Introduction

Peatland management is not just about economic gains or losses as effective functioning peatlands have great attention for the positive impact on climate issues. The governance of Peatlands is a complex playing field; with policies and regulation at all governance levels, with diverse configurations of stakeholders and opposing ambitions for peatland exploitation in the short and long-term. In times of increasing Climate Change impacts peatland restoration and reducing greenhouse gas emissions figure high on the agenda.

The aim of this course is to introduce the governance of peatlands from a system perspective as a basis for analysing the governance arena.

As peatlands and their management have a huge variety of interconnections and dependencies in many different sectors, policy making has at times created a conflict of objectives, which may explain the mixed results in regulatory effectiveness. Going forward, policy coherence is key to identifying conflicting objectives, regulatory gaps, oversights and the missed opportunities which can be tapped into without high economic or political cost.

Prof. Dr. Els Smits

Prof. Dr. Andreas Jelinkova