KoOpRegioN – Regional options of cooperation for sustainable land use in the Northern Black Forest

The joint research project wants to explore, how urban and rural municipalities can benefit from cooperation and from more sustainable land use. It aims at jointly developing strategies on the regional level, which combine the following dimensions: land use, sustainability and inter-municipal cooperation. ZIRIUS is coordinating the sub-project ‘conflicts and policy mixes’.

Northern Black Forest region is very heterogeneous regarding the economic development and regarding environmental degradation in different municipalities. High settlement pressure along the Federal highways contrasts with emigration from those parts, which are less well connected through infrastructure. In parts of the region, there are conflicts between municipalities. This is the starting point of the project KoOpRegioN.

The joint research project wants to show, how urban and rural municipalities can benefit from cooperation and from improving a sustainable land use. It aims at jointly developing strategies on the regional level, that combine the following levels of action: land use, sustainability and inter-municipal cooperation (IMC). Therefore, it will develop options of action by analyzing actors and conflicts, exploring barriers and needs, developing sustainability indicator-sets, and applying participatory approaches, e.g.

Results will be condensed into a guideline containing, e. g. relevant policy mixes, recommendations regarding project methodology, sustainability indicator-sets as well as decision support tools. These results should enable decision makers to compare options for inter-municipal cooperation and their linked sustainability effects and to translate these into joint strategies. The research project is planned to be followed by an applied pilot project (year 4 and 5).

In work package 1, ZIRIUS carries out an actor and conflict analysis. This serves to identify and characterize those stakeholders and affected actors in the region, who should be involved in the further course of the project. At this aim, established actor typologies and mapping approaches are used and adapted. With the help of stakeholder interviews, we analyze past and present experiences with successful and failed inter-municipal cooperation (IMC), specific conflict lines as well as barriers of ICM for sustainable land management.

In work package 5, ZIRIUS will combine instruments and measures, identified by project partners (which address the three levels of action sustainability, land use and inter-municipal cooperation) into policy mixes. Often, individual policy tools influence each other (interrelations). Designing policy mixes aims at minimizing conflicting interrelations and at fostering synergies to support inter-municipal cooperation and sustainable land use.

In work package 6, ZIRIUS supports the development of alternative future scenarios of inter-municipal cooperation. ZIRIUS uses its method expertise regarding scenario analysis to design a tailored scenario process jointly with the Regional Association Northern Black Forest (Regionalverband Nordschwarzwald), the coordinator of KoOpRegioN, and with other actors in the region.