Policy makers are dependent upon scientific knowledge. However, scientific results cannot be applied straightforwardly in practical decision making. We deploy Kant's term “power of judgment” – the human capacity to apply general insights to specific, contingent situations – to show that...

Land is an essential yet limited natural resource. Its current unsustainable use highlights the need for sustainability policies. In order to explore potential policy strategies, we use the concepts of stocks and durable institutions as tools for analysing temporal structures in nature and...

The opportunity costs of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) accruing to different stakeholders in Indonesia, including companies and the national, provincial and district level governments, are estimated, with particular emphasis on the influence of alternative...

Is conceptual vagueness an asset or a liability? By weighing arguments from philosophy of science and applying them to the concept of resilience, I address this question. I first sketch the wide spectrum of resilience concepts that ranges from concise concepts to the vague perspective of...

In this paper, I use the resilience framework to interpret the project of transforming the German energy system into a renewable energy sources (RES)-based system, the so-called Energiewende, as a regime shift. This regime shift comprises several transformations, which are currently altering the...