Upcoming GEDT seminar: transforming research on transboundary mountain governance

Jörg Balsiger, associate professor and GEDT member will present one of his current projects during the upcoming online GEDT seminar on May 5th at 12h15. The title of his presentation is "From technical reports to serious games: transforming research on transboundary mountain governance". 

International cooperation in mountain regions continues to be of interest to scientists, policy makers, and practitioners. As debates over the role of science in society intensify and terms such as "evidence-based policy making", "practice-based research" and the "science-policy interface" become a staple of conversations about knowledge creation, however, expectations, modalities and outputs of research evolve.

The objective of this presentation is to illustrate this evolution on the basis of two recent UNEP projects on transboundary mountain governance, one funded by the European Union, the other by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The first mandate, signed in December 2018, involved desk research and a single workshop at a ministerial consultation, and resulted in a 125-page report addressed to policy makers of the Andean Mountain Initiative. The second mandate, signed in December 2020 and currently starting up, also aims at generating practical insights on transboundary mountain governance, though the target audience is no longer limited to one mountain range.

More importantly, the approach and outputs are very different: the deliverables now include a "virtual mountain governance multiverse", videos synthesizing "knowledge pods", and a handbook for organizing a "serious game". How has it come to this? While the presentation will mostly focus on describing and contrasting the two projects, it is meant to serve as an invitation to debate and reflect on such questions as "What is research?", "What does a researcher do?" and "Who is research for?"

This seminar is open to the public. To join and get the Zoom information, send an email to Sebastien.Lambelet(at)unige.ch.