Abstract
In the words of Tim O’Riordan, sustainable development is a ‘tough nut to crack’ because it does not fit easily with the normal political model of analysis and decision. The urgent need for sustainable development is evident, but the concept is vague, contradictory and confusing. O’Riordan points out that there is no agreement on what sustainability actually is, where we have to go to get it, and what it would look like in a multi-national world of nine plus billion people demanding more and more from a stripped and stressed planet (O’Riordan 2008). O’Riordan is right in that it is difficult to pin down what sustainable development is and what sustainability transitions will imply, for reasons which include that sustainability transitions are dynamic, systemic, configuration dependent, and indeterminate.
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Notes
- 1.
Other authors in this volume also point to the inherent paradoxes and contradictions of sustainable development, which complicate the process of achieving consensus and of establishing directions that are purist, unambiguous and non-controversial. To factor into the mix, also, is that pathways to sustainability need to be elaborated in context. Pluralism, diversity and context-specificity also are acknowledged leitmotivs for sustainable development.
- 2.
The analogy might be drawn in the contrast between ‘purist’ scenarios that scientists construct to help explore how different futures could unfold and which are typically delineated along the lines of dominant or leading themes and ‘hybrid’ scenarios that explore interactions among innovations of many different types. See, for example, the ‘market first’, ‘security first’, ‘policy first’ and ‘sustainability first’ scenarios developed for the Global Environment Outlook, UNEP 2007.
- 3.
This includes scientists and researchers, but also those who set research priorities and agendas, those who allocate and administer funds for research, and those who establish and implement the criteria used to evaluate research proposals and research outcomes.
- 4.
This goes some way to explaining why there are no panaceas to the sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems. Resource degradation commonly has multiple causes rooted in complex interactions between the natural and social components of social-ecological systems. Social-ecological systems are complex, multi-level systems that are not amenable to ‘one-size-fits-all’, ‘silver-bullet’, or ‘quick-fix’ solutions. One-dimensional solutions, unidirectional solutions (top-down or bottom-up), and generalised approaches are all inappropriate. By contrast, sets of carefully chosen changes introduced top-down (especially those that affect markets, which are our most powerful mechanisms of global coordination) may combine synergistically to provide new scope and viability for alternative and more sustainable solutions at local scale to emerge bottom-up.
- 5.
The case histories describe instances where communities facing threats to common-pool ecosystems and environmental resources upon which they depend have overcome destructive rivalries and have come together to cooperate in developing new and more sustainable regimes of ecosystem management. A shared understanding of the nature and significance of the threats faced is an important factor in the emergence of new governance arrangements and of alternative ways to use and conserve ecosystems. The alternative regimes often involve new management rules, which restrain certain practices. Arrangements for cost and benefit sharing are often integral elements of the governance approach and may include mechanisms for compensating those who lose from changes in management regime and for ensuring an equitable distribution of benefits from the new regimes.
- 6.
Methodologically, Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA) combines three elements: an integrated systems analysis, which seeks to secure broad scope for the assessment; a multi-level and agent-based analytical approach, which seeks to understand multi-level processes that can lead to structural change and transition; and a cyclical, participatory process architecture, which seeks to promote social learning among stakeholders through an empowering dialogue, experimentation and transformative capacity building. ISA offers an approach for stimulating the social and institutional processes that contribute to emergent solutions.
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Weaver, P.M. (2011). Pragmatism and Pluralism: Creating Clumsy and Context-Specific Approaches to Sustainability Science. In: Jaeger, C., Tàbara, J., Jaeger, J. (eds) European Research on Sustainable Development. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19202-9_12
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