Conference Agenda

As countries like Ghana disproportionately struggle with climate change, the IPCC recommends sustainable agricultural policy to transform systems, fostering resilience and empowerment for vulnerable populations. Debates regarding agricultural adaptation are polarized with some emphasizing technology and innovation, and others agroecology. One component of adaptive agriculture is seed governance, which includes drought and pest-resistant, short-duration, and high-yielding crop varieties. After over a decade of legal battles and public debates about seed governance, genetically modified (GM) seeds were approved in Ghana for the first time. This paper uses qualitative and discursive analysis to explain the ongoing policy debates surrounding GM seeds in Ghana that focus less on the transformative potential of technology itself and more on changes made to the institutional, social-economic and epistemic arrangements governing them. Our case demonstrates that governance changes permitting GM seed have been more reformist and incremental, but with radical land use transformations, shifting agrarian life from subsistence towards more commerce. We argue that this incremental transition with transformative outcomes is possible under plural governance arrangements that permit contestation across diverse perspectives, mediated by the state. Civil society claims that both neoliberalism and top-down governance processes that GM seed requires cannot consider diverse forms of justice.

Sustainability reporting represents one of the measures of organizational performance in implementing sustainable development goals. Moreover, sustainability reporting offers organizations possibility to evidence their environmentally friendly and sustainable activities to various stakeholders, including their customers and users, which increasingly prefer and value organizations having sustainability approaches to reduce the environmental impacts (Agama and Zubairu, 2022). Since sustainability reporting offers important information for strategic management and accelerates the transparency and accountability for stakeholders, it would be even easier for their decision making when such reporting is harmonized (Jeriji et al., 2022; Job and Khanna, 2024; Korca et al., 2023; Luque-Vílchez et al., 2023). Besides, sustainability reporting interconnects with integrated reporting, provideing a comprehensive overview of organizational performance, including its financial and non-financial information, it shows how these aspects are interconnected and contribute to the organization’s long-term success and sustainability (Girella, Zambon and Rossi, 2022; Montecalvo, Farneti and de Villiers, 2018). Taking this into consideration, the European Directive 2022/2464/EU (the so-called CSRD directive) was adopted in 2023, with the purpose to disclose information about sustainability risks and opportunities of organizations more transparently, thus trying to ensure comparability, reliability and accessibility of reporting information for stakeholders. The paper in progress at hand focuses on analysing sustainability reporting in waste management industry, specifically its integration and comprehensiveness, thus including the environmental, social and governance dimensions of reporting. The main research questions are related to identifying the extent of integrated reporting in waste management industry; whether the existing sustainability reporting is already compliant with new EU directive; and how is sustainability reporting related to strategic goals of service providers. The research population includes all 65 waste management providers in Slovenia, where public utilities in this domain are managed locally, and the most common form of service provision is through public enterprise. Furthermore, this industry exhibits important sustainability concerns. Preliminary scrutinization of reporting has revealed that most analysed organizations report on sustainability in their annual reports, but only marginally and with utilization of several different “derivatives” of the word sustainability. Still, one fifth of the analysed organizations are not providing sustainability reporting at all. Comprehensive reporting is still missing, as only a few organizations are providing it. Furthermore, most organizations in the waste management industry are focusing on the environmental dimension of sustainability in their reporting. Social dimension of sustainability can be found in roughly one third of reports, whereas only six organizations in the population report also on the governance dimensions of sustainability. Interestingly, for only five organisations the evidence on the integration of sustainability concerns to organisational policies, development challenges and/or strategic goals. Thus, integrated and comprehensive sustainability reporting is still absent in the waste management industry in Slovenia, which can be partly attributed also to the fact that referenced EU directive offers lag for small organizations to follow it. We can argue that sustainability reporting is still regulatory driven rather than incentivized by the management of organizations.

As the resilience of the Earth system keeps declining in the face of an accelerating global environmental crisis, environmental management is emerging as an increasingly critical concern. However, the reductionist approach that still dominates environmental management in practice proves itself ill-suited to the systemic complexity of contemporary ecological challenges and insufficiently effective in light of sustainability imperatives. In response to these limitations, a systemic approach to environmental management began to emerge as early as the 1920s and gradually materialised, from the 1980s onwards, in the form of ecosystem-based management (EBM), grounded in integrated, adaptive, and sustainability-oriented principles. Although widely recognised within the scientific community as the most relevant mode of environmental management for addressing complex ecological issues, EBM continues to struggle to gain a foothold in current management practices. This persistent gap between scientific recognition and practical implementation of EBM reveals the existence of deep-rooted obstacles, foremost among which are institutional constraints falling within the broader domain of governance. These institutional challenges to EBM take the form of atomisation and inertia, rooted in institutional specialisation and path dependency.

In this context, cross-border cooperation (CBC) appears both as a strategic necessity and a critical opportunity to overcome the barriers hindering the operationalisation of EBM. On the one hand, CBC is necessary due to the transboundary nature and shared jurisdictional governance of many ecosystems, as well as the ecological dynamics whose effects transcend national borders—thus calling for cross-border governance arrangements. On the other hand, CBC is critical because of the polycentric processes of creating knowledge, dynamics, and practices that characterise it. These processes carry a disruptive potential capable of counteracting the atomisation and inertia stemming from institutional specialisation and path dependency, thereby fostering an effective implementation of EBM.

The objective of this research is, in this respect, to describe and explain how cross-border cooperation contributes to addressing the institutional challenges arising from the operationalisation of ecosystem-based management. To this end, it mobilises a theoretical and conceptual framework that articulates systems thinking, ecosystem-based management, and cross-border cooperation; along with a qualitative methodology based on a comparative case study of two cross-border cooperation projects designed to implement ecosystem-based management: the MED4EBM and MAREA projects, deployed respectively in the Mediterranean and Baltic regions. The results of this research highlight the mechanisms through which cross-border cooperation supports the operationalisation of ecosystem-based management, as well as the conditions likely to influence the effectiveness of these mechanisms.