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Day 3: Challenges to Progress • Theme: Governing Across Scales

Mountains as Arenas for Adaptation to Global Change

Dr Thomas SCHAAF, UNESCO, France; Dr Greg GREENWOOD, Mountain Research Initiative, Switzerland; Dr Martin PRICE, University of Islands and Highlands, United Kingdom; Dr Stephan RIST, University of Bern, Switzerland; Prof. Bob NAKILEZA, Makerere University, Uganda

Session content:
Mountains are arenas for adaptation to global change. Mountain regions, particularly in tropical regions where they are prime human habitat, are increasingly threatened by climate change, demographic pressure, and economic development that in many cases lead to resource depletion and degradation, hindering the provision of critical goods and services to both mountain inhabitants and lowland communities. Mountains are at the same time social and political arenas with a wide range of management arrangements, including private property, traditional common property regions, national scale parks and reserves, and international treaties, all embedded within a rapidly changing global economic context that can create tensions between local mountain residents and distant users of mountain resources.

This session explores the origins and dynamics of these institutional arrangements, the tensions that they can create, and various solutions that strive toward sustainability not only ecologically and economically but socially and politically as well. The session will include examples from, among others, Biosphere Reserves, common property and community governance regimes that attempt to reconcile collective and individual interests, and from multi-nation conventions that aim explicitly at sustainable development. The sessions will focus on an explicit delineation of challenges and a critical review of institutional performance.