Participatory conservation is widely endorsed as policy, yet the deliberative platforms through which it is enacted are seldom examined as research objects. This article studies a three-phase international symposium convened in Namibia in November 2025 by the University of Namibia under the INSAKA Consortium. It asks what such a platform reveals about the conditions under which participation in conservation becomes substantive rather than procedural. The study uses a single embedded case design in which the symposium functioned as both an authentic practice and a research site. Data comprised thematic presentations delivered across the three phases, rapporteur records of plenary and panel discussions and a moderated community panel at the ≠Gaingu Conservancy. Participant observation at all three locations and a closing reflective session completed the corpus, which was analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Five themes were constructed. Knowledge moved through iterative dialogue rather than one-directional transfer. Community participants articulated place-based ecological knowledge that reframed the questions posed to them. Adaptation practices reported by conservancy members operated across land-use boundaries, supporting planning at the landscape rather than unit scale. Existing compensation instruments marked the limits of procedural participation. Informal relational settings generated the event's most concrete institutional commitments. Cutting across these themes, the itinerant design made visible an asymmetry between Namibia's mature terrestrial participation architecture and its comparatively closed marine governance arena. The article contributes empirical evidence on how convening design shapes participatory outcomes. It argues that transferring the conservancy model to the coast is first a legislative question and only then a participatory one.
Human–Wildlife Conflict (HWC) remains a critical environmental and socio-economic challenge, undermining conservation objectives and rural livelihoods, particularly in communities situated adjacent to protected areas. In Namibia, recurrent livestock predation has contributed to the decline of large predator populations, as affected farmers often resort to retaliatory killings. This study investigates how farmers' attitudes toward wildlife managers shape patterns of HWC within the Sheya shUushona Conservancy. Drawing on a qualitative research design, the study employed in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and secondary data sources to capture the nuanced social dynamics influencing conflict management. The main participants in the study were farmers. HWC event books at the conservancy office were used to purposively identify and select farmers who had reported HWC incidents in the preceding five years at the time of data collection. Participants were selected from different HWC hotspot areas across the conservancy. A total of 65 participants took part in the study. Thematic data analysis was used to analyse the collected data. Findings reveal that the relationship between farmers and wildlife managers is characterized by significant distrust driven by key factors including slow response times by wildlife managers to conflict incidents, dissatisfaction with the offset-payment compensation scheme, a perceived lack of tangible benefits from wildlife, the deteriorating condition of boundaries with the national park, and the expansion of human settlements into conservation areas. These localized institutional and social drivers exacerbate tensions and undermine collaborative conservation efforts. The study underscores the importance of localized context and trust in governance approaches to effectively mitigate HWC at the nexus of communities and protected areas.
IntroductionThe Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA, Regulation EU 2024/1252) has elevated mineral extraction within European governance, creating tensions between supranational supply-security objectives and domestic political, territorial, and environmental interests. This article examines the political conditions under which EU governments implement, resist, or selectively reframe CRMA mandates.MethodsThe study employs a structured focused comparison of Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Sweden, combined with process-tracing logic and explicit causal process observations. Documentary evidence is selected, coded, and triangulated to evaluate coalition dependency, populist strategic ambiguity, and civil-society escalation, distinguishing descriptive associations from causal support.ResultsCoalition dependency receives partial support and is reformulated by the Spanish case from an expected hard veto to soft political ambivalence or constrained endorsement. Populist strategic ambiguity receives mixed support because differentiated positions across institutional levels do not independently establish strategic intent or electoral motivation. Civil-society escalation is observed most clearly in Portugal at the stage of EU-level legal escalation, while subsequent regulatory feedback remains unobserved. The comparison also identifies an extraction-transition tension that cannot automatically be interpreted as an ideological contradiction. State ownership in Sweden emerges as a potentially relevant conditioning factor, rather than an established causal effect.DiscussionThe findings refine multi-level governance explanations by distinguishing hard vetoes from soft political constraints, differentiated positioning from demonstrated strategic ambiguity, and supranational escalation from regulatory feedback. Opposition to particular extraction projects may coexist coherently with support for renewable-energy transitions where credible alternative material-supply strategies or project-specific environmental and social concerns are articulated. Further comparative research is required to evaluate the mechanisms and the potential influence of ownership structures.
Despite extensive policy support and climate commitments, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) remains more expensive than conventional jet fuel. Hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) are currently the dominant commercial SAF pathway. This paper evaluates a narrower proposition: whether differences in lipid-feedstock quality create a biophysical mechanism that could contribute to persistent production-cost differences as HEFA deployment expands. The analysis is structural and comparative rather than a time-series or causal model of observed prices. Using a biophysical-economics framework, this study compares the external energy required to acquire, prepare, and convert used cooking oil (UCO), conventional crop oils, and purpose-grown oil crops. Under midpoint assumptions for external input and liquid-energy recovery, external-energy EROI is approximately 4.06:1 for UCO, 1.55:1 for conventional crop oils, and 1.82:1 for purpose-grown oil crops. The corresponding full-combination envelopes are 3.0–5.9, 0.99–3.2, and 1.3–3.2, respectively; these envelopes combine favorable or unfavorable parameter endpoints and are not probability distributions. The UCO baseline applies a cut-off attribution convention: no original agricultural-production burden is assigned after the oil has completed its first use, although collection, transport, pretreatment, hydrogen, and conversion energy are included. This convention is not a claim that UCO is physically burden-free. Reassigning 25%, 50%, and 100% of a representative 0.29 MJ/MJ original crop-oil burden lowers the UCO EROI to approximately 3.05, 2.44, and 1.74, respectively; adding 0.50 MJ/MJ lowers it to approximately 1.23. Thus, UCO's absolute advantage is allocation-sensitive, whereas the physical energy required for collection and HEFA conversion is unchanged. The results identify a step from low-attributed-burden waste lipids to an overlapping band of deliberately cultivated oils. Eliminating the modeled midpoint conversion-stage energy would offset only about 15.6% of the representative external-input difference between UCO and conventional crop oil. This static comparison supports a plausible offsetting mechanism between conversion learning and marginal-feedstock quality, but it does not locate a deployment level or date at which one effect overtakes the other. Tallow remains volumetrically important but energetically unresolved, and a numerical petroleum comparison is withheld pending a boundary-harmonized well-to-gate calculation.
Science-based integrated modelling has proven to be highly valuable for addressing complex sustainability challenges and is fundamental in policy analysis and development. The book Earth for All makes several policy recommendations to address the global sustainability predicaments of the World, promising a bright new world for everyone, living in harmony with each other, and with nature. These policy recommendations are claimed to be based on and supported by a system dynamics model. However, the model presented as the analytical basis for the Earth for All policy recommendations was constructed after the recommendations were made and not used in the policy development. Furthermore, a closer inspection of the model design reveals a lack of dynamic feedback between its components. The use of systems modelling software effectively conceals the fact that there is no real dynamic model inside the code, relying instead on ready-made curves to create an apparent dynamic behaviour. The use of predefined outputs, from what amounts to a numerical model with severe scientific flaws, gives a misleading appearance of ‘verifying’ the findings that attempts to lend credence to the policy advice given. Predefined normative outputs are used to substitute for what is meant to look like an analytic scientific process. The presented Earth for All book, its policy advice, and the development and use of the Earth4All model appear not to follow fundamental ethical principles and good practices in science and modelling, as well as transparent and analytically sound evidence-based policy advice. It would be inappropriate, and possibly hazardous, to base policy advice or policy at the EU, other regional, or global levels on an E4A model with serious scientific flaws that claims to support the body of work presented in the Earth for All book.
