On the occasion of the opening of the Kraijenhoff van de Leur Laboratory for Water and Sediment Dynamics, a symposium is organized on the role of laboratory experiment in water and sediment dynamics research.

You are invited to consider, share and discuss different views on the topic with scientific experts in experimental research. Additionally, you are welcome to visit our campus and the new laboratory in a guided tour. This day includes lunch and drinks after the symposium and is free of charge.

In this symposium, we would like to explore the role of social science methods in designing, facilitating and evaluating participatory processes. Questions that will be covered are: Why are social science methods important for participatory processes? What kind of social science methods are relevant in this regard? What does this mean for the role of the social scientist? What kind of empirical applications are there, and what can we learn from them?

This symposium will precede the PhD graduation of Eefje Cuppen.

To register, please send an email with subject "symposium participation" to: e.h.w.j.cuppen@tudelft.nl

The full programme is available for download HERE.

On December 14th Prof. William Rees (University of British Columbia) will give a lecture about the (un)sustainability of modern society. The lecture will be followed by an open debate. Prof. Rees is, among other things, the originator of the "ecological footprint" concept.

Participation in the event is free of charge. Registration is highly advisable.

The study of regime shifts developed independently in the freshwater and marine realms; with studies of freshwater regime shifts having a resource-based focus while in marine systems, research concentrates on higher trophic levels. Do these distinct approaches reflect fundamental differences in the drivers of the abrupt changes or is it simply a reflection of a parallel development towards one unifiable body of theory?

The announcement poster can be downloaded here.

Information: Kristina.Raab@wur.nl, Reinier.HilleRisLambers@wur.nl, Andrea.Downing@wur.nl

Registration: email Andrea.Downing@wur.nl before September 7th, specifying whether you will present a poster or talk (and include any dietary requirements).

Oral presentations: If you want to present a talk, please also send an abstract of no more than 200 words (font size 12). Remember to include the title (font size 14), authors and affiliations (both font size 10), all in Times New Roman font.

Poster presentations: For posters, please send the only title, authors and affiliations in the same format as described above.

Workshop on: Transparency in Global Environmental Governance

Organizer: Aarti Gupta, Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands

Location: Hotel de Wageningse Berg, Wageningen, the Netherlands

When: April 23-24, 2009

mailto:aarti.gupta@wur.nl

A workshop will be held on April 23-24, 2009 in Wageningen University on the topic of "Transparency in Global Environmental Governance". Transparency is often assumed to be associated with accountable, legitimate, democratic and effective global environmental governance, yet the link between transparency and such desired ends (and what these relationships entail, or how they can be conceptualized) has not been systematically studied.

This workshop brings together papers that explore these issues in conceptual and empirical depth. The focus is on information disclosure as a concrete operationalization of transparency. Information disclosure is central to a growing range of global environmental governance initiatives. These include the private voluntary Global Reporting Initiative to multilaterally negotiated Prior Informed Consent treaties addressing trade in hazardous waste, chemicals or genetically modified organisms, to private voluntary certification and disclosure schemes in forestry, fisheries and extractive industries, to the Aarhus Convention institutionalizing a right to environmental information.

All such examples will be addressed by papers presented at this workshop.

Click here for the workshop programme. This workshop is supported by COST Action IS0802 on Transformations in Global Environmental Governance. More information about this Action can be found here.