Sustainability Science

This paper examines the contribution of resilience thinking for social-ecological systems (SESs) in understanding sustainability and the need to preserve natural resources in the face of external perturbations. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, the literature survey shows the increased importance of resilience and its integration into the interdisciplinary area of sustainability studies. By exploring the links between resilience and sustainability, the analysis finds that these two concepts share some similarities and also highlight the differences. The discussion of resilience indicators, measuring criteria, models and management issues reveals how resilience contributes to sustainability science and in what ways the concept can be used to measure resilience in terms of sustainability. Most existing studies emphasise the ecological aspects of resilience, but only by including human activities in the modelling can resilience thinking inform sustainability in a meaningful way. The paper concludes defining issues requiring further investigation, such as identifying and managing the drivers and key elements of resilience in SESs, exploring the dynamics between critical variables of SESs and the system feedbacks to external perturbations, as well as evaluating policies and engaging stakeholders for building resilience.

Water security is integral to worldwide human and economic development objectives. Yet despite many successes, global forecasts show that achievement of universal water security remains elusive. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, because it is universal and comprehensive, offers an opportunity to renew the discourse on water security. It is argued that achievement of all water-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and underlying targets is crucial to the success of the entire suite of SDGs pertaining to universal health, food security, gender equality, sustainable consumption, resilient urbanization, and conservation of marine resources and terrestrial ecosystems. A comprehensive approach requires broad engagement of stakeholders, including civil society organizations, governments, private businesses and industries, researchers and scientists. National governments and international development community must help create an enabling environment for all these stakeholders.

The Montney Play Trend (MPT) is a 1090 km2 region in northeast British Columbia that produces approximately one-third of western Canada’s natural gas output. In response to a proposed expansion of the MPT in 2016, the Government of British Columbia launched a Regional Strategic Environmental Assessment (RSEA) to identify the necessary conditions to achieve sustainable environmental outcomes. In this paper, we describe the methods and scenario planning tools that were developed to estimate how the development of the MPT might affect the subsistence economies of First Nations in the region. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, two impact assessments—Prince Rupert gas transmission pipeline and the Coastal GasLink pipeline—are presented. While no scenario can provide a definitive portrayal of exactly what will happen in the future, the tools that were co-developed are serving as an effective starting point for exploring possibilities that are at least consistent with current knowledge and can serve as a platform for collaborative learning and conflict management.

This paper examines the processes and factors that influence the production of a salient, credible and legitimate Cambodia’s National REDD+ Strategy (NRS). Findings are presented in two parts. First, it empirically reveals that while many working drafts were produced and consulted with more than 1,000 stakeholders from local to international level, finalization of the NRS is still pending as of December 2016. The second part then theoretically explains this empirical finding through concepts in sustainability science, in particular effective boundary work, defined as negotiation processes that happen at the interface between relevant scientists and policy-makers with different views of what constitute salient, credible and legitimate knowledge. This paper makes the central argument that while boundary work does contribute to stakeholders’ perceptions of the Cambodian NRS as salient, credible and legitimate, the effectiveness of this boundary work depends on the combined impacts of contexts and boundary agents. Although contexts for the NRS production are characterized by multiple sources and users of knowledge, this paper found that the former is less significant than the latter. It also found that in highly politicized contexts, boundary work is performed through boundary agents, instead of the formally established institutional arrangements. Boundary agents are defined by their abilities to facilitate communication, translation and mediation of the different political and personal interests that stakeholders bring into the policy process. This paper concludes that the process to develop a salient, credible and legitimate NRS is both a technical and political exercise.

