5. TIAS Plans

I myself have no experience in producing a journal - other than being one of those reviewers who always have to be chased.

Having said that, the one thing that immediately resonates with me is Hadi's comment (in an e-mail prior to the meeting) that the special issues have been relatively successful. Probably, that is simply because specific themes are more appealing and easier to connect to current debate than something general like . Thus, for refocussing the journal a special-issues-only strategy seems logical and appealing to me. It might even circumvent the problem with the Integrated Assessment flag as phrased by John Robinson.

Jan Bakkes

John is right. Does that matter for TIAS? Probably, the implication of John’s observation is that focussing on application and content – as opposed to methodology – will make TIAS work interesting to a larger community.

At the same time, I think TIAS’ integrated assessment perspective remains a useful, specific point of entry. The concept of IA may no be ‘hot’, but over the past five years or so there has been a lot of work that I would classify as related to integrated assessment. That is either because it applied integrated assessment or because it tried to come up with new concepts or rules for IA.

What does this mean for TIAS activities? I think John’s comment reinforces two or three points made, or implied, by others. These are:
• for the journal, it makes sense to produce thematic issues only (that is my conclusion from an observation by Hadi Dowlatabadi)
• in branding TIAS, it makes sense to re-emphasize our roots in environment assessment (see non-signed comment below)
• the current cohort of global assessments is a great opportunity to work on the connection between pure methodology and practice (proposed in work plan 2008).

Jan Bakkes

It is too bad that this discussion did not start earlier in this 'meeting'. It raises some fundamental questions about the future of the society.

By the way, in addition to looking at the relationship between IA and Sustainability Science, I think it is also look at IA's relationship to Ecological Economics. I recall an initiative to do so a few years back, but I do not believe anything concrete came out of that effort. In spite of, or perhaps because of the link to economics, Ecological Economics has probably been the most effective of the 'new disciplines' as far as building a community of the sort I think we aspire to with IA. Thus, there are most likely lessons that we could learn from their experience.

Dale

I agree with John that IA community may have a greater chance of growing and of outreach if it was to be linked to Sustainability. But this reminds me the old discussion on whether to put 'Environment' in between 'Integrated' and 'Assessment'. I personally would be very happy if we would refer to the IA as 'Integrated Environmental and Sustainability Assessment' (or similar), which I think is what most of us do. Not sure we can resolve that but it's a topic we can discuss further.

Within the EU project Matisse on Tools and Methods for Integrated Environmental Assessment there has been quite a lot of efforr to link and to develop IA tools to sustainabiity debates and transition theory in particular (www.matisse-project.net; see special issue of International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 2008 vol 3(1/2). My guess is that ISA is also part of the various strands of IA -the one more focused to transition and agent transformation. But I agree we still have the problem that perhaps the IA community needs to make clear its links and focus on Enviornmental and Sustainability focused type of assessment. Of course, people inside the community know that, but I think what John's refers to is to the people outside, and how we communicate with them.

seems that my previous comment was successfully uploaded - great!
Claudia

In response to the comments of John I want to express my agreement that IA does not seem to be a strong bond for a community. I agree that it has the problems of other fields where people share more the practice rather than identifiying themselves as being an "IA scholar". However, we also have not managed to build a kind of community of practice under the label of IA where people actively participate and share tools and methods. This may be on one hand due to the fact that it is indeed too broad and at the same time too narrow. Some people (not from the IA community) expressed their feeling that "Assessment" is for them too passive. Which is not how many of those active in the field experience it. IA is not (or no more) only assessing the current state and options but also supporting processes of change in doing so. Hence this can be more emphasized - "managing change". Also a very popular field. Next I would not mind to move closer to sustainability science because that is in the end where most of the IAs we are interested in contribute. And also in sustainability science there is now a strong emphasis not only on indicators of states but more on processes of change, how to improve the current situation.
The strenght of IA as we understand it is that it integrates formal modelling and qualitative, interpretative strands of the social science. Also here I see a growing field of interest.

I am quite convinced - if we had a critical mass of financial support we could get something off the ground. Because this is also a major constraint.

Claudia

From John Robinson

I think there are some fundamental issues that TIAS needs to face. Has the concept or community of IA matured to the point that there is a real constituency for it that can support a society, journal, newsletter, etc. I am very committed to the idea of IA, or at last PIA, but I am not sure the answer is yes. I think the history of the concept and journal of Industrial Ecology (on the Board of which I sit) is a good case in point. I think IE is struggling in some of the ways IA is struggling, though it has been successful in creating a functioning community and journal. But methods are rather general. It is hard to feel that that is the unifying bond for a community. My guess is that TIAS would have a greater chance of growing if it was identified with some particular content (e.g. sustainability) but that would be opposed to some no doubt strong views about what IA is and stands for.

I do not know what the answer is. But IA has simply not taken off the way we might have expected it to about 10 years ago. In this connection, the climate change example is instructive. Look at the language about IA in the SAR, and compare it to the equivalent language in the TAR and 4AR. I think there is a loss of energy and initiative. IA might have become the leading means of doing full cycle integrated analysis of climate change, perhaps if it had been more open to the interpretive social sciences (though maybe this was a non-starter independent of the attitude of the IA community). Instead the ‘human dimensions’ space has been taken up in other ways, I think (though still not satisfactorily). And the much vaunted marriage of quantitative modeling analysis and qualitative story-lines does not seem to have progressed much beyond the state of the art in 2000. That is, it is still going on but without much methodological progress or any real breakthrough to incorporate the human dimensions in a rich and nuanced way.

Maybe I am just ignorant of exciting new developments in the field. But I sense a failure to capitalize on opportunities that seemed to be available about a decade ago. Again, I don’t have any answers. But I think some of these issues are worth discussing.

Thanks for pointing this out. The proposal for the follow up workshop is now uploaded.
Caroline

Please note that the UNEP expert for the day can be found at http://www.unep.org/experts/.

Can you please clarify where to find the porposal for the follow up on Global Assessments Evaluation workshop/meeting? If the TIAS electronic meeting forum is on this or the main TIAS website, I cannot find it.

Thanks, Dale