Assist. Prof. Dr. Nicolas W. Jager 

As many of today’s urgent sustainability challenges cut across territorial boundaries, traditional governance responses often lead to piecemeal solutions neglecting the environmental integrity of ecosystems. This problem of ‘social-ecological fit’, while well-acknowledged in international and inter-localsettings, could gain less attention in the context of federal systems (e.g. Germany, USA, Brazil), where authority over environmental resources is split within countries between several substates. Hence, this workshop will address the question: How can we assess social-ecological fit within federal systems and its potential to meet the pressing regional environmental challenges? To approach this question this workshop will serve as a forum to bring together experts on various aspects of federalism and intergovernmental cooperation, with those from the field of social-ecological fit and social-ecological networks. Social-ecological network approaches provide a promising avenue for the study of socialecological systems as they merge in the same scientific model biophysical dynamics within and between ecosystems, with the social and institutional dynamics set out to address these. Providing space for a dialogue between the two fields of federalism and social-ecological fit will stimulate cross-fertilization of ideas in order to come up.