach in English and German, and have acquired a venia docendi (habilitation) or an equivalent. In case of equal qualification, female candidates will be preferred.

Please find details at the official announcement.

Public and Private in Natural Resource Governance: A False Dichotomy?
by Thomas Sikor

This book provides a new perspective on prominent issues in resource governance. It builds on empirical analyses from six fields of natural resource governance - agri-environment, biodiversity, bioenergy, food quality and safety, forestry, and rural water – and employs a comparative approach which goes beyond the specificities of individual policy fields. This is essential reading for academics, students and policy experts in natural resource governance, development and environmental policy.

For more informations please click here

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Environmental Values Vol.17 No.2

is a special issue in Honour of the last editor. This has a range of papers of interest to Ecological Economist including topics of a happiness and the meaning of a good life, meaningful relations with nature, environmental politics, economic valuation and ecosystem services. Contributors include Ted Benton, Andy Dobson, John O’Neill, Mark Sagoff and Clive Spash.

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Environment & Planning C:

Government & Policy also had a special issue (Vol.26 No.2) recently in honour of 25 years in print. Two papers of potential interest are:

• Andrew Jordan "The governance of sustainable development: Taking stock and looking forwards"
• Clive Spash "Contingent valuation design and data treatment: If you can’t shoot the messenger, change the message"