Suchergebnisse

Complex societal challenges require collaboration between organizations, often with conflicting priorities and ways of working. Connecting organizations has come to be referred to as boundary-spanning. There is a need to understand the features of boundary-spanning at the local level, since policy-makers and practitioners from different sectors need not only to work together but also to relate to the recipients of their interventions. Addressing this gap, a scoping review was conducted. The review highlights the need to carve out a contextualized conceptualization of boundary-spanning that accounts for the distinctive features of this work when embedded in local community context.

A survey was conducted to investigate the prevalence of boundary spanning activities among public relations practitioners. The survey drew from previous measures of boundary spanning activities in the organizational behavior literature and added new items to index public relations practice. Six factors were derived in a factor analysis. All six boundary spanning factors were positively and significantly correlated with the public relations roles of Expert Prescriber, Communication Facilitator, and Process Facilitator. Comparisons were also made between the actual frequency of various roles and boundary spanning activities and practitioners' estimates of the ideal level of these activities.

AbstractNatural resource governance challenges are often highly complex, particularly in Indigenous contexts. These challenges involve numerous landscape-level interactions, spanning jurisdictional, disciplinary, social, and ecological boundaries. In Eeyou Istchee, the James Bay Cree Territory of northern Quebec, Canada, traditional livelihoods depend on wild food species like moose. However, these species are increasingly being impacted by forestry and other resource development projects. The complex relationships between moose, resource development, and Cree livelihoods can limit shared understandings and the ability of diverse actors to respond to these pressures. Contributing to this complexity are the different knowledge systems held by governance actors who, while not always aligned, have broadly shared species conservation and sustainable development goals. This paper presents fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) as a methodological approach used to help elicit and interpret the knowledge of land-users concerning the impacts of forest management on moose habitat in Eeyou Istchee. We explore the difficulties of weaving this knowledge together with the results of moose GPS collar analysis and the knowledges of scientists and government agencies. The ways in which participatory, relational mapping approaches can be applied in practice, and what they offer to pluralistic natural resource governance research more widely, are then addressed.

"Angesichts grenzüberschreitender Wirtschaftsverflechtungen nimmt die Bedeutung von internationalen Organisationen und ihr Einfluss auf die politische, rechtliche und wirtschaftliche Situation in nationalstaatlichen Arenen zu. Als politische Institutionen agieren internationale Organisationen in nationalstaatlich geprägten Kontexten. Jedoch gibt es kaum gesicherte Erkenntnisse, wie diese Organisationen die Formulierung und Implementierung grenzübergreifender Politiken auf Signale aus und Entwicklungen in ihrer Umwelt abstimmen. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird argumentiert, dass in den Kommunikations- und Abstimmungsprozessen zwischen internationalen Organisationen und den Akteuren aus ihrer Umwelt Anlässe für Organisationslernen begründet liegen. Das Interaktionsgeschehen ist durch 'boundary spanning units' in den Handlungszusammenhang der Organisation eingebunden. An den Außengrenzen der Organisationen fungieren sie als Bindeglieder zur Umwelt. Nach innen können sich boundary spanning units förderlich auf Lernen in internationalen Organisationen auswirken, da hierüber die für diese Organisationen überlebenswichtigen Signale (Wissen, Anforderungen, Erwartungen) aus der Umwelt in die Organisation gelangen. Im Mittelpunkt des vorliegenden Aufsatzes steht die Fragestellung, unter welchen Bedingungen äußere Signale Lernprozesse in internationalen Organisationen auslösen. Hierfür werden auf der Grundlage eines soziologischen Verständnisses zum Organisation-Umwelt Verhältnis ausgewählte Konzepte aus dem Bereich des Organisationslernens und Überlegungen aus der politikwissenschaftlichen Diskussion zum Lernen in öffentlichen Politiken miteinander verknüpft." (Autorenreferat)

The focus of this thematic issue is on migrants' experiences of belonging and non-belonging, and how communities are constructed in the destination country. It includes a group of international scholars across disciplines who are studying migration in a range of different contexts. Migration spans multiple disciplines and encompasses a variety of epistemological, ontological and methodological orientations. Despite such divergent approaches and positions however, there is consensus across the social sciences that understanding the dynamics of migration and mobilities is central to illuminating social relations within societies.

In urban policy there is an increasing emphasis on the management and sharing of information in and about cities. This paper focuses on external sharing practices which are facilitated by boundary‐spanning organisations. Boundary‐spanning organisations are hybrid structures that provide a platform to link internal networks of the city government with external actors, and in particular focus on engaging various types of stakeholders. The paper offers a preliminary assessment of a sample of boundary‐spanning organisations based across six case studies (Barcelona, Chicago, London, Medellin, Mexico City and Seoul) and across three types of BSOs: living labs, innovation districts and sector‐oriented BSOs. Unpacking the shape and development of BSOs, and "placing" them in urban governance, we begin to sketch a preliminary agenda geared to offer a better appreciation of the "information ecosystem" underneath policy‐making in cities.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social and Cultural Geography on 6 February 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14649365.2015.1126628. ; This article situates interactions between German- and English-language social and cultural geographies since the mid-20th century within their wider intellectual, political and socioeconomic contexts. Based on case study examples, we outline main challenges of international knowledge transfer due to nationally and linguistically structured publication cultures, differing academic paradigms and varying promotion criteria. We argue that such transfer requires formal and informal platforms for academic debate, the commitment of boundary spanners and supportive peer groups. In German-language social and cultural geography, these three aspects induced a shift from a prevalent applied research tradition in the context of the modern welfare state towards a deeper engagement with Anglophone debates about poststructuralist approaches that have helped to critique the increase of neoliberal governance since the 1990s. Anglophone and especially British social and cultural geography, firmly grounded in poststructuralist and critical approaches since the 1980s, are increasingly pressurized through the neoliberal corporatization of the university to develop more applied features such as research impact and students' employability.

Research finds that productive interfaces between collaborative and bureaucratic forms of governance hinges on the extent to which public managers act as competent boundary spanners who process information, accommodate communication and align and coordinate behavior, and it seems likely that politicians have an equally important role to play in aligning processes and arenas of collaborative governance with representative democracy. The empirical forms that political boundary making takes are examined in a study of 28 cases of local, regional or national level policy-making in nine Western countries. This study indicates that there is considerable variation in the way politicians perform political boundary spanning particularly with respect to their degree of engagement in collaborative policy-making arenas and the focus of their boundary-spanning activities. Furthermore, the study shows that collaborative governance tends to go best in tandem with representative democracy in those cases where politicians perform both hands off and hands on boundary-spanning activities

A growing literature highlights complexity of policy implementation and governance in global health and argues that the processes and outcomes of policies could be improved by explicitly taking this complexity into account. Yet there is a paucity of studies exploring how this can be achieved in everyday practice. This study documents the strategies, tactics, and challenges of boundary‐spanning actors working in 4 Sub‐Saharan Africa countries who supported the implementation of multisectoral nutrition as part of the African Nutrition Security Partnership in Burkina Faso, Mali, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Three action researchers were posted to these countries during the final 2 years of the project to help the government and its partners implement multisectoral nutrition and document the lessons. Prospective data were collected through participant observation, end‐line semistructured interviews, and document analysis. All 4 countries made significant progress despite a wide range of challenges at the individual, organizational, and system levels. The boundary‐spanning actors and their collaborators deployed a wide range of strategies but faced significant challenges in playing these unconventional roles. The study concludes that, under the right conditions, intentional boundary spanning can be a feasible and acceptable practice within a multisectoral, complex adaptive system in low‐ and middle‐income countries.