Workshop Confronting Manageability Paradigm/General Results

Workshop results

The more we study, the less we manage.

The more we study, the better we know whether and how to manage.

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Future

The workshop was so encouraging that people directly asked for another one. January 2009 has been suggested.

Products

• Publication (electronic?, university edited series "Aktuelle Reihe" (by TU Cottbus faculty for environmental sciences and engineering) (
• Email list (status: done)
• Uploading presentations (status: in process)
• Local Study projects at TU Cottbus
• (Annotated) Bibliographies for various topics and fields of (Critical EM) research

Aims

• Helping each other
• Support local (BTU ERM) students to work critically. Ingmar mentions the possibility to do study projects. Projects could study reality from a social scientific perspective.

Publication

We need to work on the paper such that they relate to each other clearly. They need to be in a similar academic context. Although a coherent theoretical frame is difficult we can have some common themes which run through the contributions.

A basis for the publication could or should be the call for contributions.

Themes and questions which could run through the publication:

• How does environmental management lead to situations in which specific problems are not dealt with?
• What are/is environmental management (practices) based on?
• What do particular models of management make visible/invisible?
• How does political economy come into environmental management (practices), and how science&technology?
• How is the observed/studied (practice/paradigm) peculiar? Constitute it as worth being studied.
• What is meant by environmental management?
• What happens under the umbrella, within the container/black box "environmental management"?

Keywords could be structures, factors, believes, boundaries.

Evaluation

Some points which have been mentioned in the evaluation:

• wishes for products such as mentioned above
• an orientation to find solution has been missing. (yes, there was none intended. we aimed at asking questions)
• DIY spirit was seen as good
• communication in discussions were not (that) good. I.e. discussing somehow coherently was missing.
• focus of workshop was not clear
• missing conclusion (in terms of content)
• it was good to have new perspectives
• participants should be prepared, especially students should have been prepared with a reading list
• the insight that theoretical framings influence how we see the world should have been dealt with in the beginning rather than the end