Track 2: Regional Sustainable Development
Coordinators: Guy Engelen - Yves De Weerdt - Jean-Luc De Kok
General introduction
The complexity of decision-making and planning for regional development increasingly grows with time. This observation is not new, nor is the set of factors causing this trend: increasing number, strength and importance of interactions in human societies among the various socio-economic sectors and actors as well as between the socio-economic and natural sub-systems and the resources that the latter provides. Decision-making therefore becomes a formidable task, outgrowing the capacity of the individual decision makers. Moreover, state of the art planning and decision-making entails the involvement of stakeholders which enriches but also complicates the management of the process.
For many years attempts have been made to support decision-makers and planners with advanced tools, not in the least thematic models. The successful application of the latter to guarantee the sustainable development of regions has been hampered because of their incapacity to represent the integrated nature of the task.
Systems models and more specifically systems dynamics models were introduced nearly half a century ago to better represent the multi-facetted, holistic nature of regional development and planning problems. Despite their inherently promising characteristics, they have so far not been used extensively for decision-making and regional planning. Often they have been criticized for their lack of detail and their high level of abstraction in dealing with well-known parts of the system. Yet and at the same time it is precisely this characteristic which enables them to be used for explorative exercises aimed at discovering bifurcation points and assessing alternative development paths.
In this session the question is raised whether and how systems dynamics models, representing the socio-economic-natural system in an integrated manner, can be made more useful in practical planning and decision-making for regional development. What is or could be their role in the envisioning step of transition management processes, hence, in involving stakeholders and decision makers alike in defining desirable future states of the system and the pathways to realizing these?
Contributions are welcomed that:
- Demonstrate good practical uses and applications of integrated systems models in support of integrated or cross-sectoral planning and decision making aimed at sustainable development in regions of various sizes and levels of complexity.
- Discuss or illustrate how models can serve participatory planning processes, in contexts of envisioning and backcasting.
- Discuss problems met with implementing and applying the type of models, both from a scientific-technical and practical-organizational perspective.
- Present modeling and software systems enabling the straightforward implementation of integrated systems models for planning and decision making as well as their user-friendly application in facilitating transition processes.
KEYNOTE LECTURES
- Marleen Van Steertegem - Flemish Environment Agency, Belgium
- Bert de Vries - University Utrecht, The Netherlands - Professor
- Domenico Rosetti di Valdalbero - European Commission – Principal Administrator
- Peter Allen – Cranfield University, United Kingdom - Professor Emeritus
ORAL PRESENTATIONS
- Joost Dessein - ILVO
- Christophe Debrabander - Bouw Francis Bostoen NV
- Julie Marin - KULeuven Department of Architecture
- Varsha Gupta, A K Khare - National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi, India
- Roger White - Memorial University of Newfoundland
- Vasco Diogo Department of Spatial Economics/SPINlab, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Mikaël Maes - ERM Environmental Resources Management
- Celia Maria Castro Barros - Ghent University, Belgium
TOPICS
- Demonstrate good practical uses and applications of integrated systems models in support of integrated or cross-sectoral planning and decision making aimed at sustainable development in regions of various sizes and levels of complexity.
- Discuss or illustrate how models can serve participatory planning processes, in contexts of envisioning and backcasting.
- Discuss problems met with implementing and applying the type of models, both from a scientific-technical and practical-organizational perspective.
- Present modeling and software systems enabling the straightforward implementation of integrated systems models for planning and decision making as well as their user-friendly application in facilitating transition processes.
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
- Bert de Vries - University Utrecht, The Netherlands
- Denis Bailly - Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France
- Peter Allen - Cranfield University, United Kingdom
- Alexey Voinov - ITC Enschede, The Netherlands
- Roger White - Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
- Bernhard Glaeser - Gesellschaft für Humanökologie, Germany - (to be confirmed)
- Russell Richards - Griffith Climate Change Resonse Program, Australia - (to be confirmed)
- Derk Loorbach - Dutch Research Institute For Transitions (DRIFT), The Netherlands
