About the project

Navigating the policy landscape: barriers and synergies in climate and biodiversity policies.

There is no shortage of public policies aimed at promoting sustainable development in general and climate and biodiversity objectives in particular. On the contrary, there are plenty of strategies for sustainable societal transformation that span the local, national and global levels. Despite this, important environmental objectives are currently not yet achieved, as current climate and biodiversity strategies face a number of barriers to effective implementation and target achievement, such as a poor match between overall objectives and concrete instruments, implementation failures, conflicts between different environmental strategies, with strategies in other policy areas, or with the agendas and actions of different societal actors. Together, these barriers are important root causes of failure to meet targets and poor performance.

The aim of the NAVIGATE programme is to advance, through a multidisciplinary and co-learning approach, our knowledge of these existing, but far from explicitly recognized, barriers and provide recommendations on how contemporary and future climate and biodiversity strategies can be improved in order to avoid controversies and conflicts of objectives and instead increase synergies between them. To achieve this, the program draws on expertise from a range of social science disciplines, uses a diverse set of methodologies, and consistently interacts closely with relevant stakeholders at local, regional, national and global levels.

NAVIGATE will provide officials working to translate national and international strategies into policy practice and concrete actions with guidance on how climate and biodiversity objectives can be reconciled in policy decisions and effectively achieved, and what institutional, policy and organizational changes are needed to overcome current implementation barriers.

The program is led by Luleå University of Technology, in collaboration with researchers from the Uppsala University, The Swedish Institute for International Affairs, and University of Gothenburg. The programme is funded by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Research Fund, in collaboration with the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management.

• Read more about the program on the The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency External link, opens in new window.