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Social-ecological dynamics, ecosystem services uses, and governance of green and blue infrastructure in urbanizing environments

(FOR2432/2 – Project C03) – DFG Research Group 2432/2

Funding

The FOR2432/2 is financed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgeminschaft - DFG)

Project time period

April 2019 - January 2023

Summary

The FOR2432/2 – C03 project aims at providing socio-ecological knowledge of the dynamics, values, development opportunities and governance of green infrastructure along the area of rural-urban transformation in the Metropolitan region of Bangalore.
The Section will coordinate the work packages examining changes in the governance of green infrastructure across levels in the metropolitan region of Bangalore. This will be analyzed based on the data of main drivers of institutional change and governance; the actors and their implications for changing the governance of green infrastructure especially in areas of rural-urban transformation. The Section will develop a social-ecological framework that sets social and environmental characteristics in relation to the governance and management of urbanized green infrastructure. The project will answer the overall hypothesis ‘conflicts between provisioning, supporting, regulating and cultural ecosystem services increase with urbanization’ by studying tradeoffs between provisioning, supporting, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services at different rural and urban situations and by studying conflicts in the demand for ecosystem services among different actors. The project will help in understanding and developing theory on changes of governance in rapidly transforming social-ecological systems with a particular focus on large-scale, interconnected water related green infrastructure and aid in advancing social-ecological systems frameworks for understanding the role of green infrastructure in urbanizing environments.
The project (C03) is a collaboration between the Section of International Agricultural Policy and Environmental Governance and the Department of Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems of the University of Kassel and George-August-University Goettingen (Germany); ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies of James Cook University (Australia); in cooperation with Azim Premji University (APU), Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) and University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore (UASB) (India). The project builds on the work undertaken in the Graduate Program for Bangalore Dynamics (GP-BangaDyn) (2017-2020) and FOR2432 – Phase 1 (2016-2019).