Stratification of stakeholders for participation in the governance of coastal social-ecological systems.

Knowledge co-production has become part of an evolution of participatory and transdisciplinary research approaches that are increasingly important for achieving sustainability. To effectively involve the most appropriate stakeholders there is a need for engagement and increasing prominence of stakeholders in environmental management and governance processes. The paper aims at developing and testing a methodology for stratifying stakeholders by (i) classifying organisations involved in coastal and ocean governance by their agency, and (ii) grouping them into organisational archetypes for representation and selection in research processes. Agency was measured by the three dimensions of scale, resources, and power. Each dimension was further elaborated as a set of indicators. The methodology is applied in the context of a research project set in Algoa Bay, South Africa. The stratification of organisations enabled the research team to gain a better understanding of the stakeholder landscape of organisational agency, and thus identify the most relevant stakeholder with which to engage. The use of a hierarchical cluster analysis identified five organisational archetypes in relation to ocean and coastal governance in Algoa Bay. The methodology used in this study proposes an informed and intentional approach to create the conditions under which the co-production of and participation in research processes can take place.

Climate services to improve public health.

A high level expert panel discussed how climate and health services could best collaborate to improve public health. This was on the agenda of the recent Third International Climate Services Conference, held in Montego Bay, Jamaica, 4-6 December 2013. Issues and challenges concerning a demand led approach to serve the health sector needs, were identified and analysed. Important recommendations emerged to ensure that innovative collaboration between climate and health services assist decision-making processes and the management of climate-sensitive health risk. Key recommendations included: a move from risk assessment towards risk management; the engagement of the public health community with both the climate sector and development sectors, whose decisions impact on health, particularly the most vulnerable; to increase operational research on the use of policy-relevant climate information to manage climate- sensitive health risks; and to develop in-country capacities to improve local knowledge (including collection of epidemiological, climate and socio-economic data), along with institutional interaction with policy makers.