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Centre for Sustainable Area Management (CeSAM)
New project funded

Alicia Donnellan Barraclough received grant for collaborative project ACTIONABLE

We are very pleased and proud to congratulate Dr. Alicia Donnellan Barraclough for receiving funding from the Norwegian Research Council to execute her interdisciplinary project: “ACTIONABLE - Adaptive Co-management to enhance biocultural diversity and sustainable development in coastal communities”.

ACTIONABLE conceptual figure
Conceptual figure for ACTIONABLE
Photo:
Alicia Donnellan Barraclough

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Project summary

ACTIONABLE is a project that aims to translate global sustainability imperatives and policies to local and regional coastal and marine realities through a transdisciplinary approach that facilitates exchange and learning between local and global institutions and stakeholders.  The project will consider the changing social and ecological outlook of biocultural diversity and ecosystem services in three coastal regions in Norway, addressing the role of collaborative platforms and bridging institutions as pathways to localize Agenda 2030. ACTIONABLE’s partners work together to understand adaptive co-management of coast and sea as enabled by round table institutions and sustainability designations in the coastal and marine areas of Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere, Lofoten UNESCO Biosphere Candidate and Sápmi Finnmark.

ACTIONABLE will help advance current understanding of adaptive co-management effectiveness to achieve regenerative and fair development, investigating its potential to manage ecosystem service and biodiversity trade-offs triggered by different coastal and marine area uses, navigating disparate stakeholder interests and values. ACTIONABLE will address these issues from a social-ecological perspective, through a biocultural approach that considers the complex relationships between coastal biological and cultural diversity.

The project will take an explicitly transdisciplinary approach with societal impact as a core pillar and vision. This means it will co-produce knowledge to generate policy-relevant and solution-oriented research that helps identify place-based approaches to coastal sustainability challenges, which are sensitive to local cultural narratives, biocultural perspectives and biodiversity. Co-developing a monitoring and evaluation framework ACTIONABLE will inform sustainable management practices that support coastal identities and biodiversity. This way, ACTIONABLE will encourage resilient ecosystem service management by drawing on Indigenous and local knowledge to disentangle complex social-ecological problems.

Focus on cross-disciplinarity

The project is a trans- and inter-disciplinary partnership between UiB (led by Alicia Barraclough with support of Inger Måren UNESCO Chair on Sustainable Heritage and Environmental Management, and Peter Manning from  the Centre for Sustainable Area Management CeSAM), LoVe utvikling (Ørjan Arntzen), Nordhordland Biosfære (Kari E Natland), SAMAS (Mikkel Nils Mikkelsen Sara), SINTEF (Dorothy Dankel) and University of Saskatchewan (Maureen Reed), as well as many other collaborators and advisors from key institutions in Norway and abroad.

Funding under pressure

This grant was funded as a Collaborative Project to Meet Societal and Industry-related Challenges, under the theme ‘Areal under press’ (areas under pressure). With the current situation of ongoing uncertainties regarding research funding, we consider this fantastic achievement even more impressive. Congratulations, and we are excited to keep having you on the team!