Table 11 Typology for research relevant to studying the “goodness” of sustainability governance systems or regimes, and how to improve them to solve possible sustainability governance crises, using the bioenergy sector as an example
From: Conceptual framework for increasing legitimacy and trust of sustainability governance
Dimension | Symbol | Value | Description with bioenergy as example |
|---|---|---|---|
Research focus | R1 | Context | Contextual variables, for example, political, historical, economic, social, biophysical factors and patterns |
R2 | Policy | Policy variables, e.g., related to bioenergy, forest, agriculture, nature conservation, or waste policies or economic, environmental, social policies more generally | |
R3 | Measurable impact | Measurable impacts (parameters and indicators) of bioenergy, forestry, agriculture activities, or activities in another of the above-mentioned sectors | |
R4 | Perceived impact | Perceived impacts (parameters and indicators) of bioenergy, forestry, agriculture activities, or activities in another of the above-mentioned sectors | |
R5 | Legitimacy | Granted and achieved legitimacy of bioenergy, forestry, agriculture activities, policies or sustainability governance systems, or of those sectors mentioned above | |
R6 | Trust | Granted and achieved trust in sustainability of bioenergy, forestry, agriculture activities and policies or in the trust that the sustainability governance system achieves sustainability goals that it was designed to achieve | |
Comparative approach | A1 | Temporal | Examining changes over time for one or more geographies or policies |
A2 | Geographies | Examining differences in policies between different geographies, typically jurisdictions | |
A3 | Levels | Examining overlaps and complementarity of different levels of governance in a multilevel governance regime (Fig. 2) | |
Research question | Q1 | If | Corresponding to a statistical test to show “if” a change or a difference is statistically significant |
Q2 | How | Concerns the exact patterns in data, i.e. the nature of a change or a difference, for example, how did a policy change or how do policies differ, cf. the classifications systems presented in Sect. "Assessing if sustainability governance systems are good" | |
Q3 | Why | Concerns “why” certain changes or differences occur and if there is correlation and maybe causality |