Page 37 - Governing Congo Basin Forests in a Changing Climate • Olufunso Somorin

General Introduction and Research Setting
actors (roles, diversities and capacity) and existing or new institutions (rules,
values and norms) in achieving adaptation and mitigation outcomes. In order 1 to operationalize the central objective of the thesis, the following research
questions were formulated:
1. What are the dominant frames and discourses on adaptation and mitigation strategies in the Congo Basin, and what implications do these discourses have for policy design?
2. How are adaptation strategies defined and designed, and what institutional arrangements exist or are being designed by policy actors to shape adaptation outcomes?
3. How are mitigation strategies defined and designed, and what institutional arrangements exist or are being designed by policy actors towards positive mitigation outcomes?
4. How do adaptation and mitigation strategies interact? What institutional arrangements or policy frameworks are policy actors developing towards maximizing the synergies?
Except for question 2, where two papers have been produced to look at adaptation strategies at the national level and another at the local level, each question is addressed individually by a separate chapter in this thesis. As peer- reviewed research papers, these chapters are further structured into sub- questions in order to further operationalize the main questions as well as make them more relevant to empirical realities.
1.3 Theoretical Background
1.3.1 The concepts of governance and new institutionalism
This thesis adopts a theoretical approach on governance to understand the policy processes of adaptation and mitigation strategies in the Congo Basin. Over the last three decades, the concept of governance has become a popular
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