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Meaning and Purpose in Sustainability Transitions

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The Palgrave Handbook of Climate Resilient Societies

Abstract

Sustainability transitions would benefit from considering how people’s contributions to mitigating climate heating and biodiversity loss generate meaning and purpose in their work and lives. This chapter develops a practical philosophy of change that incorporates into sustainable transitions underexplored system features such as life and work meaning. A practical philosophy of change is outlined that explores ethical concerns related to how people experience change and extends the ethical purposes of change to more-than-human development. The value of meaningfulness is proposed as a standpoint in practical reasoning regarding “what we ought to do.” Using the value of meaningfulness in sustainability transitions enriches the meanings, values, and conceptual language by which participants can identify and describe their cognitive-emotional responses to change and evaluate their collective purposes in the light of the sustainability imperative. Organizing for change in sustainability transitions is understood to be a tensional process of navigating sustainability/resiliency, where taking responsibility for complexity (rather than complexity being “done to us”) has implications for developing agency narratives in complexity work. Proposals are advanced for including Meaning Labs in change initiatives. Meaning Labs provide participants with experimental spaces and tools for using meanings and purposes in sustainability transitions by generating narrative and norms, learning using dualities thinking, and imagining with fractal design.

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  1. Kellogg College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Ruth Yeoman

  2. Northumbria University, Tyne, UK

    Ruth Yeoman

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Yeoman, R. (2021). Meaning and Purpose in Sustainability Transitions. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Climate Resilient Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32811-5_100-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32811-5_100-1

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