The EfD Annual Meeting 2010 in Ethiopia, October 28-31, started with one day at UN Economic Commission for Africa focusing on how to make the most use of environmental economics research for development. Three days of research presentations and discussions followed together with key note speeches and a lecture on a multi-disciplinary approach to analyze Social Ecological Systems, designed by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom and applicable for EfD´s planned thematic research collaboration.
”Our objectives of the Policy Day was to disseminate selected work of EfD’s research and its potential contributions to a key policy institution, UNECA, and other key stakeholders present at the meeting. We also wanted to share information across EfD centers on successful research-policy interactions, as well as increase our learning on how to translate research to policy more in general”, says EfD Director Gunnar Köhlin.
The Policy Day was hosted by UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) together with the Ethiopian EfD Center (Environmental Economics Policy Forum for Ethiopia which is hosted by the Ethiopian Development Research Institute).
Among the speakers were Desalegn Mesfin, Deputy Director General, Federal Environmental Protection Authority of Ethiopia, who opened the meeting. Anders Ekbom, EfD Research Fellow and policy analyst at the University of Gothenburg, spoke about research-policy interactions: models, approaches and lessons learned. Chantal Line Carpentier, Sustainable Development Officer, Division for Sustainable Development United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, spoke about needs and opportunities to strengthen policy-research links on the economics of environment and climate change – perspectives from UNDESA.
Successful cases of EfD research-policy interactions were presented by Menale Kassie, former EfD Research Officer and now working for CIMMYT in Kenya, and by the EfD coordinators Jintao Xu, Professor at Peking University, and Francisco Alpizar, CATIE, Costa Rica. Please see all Policy Day speakers in the full program below.
Alemu Mekonnen EfD Coordinator in Ethiopia and host of the Annual Meeting 2010.
The following three days of the EfD annual meeting were hosted by Alemu Mekonnen, EfD Research fellow and Coordinator of EfD Ethiopia, and held at Kuriftu Resort in Debrezeit. Most of the time was devoted to presentations and discussions on ongoing and planned EfD research.
One of the key note speakers was Roger Sedjo, RFF Senior Fellow and Director of RFF's Forest Economics and Policy. Sedjo spoke on the role forests can play in carbon capture: principles, costs and policies. The other key note speaker was World Bank Lead Economist Klaus Deininger, who spoke on large scale land acquisitions.
EfD Research Fellow Roger Madrigal from Costa Rica gave a lecture on the Social Ecological System Ontological framework, designed by professor Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons. Roger Madrigal made a long research visit to professor Ostrom at Indiana University before she received the prize, in order to develop the design of his research project on drinking water management.
EfD Research Fellow Roger Madrigal
"The ontological framework is a conceptual map for analyzing the interactions between humans and ecosystems. It builds on the last decades of findings in the literature of common-pool resources and collective action towards the management of natural resources", says Madrigal:
"This framework might help to conduct systematic diagnosis of the structure of the interactions between humans and ecosystems analyzed by EfD´s scholars in different parts of the world."
