Dear ESP Colleagues,
Our thematic working group No 18 on governance and institutional aspects looks back on more than a decade of dedicated activities to strengthen a socio-political focus on ecosystem services provision and coordination. As a core of our activities, we regularly organise thematic sessions at ESP Europe and ESP World conferences, have successfully edited three special issues on governance of ecosystem services in the journal Ecosystem Services, and working group members engaged in various joint projects.
However, by now the working group faces the challenges of lacking active and engaged members and fresh ideas. Therefore, we believe it is a good moment to put our heads together and to reflect on past activities, the goals and objectives of our TWG18 and revise and adjust them to recent developments and future needs.
Therefore, we would like to invite you to join us in a strategic reflection and brainstorming workshop about the envisioned future TWG18 activities and impacts on November 13-14 in Brussels, Belgium.
In the workshop, we plan to:
- Revisit our objectives, i.e. do a retrospective, reality-check and adjust them to future requirements;
- Elaborate how we can increase our visibility and impact within the ESP community and beyond;
- Brainstorm on how to strengthen joint research collaboration (e.g. publications, network building, project proposals, etc.), and
- Discuss if, how and where to gain impact on decision-making.
The workshop will start on Monday, 13.11 around midday with a look back on the founding ideas and the achieved outcomes before we enter a forward-looking debate on our working group’s future goals, activities and impacts for the rest of the workshop. In between, we thought about some nice Belgium food and drinks ;-).
You can download the detailed agenda here.
If you are interested to join, reflect and discuss with us, please send an email to: [email protected] by September 15th the latest.
All the best,
Lasse, Carsten, Dieter and Michael