This paper examines how education for sustainable development (ESD) can be concretely advanced using the theoretical approaches of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) and sustainable livelihoods (SL). Five case examples illustrate a diverse set of strategic educational interventions focusing on: (1) education of specific organizational actors about these theoretical frameworks illustrated with case examples (such as SCP training by the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies [UNU-IAS] and CSR-Asia of government and business representatives), (2) regional education strategies focused on production and consumption in specific sectors (such as the food sector in Skåne, Sweden), (3) social learning directed at innovation for sustainable development (such as competitions of solar boats developed by universities in the region of Friesland, the Netherlands), (4) education of consumers and firms made possible by the adoption of certification systems affirming SCP and SL (such as Cradle-to-Cradle certification of a paper company in the Netherlands or the establishment of Fair Trade cities in Sweden), or (5) reorienting communities to address underutilized productive physical capital within communities (such as the sharing productive capital project in rural areas of Saskatchewan, Canada). The cases are drawn from the projects that the UNU-IAS, four of its regional centers of expertise (RCE) on ESD and other affiliates have conducted. In addition to documenting the educational processes emerging from specific regions, the paper highlights findings related to the success of these projects and opportunities for further research, including regional and inter-regional approaches.

This article highlights the emergence of intentional communities known as ecovillages (ecoaldeas) in Mexico, exploring how humans seek to design sustainable futures in part by re-making rural livelihoods. Ecovillages are inherently speculative ventures, or as Burke and Arjona (2013) note, laboratories for alternative political ecologies, inviting—and indeed, necessitating—the reimagination of human lives with greater consideration for the natural world. In this sense, such communities might be understood as “exilic spaces” (O’Hearn and Grubačić 2016), in that they seek to build autonomous and self-sustaining agricultural, social, and economic systems while also reflecting a stance of resistance to neoliberal capitalist structures. At the same time, communities may also remain dependent on connections to broader regional or global markets in diverse and interconnected ways. Understanding ecovillages as diverse and emergent “worldings” (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018), I ask how these experimental social ventures reckon with their connections to the very systems they are positioned against. To trace out how communities negotiate this fragile space, this article is concerned with how ecovillagers spend their time at work—particularly when it comes to managing relationships with and between more-than-human beings. Drawing on participant observation with ecovillagers and more-than-human others they work with, I explore how the concept of “rentabilidad” (profitability) is differently constructed. To this end, I highlight ethnographic examples where rentabilidad is purposefully reconceptualized with more-than-human lives in mind; such a shift, I suggest, hinges on ecovillagers’ individualized relations with the beings they (imagine themselves) to care for.

Understanding complex problems such as climate change is difficult for most non‐scientists, with serious implications for decision making and policy support. Scientists generate complex computational models of climate systems to describe and understand those systems and to predict the future states of the systems. Non-scientists generate mental models of climate systems, perhaps with the same aims and perhaps with other aims too. Often, the predictions of computational models and of mental models do not correspond with important implications for human decision making, policy support, and behaviour change. Recent research has suggested non-scientists’ poor appreciation of the simple foundations of system dynamics is at the root of the lack of correspondence between computational and mental models. We report here a study that uses a simple computational model to ‘run’ mental models to assess whether a system will evolve according to our aspirations when considering policy choices. We provide novel evidence of a dual-process model: how we believe the system works today is a function of ideology and worldviews; how we believe the system will look in the future is related to other, more general, expectations about the future. The mismatch between these different aspects of cognition may prevent establishing a coherent link between a mental model’s assumptions and consequences, between the present and the future, thus potentially limiting decision making, policy support, and other behaviour changes.

In this comment, we respond to the claim of (Bodin, Sustain Sci 16: 2151–2155, 2021) that sustainability science, as a research community, has begun to “lean to the left” in a problematic manner. On one hand, we remain unconvinced by the examples cited as indications for this tendency, and argue for caution in making such judgements. On the other hand, we hold that that there may be reasons for seemingly “left leaning” positions which are scientific rather than purely political or ideological. Finally, we urge sustainability scientists to take heed of social theorists’ insights regarding the pitfalls of common sense analysis. This can better enable open and reflexive debate on the field’s development as well as the challenges it seeks to address.