Urgent and concerted action can stop and reverse unsustainable land use and the over-exploitation of land resources.This will, however, require rapid, simultaneous, and coordinated action by a diversity of land use decision-makers. MOSAIC aims therefore to achieve the following objectives:
1. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the motivations and drivers behind land use decisions (e.g. cultural factors, social identities, cognitive frameworks, market prices, legal frameworks, etc.), including their relative importance and interactions, within and between relevant governance levels, ranging from individual land managers to supra-national organisations.
2. To gain a thorough understanding of the awareness of key land use decision makers about climate change, biodiversity loss, and renewable energy challenges, and their willingness to address these challenges.
3. To characterise future land use patterns based on spatial, social, and economic models that integrate key insights into the motivations and drivers behind land use related decisions and the result of these decisions in causing displacement effects, i.e. indirect land use changes in other parts of the world.
4. To support policy design and implementation for climate change, renewable energy and biodiversity, by means of innovative cost-effective instruments and approaches co-created in policy labs contributing to and elaborating on MOSAIC’s research results in a transdisciplinary way.
5. To develop an interactive digital learning environment, embedded within a digital toolbox comprising proven technologies and approaches consistent with long-term European sustainability goals and strategies to support land use decision processes at governance levels ranging from local to supra-national scales. Interdisciplinary SSH research linked to state-of-the-art land use modelling will be core to this project, and will be embedded in a transdisciplinary research approach based on policy labs.
Tasks:
ESSRG co-leads and supports the establishment of the policy labs (PLs). PLs follow a multi-actor approach, based on the quintuple helix model, and engage key private and public land-use decision makers (e.g. natural site managers, private landowners, rural businesses, landscape development agencies, and farmer organisations, and policymakers) in organised, structured dialogues. Based on literature review, an analysis of the experiences of previous EU projects, and a needs analysis within the MOSAIC consortium, the task leads will develop a guide and provide workshops for the set-up and design of PLs.
ESSRG leads the capacity building of knowledge brokers. The knowledge broker is responsible for facilitating knowledge exchange between the consortium and local practitioners and researchers involved in the policy innovation. We will train the knowledge brokers to set up and coordinate the knowledge exchange at case study level as well as link the case study to the overall project structure.
ESSRG co-leads the interregional learning on sustainable land use policies through policy labs. The PLs aim to contribute to policy innovations at different stages of the policy cycle, e.g. agenda setting, policy design, implementation, and evaluation. To cease cross-case learning opportunities and support the upscaling of lessons learned on sustainable land use policies, a process of joint self-reflection will be established and facilitated throughout the MOSAIC PL process.
ESSRG co-leads the designing process of qualitative research methods for identifying structural and motivational drivers behind land-use change. This task aims to gain an in-depth understanding on (personal, environmental, economic, political) drivers that motivate or hamper stakeholders to implement sustainable land-use changes.
The project (number: 101081238) receives funding from the EU HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions, between 1 September 2023 and 29 February 2028.