Sustainability Science

The history of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples is not well developed in written form, but has been passed down in oral form based on memories from the collective consciousness. However, tracing the cultural roots of Indigenous peoples’ concepts of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and science is necessary to more deeply engage with Indigenous epistemologies. The main purpose of this narrative inquiry is to explore traditional concepts of the Indigenous Atayal aborigines of gaga (moral rules) and utux (faith) from a hunting culture, which has constructed their sustainability. This study was performed using qualitative social sciences. We listened to and collected stories by local tribes that live at elevations of 300–1300 m in northern Taiwan, and then conducted an analysis based on a joint construction of cultural meanings from rights-holders such as Atayal officers, tribe leaders, and local hunters. Using concepts from TEK, we determined how these concepts of gaga and utux became established in the lives of the Atayal people, and how Indigenous Atayal hunters have devoted their skills to maintaining the culture which sustains their resilient landscapes and ecosystems. Through the special cultural connotations of hunting knowledge and specifications, the hunting behavior of Taiwan’s Atayal can shape a harmonic balance with ecological systems, and facilitate learning about competition and rules of survival in the natural environment.

Achieving nature conservation goals require grappling with ‘wicked’ problems. These intractable problems arise from the complexity and dynamism of the social–ecological systems in which they are embedded. To enhance their ability to address these problems, conservation professionals are increasingly looking to the transdisciplines of systems thinking and evaluation, which provide philosophies, theories, methods, tools and approaches that show promise for addressing intractable problems in a variety of other sectors. These transdisciplines come together especially around praxis, i.e., the process by which a theory or idea is enacted, embodied or realized. We present a review and synthesis of the learnings about praxis that have emerged from The Silwood Group, a consortium of conservation professionals, professional evaluators, and complexity and systems thinkers. The Silwood Group believes that for conservation activities to achieve ambitious goals, we should benefit nature without compromising the well-being of people, and that framing a praxis for conservation in the context of social–ecological systems will provide the greatest potential for positive impact. The learnings are presented as four key principles of a ‘praxis for effective conservation’. The four principles are: (1) attend to the whole with humility; (2) engage constructively with the values, cultures, politics, and histories of stakeholders; (3) learn through evaluative, systemic enquiry, and (4) exercise wisdom in judgement and action. We also provide descriptions and references for tools and methods to support such praxis and discuss how the thinking and approaches used by conservation professionals can be transformed to achieve greater effectiveness.

Blue Growth is promoted as an important strategy for future food security, and sustainable harvesting of marine resources. This paper aims to identify dominating ideologies and strategies of Blue Growth in the Faroe Islands, mainly regarding salmon farming and industrial capture fisheries, and to investigate how these ideologies materialize in the social metabolism of Faroese society. The analysis approaches the Faroese Blue Economy from a holistic perspective using analytical concepts and frameworks of social (island) metabolism, environmental justice and degrowth to assess how current Blue Growth strategies pertain to long-term sustainability and human well-being. It offers a critical analysis of aquaculture in the Faroe Islands and shows that although the rhetoric around Blue Growth is framed within mainstreamed sustainability discourse, the ideologies and visions underpinning current Blue Growth strategies result in a continuation of conventional growth through the exploitation of new commodity frontiers. Finally, the negative consequences of Blue Growth are assessed and discussed through a mapping of recent and ongoing social and ecological distribution conflicts in the Faroes.

This essay explores the potential of solidarity economy (SE) as theory, practice, and movement, to engender an ontological politics to create and sustain other worlds that can resolve the existential crises of ecological destruction and historic inequalities. We argue that such a politics is necessary to go beyond the world as it is and exceed the dictates of a dominant modernity—capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy—that positions itself as the only singular reality—or One World World (Law J (2011) What’s Wrong with a One World World. Heterogeneities. http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2011WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorld.pdf ). What is needed are alternatives to development in contrast to alternative developments. Over the past decade, the SE movement in Massachusetts has advanced a fight and build approach, which has reframed economy as a matter of concern, as something that communities can, and already do, shape themselves—and that powerfully disrupts the reality of a singular capitalist economy. At the same time, the heterogeneous elements of SE are caught up in and assembling political projects with multiple orientations: modernist, social justice, and ontological (Escobar, Pluriversal politics: the real and the possible, Duke University Press, Durham, 2020). SE movement can remain stuck in a modernist politics of growing and scaling businesses and jobs. Even though a social justice approach attends to power and is more amenable to a relational view of reality where things only exist in interconnection, it too can remain mired in One World World liberal politics of redistribution and market ‘solutions’. How SE movement might actualize an ontological politics is a matter of care, an attunement to how relational worlds are coming into being and maintained. As an ontological politics, SE is not about economy qua economy at all, but about creating and sustaining worlds, pluriversal realities where we can be in solidarity with other people, beings, and planetary life systems.

Given the rapid emergence of data science techniques in the sustainability sciences and the societal importance of many of these applications, there is an urgent need to prepare future scientists to be knowledgeable in both their chosen science domain and in data science. This article provides an overview of required competencies, educational programs and courses that are beginning to emerge, the challenges these pioneering programs face, and lessons learned by participating instructors, in the broader context of sustainability science competencies. In addition to data science competencies, competencies collaborating across disciplines are essential to enable sustainability scientists to work with data scientists. Programs and courses that target both sets of competencies—data science and interdisciplinary collaboration—will improve our workforce capacity to apply innovative new approaches to yield solutions to complex sustainability problems. Yet developing these competencies is difficult and most instructors are choosing instructional approaches through intuition or trial and error. Research is needed to develop effective pedagogies for these specific competencies.

In theory, building resilience is touted as one way to deal with climate change impacts; however, in practice, there is a need to examine how contexts influence the capacity of building resilience. A participatory process was carried out through workshops in regions affected by drought in Chile in 2014. The aim was to explore how resilience theory can be better applied and articulated into practice vis-á-vis participatory approaches that enrich the research process through the incorporation of co-produced. The results show that there are more differences in responses by type of actor than between regions, where issues of national interest, such as ‘education-information’ and ‘preparedness’, are highlighted over others. However, historically relevant local topics emerged as differentiators: decentralisation, and political will. This reinforces why special attention must be given to the different understandings in knowledge co-production processes. This study provides evidence and lessons on the importance of incorporating processes of the co-production of knowledge as a means to better articulate and transfer abstract concepts, such as resilience theory, into practice.

This paper investigates sustainability competences through the eyes of professional practitioners in the field of sustainability and presents empirical data that have been created using an action research approach. The design of the study consists of two workshops, in which professional practitioners in interaction with each other and the facilitators are invited to explore and reflect on the specific knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours necessary to conduct change processes successfully towards sustainability in a variety of business and professional contexts. The research focuses on the competences associated with these change processes to devise, propose and conduct appropriate interventions that address sustainability issues. Labelled ‘intervention competence’, this ability comprises an interlocking set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours that include: appreciating the importance of (trying to) reaching decisions or interventions; being able to learn from lived experience of practice and to connect such learning to one’s own scientific knowledge; being able to engage in political-strategic thinking, deliberations and actions, related to different perspectives; the ability for showing goal-oriented, adequate action; adopting and communicating ethical practices during the intervention process; being able to cope with the degree of complexity, and finally being able to translate stakeholder diversity into collectively produced interventions (actions) towards sustainability. Moreover, this competence has to be practised in contexts of competing values, non-technical interests and power relations. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and practice.