Knowledge Cumulation

Special Issue on Knowledge Cumulation in Environmental Governance

~ Jens Newig ~ Leave a comment

By Michael Rose and Jens Newig

Over the past years, we’ve watched environmental governance research expand at impressive speed. New case studies, new concepts, new methods — the field is vibrant. Yet one question has kept nagging at us: Are we actually building knowledge, or are we sometimes also talking past each other?

This simple question ultimately motivated a group of scholars from the Earth System Governance taskforce on Knowledge Cumulation to work on a special issues, which is now published with Environmental Policy and Governance.

Environmental governance research is wonderfully diverse, but that diversity also makes it difficult to connect findings across contexts. Too often, insights remain isolated: a promising mechanism here, an interesting participatory process there — but without linking back to previous work, without clarifying whether what we’ve learned travels, under which conditions, and with what implications. If we want the field to mature — and to be genuinely useful for policymakers and practitioners — we need to become more deliberate about how we build on each other’s work.

The contributions in this issue take up this challenge from different angles. Some examine where cumulation is already happening (and where it isn’t). Others propose ways to measure or strengthen cumulation — through comparative designs, transparent data practices, systematic reviews, or conceptual clarification. Still others reflect critically on whether a stronger push for cumulation risks narrowing the field or crowding out diverse ways of knowing. Taken together, they open up a conversation we believe the field has long needed.

Our hope is that this special issue sparks more reflection — and more intentionality — in how we, as a research community, create knowledge that genuinely adds up. Not by forcing uniformity, but by building bridges: across cases, disciplines, methods, and perspectives. We as guest editors – Michael Rose, Jens Newig, Sina Leipold – invite you to explore the issue, engage with its arguments, and join the conversation on what cumulative knowledge in environmental governance could and should look like.

This way to the Special Issue page: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)1756-9338.knowledge-cumulation-environmental.

Introducing ParticipationCaseScout – a tool to explore 305 coded cases of public environmental governance

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By Jens Newig and Michael Rose

We are proud and happy to announce the launch of ParticipationCaseScout: a new web-based tool to explore and analyse a database of public environmental decision processes, with a focus on participatory and collaborative governance in Western democratic states (project ‘EDGE’).

With the goal of integrating and cumulating fragmented case-based knowledge, ‘EDGE’ has produced a database of 305 coded cases of public environmental governance, mainly to test the relationship between different forms of participatory and collaborative decision-making and environmental outcomes (for results, see e.g. Jager et al. 2020 and Newig et al. 2019). Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), ‘EDGE’ was led by Jens Newig, with Ed Challies, Nicolas Jager and Elisa Kochskämper as collaborators. The map below shows all locations of ‘EDGE’ cases.

To facilitate knowledge transfer, we developed the idea for ParticipationCaseScout in two undergraduate research seminars at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2019 and 2020. When students were conducting expert interviews, they learned that professionals in public administration and consulting would appreciate a web-based tool that allows them to browse case studies in settings similar to their own work.

After two years of work, ParticipationCaseScout (available in English and German) not only serves to browse, explore and compare existing case studies (with many options for searching and filtering). It also allows to calculate governance-related ‘success’ factors for achieving desired environmental or social outcomes via specifically tailored regression analyses.

We are grateful to our many collaborators: our student assistants, Marlene Rimmert, Anita Vollmer, Inga Melchior and Lana Wesemann; the participants of the two undergraduate seminars; the many experts in public administration and consulting who commented on earlier versions of ParticipationCaseScout and to Mathias Jesussek from DataTab for technical implementation of the interactive tool.

We hope that ParticipationCaseScout will inspire practitioners in the evidence-informed design of participatory decision-making processes, and provide researchers an easy access to a cumulative knowledge base for further comparative inquiry – qualitative and quantitative.