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This article has a focus on the changing patterns of connected urban spaces forming large super-regional aggregates made up of cities of various sizes and regional functions as well as the interconnecting space of much smaller municipalities of agricultural or forestry types of character. The multi-scalar level analysis of these connected clusters is pursued from the level of the individual to the regional, national, Nordic and EU levels. The enfolding of the regional pattern also has global connotations in terms of trade connections, but also in the context of bio-geo challenges as climate change, biodiversity depletion or food security considerations. The transition dynamics involves governance, economic, social and cultural aspects. International negotiations, as the Paris agreement on climate change and agreements at the UN level as the 17 "Sustainable Development Goals" (SDG), or agreements at the EU level, provide an international political frame to this process.

This book focuses on opportunities and challenges in implementing a bioeconomy strategy from a research and education perspective. It draws on contributions presented during the 30th EURAGRI annual conference held in Tartu (Estonia) in September 2016, as well as on other workshops organised as part of EURAGRI. EURAGRI is an informal gathering of EU research and higher education organisations and ministries interested in agri-food research. It works as a platform of exchange and discussion on topics of common interest pertaining to the organisation, orientation and outlook of agri-food research in Europe in connection with global changes.

"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens' input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools.
This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University.
Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts.
They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications.
As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences. "