9 pages, The University of Nebraska–Lincoln Testing Agricultural Performance Solutions (TAPS) program involves use of farm management competitions to increase engagement across producers, industry, and universities. Participants make several management decisions throughout the growing season in a controlled field trial held at the university research station. Results are analyzed, and awards are presented for most profitable farm, most efficient farm, and farm with the greatest grain yield. The TAPS program involves several techniques for facilitating participatory assistance, including two-way communication and transformational learning. It has resulted in participants' questioning their past management decisions and realizing that they need to improve their marketing skills to improve profitability.
19 pages., Via online journal., This project’s primary purpose was to identify and describe the leadership styles and skills emphases of current Kansas agricultural organization chief executive officers. Twenty-three current CEOs participated and were described in terms of their leadership styles, leadership-skills emphases, and demographics. Overall, they appeared to be rather “middle of the road” on each of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire’s nine leadership scales. Leadership styles were not significantly affected by demographics, with the exception of formal leadership training affecting transactional leadership and education level, organizational category, and staff size affecting passive-avoidant leadership. Participants generally rated the 50 leadership skills as important. Leadership styles did not significantly affect the skill emphases. In evaluating CEO candidates, an agricultural organization should design its process to gauge leadership styles and skills separately because, according to this project, they do not predict each other. Once a new CEO is hired, a formal leadership-training program should emphasize the transformational style over the transactional and, more so, passive-avoidant while still maintaining an appropriate balance between transformational and transactional.
7 pages., Via online journal., Recent GHG emissions trends are in stark contrast with the Paris Agreement’s target to hold the increase in average global warming to “well below 2 °C and pursue efforts to stay below 1,5 °C” by the end of the century compared with preindustrial times. This disconnect has further unveiled the limitations of current knowledge production and communication processes in Southern European countries, where fast institutional changes are needed to address the potential impacts as well as the opportunities for transformation derived from High-End Climate Change (HECC). The prevailing knowledge deficit-model – aimed at producing ‘more knowledge’ about climate impacts, vulnerabilities and long-term scenarios to decision makers – has long proven inadequate in tackling the many complexities of the present socio-climate quandary. The growing emphasis on assessing and implementing concrete solutions, demand new and more complex forms of agent interactions in the production, framing, communication and use of climate knowledge; and in particular, explicit procedures able to tackle difficult normative questions regarding assessment of solutions and the allocation of individual and collective responsibilities. To explore these challenges, we analyse the views of 30 Spanish knowledge contributors and users of the latest UN IPCC AR5 report and share the insights gained from the implementation of a participatory Integrated Assessment procedure aimed at developing innovative solutions to high-end climate scenarios in Iberia. Our analysis supports the view of the need to institutionalise transformation, and in particular underlines the potential role that transformative climate boundary organisations could play to address such difficult ethical choices in different contexts of action.
