Abstract
The world is facing a multitude of pressing problems, including environmental degradation, natural disasters, and social inequity, to name but a few. These challenges are also complex and uncertain in nature, though it is crucial for humanity to attempt to solve them in order to achieve sustainable societies. The Graduate Program in Sustainability Science-Global Leadership Initiative (GPSS-GLI) of the University of Tokyo is an academic program which looks forward to facing these challenges. The program has a strong focus on field exercises, which attempt to introduce students to the real situations being experienced by people. Students are encouraged to deal with complexity by engaging the issue from a holistic (“top-down”) and transboundary (“bottom-up”) perspective. Having a holistic view and transboundary perspective may provide a basis to deal with the complexities and uncertainties present in sustainability issues, where it is difficult to provide solutions by thinking only of fixed end-targets. Through such efforts it is hoped that students can understand and propose solutions on how to achieve more sustainable and resilience societies. The present chapter will serve as an introduction to the rest of the chapters in this book, briefly outlining the general philosophy of the GPSS-GLI regarding Global Field Exercises (GFEs) and Exercises in Resilience (ERs).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Agrawal, A., Chhatre, A., & Hardin, R. (2008). Changing governance of the world's forests. Science, 320(5882), 1460–1462.
Akiyama, T., Li, J., & Onuki, M. (2012). Integral leadership education for sustainable development. Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 7(3), 55–69.
Alliance, R. (2010). Assessing resilience in social-ecological systems: Workbook for practitioners.
Bell, S., & Morse, S. (2008). Sustainability indicators: measuring the immeasurable?. UK: Earthscan.
Berkes, F., & Folke, C. (Eds.). (1998). Linking sociological and ecological systems: management practices and social mechanisms for building resilience. NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Brekke, K. A. (1997). Economic growth and the environment: On the measurement of income and welfare. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Carpenter, S., Walker, B., Anderies, J., & Abel, N. (2001). From metaphor to measurement: resilience of what to what? Ecosystems, 765–781.
Clark, W. C. (2007). Sustainability Science: A room of its own. PNAS.
Clark, W. C., & Dickson, N. M. (2003). Sustainability science: The emerging research program. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(14), 8059–8061.
Clayton, A. M., & Radcliffe, N. J. (1996). Sustainability: A systems approach. Earthscan.
Daly, H. (2008). A steady-state economy. Sustainable Development Commission.
Ehrlich, P., & Hanski, I. (2004). On the wings of checkerspots: A model system for population biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ehrlich, P. R., & Levin, S. A. (2005). The Evolution of Norms. PLoS Biology, 3(6), e194.
Espinosa, A., Harnden, R., & Walker, J. (2008). A complexity approach to sustainability–Stafford Beer revisited. European Journal of Operational Research, 187(2), 636–651.
Esteban, M., Onuki, M., Ikeda, I., & Akiyama, T. (2015). Reconstruction following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami: Case study of Otsuchi Town in Iwate prefecture, Japan. In M. Esteban, H. Takagi, & T. Shibayama (Eds.), Handbook of coastal disaster mitigation for engineers and planners. Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann (Elsevier).
Folke, C., Carpenter, S., Elmqvist, T., Gunderson, L., Holling, C. S., & Walker, B. (2002). Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 31(5), 437–440.
Folke, C., Hahn, T., Olsson, P., & Norberg, J. (2005). Adaptive governance of social-ecological systems. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 30, 441–473.
Gibson, C. C., Ostrom, E., & Ahn, T. K. (2000). The concept of scale and the human dimensions of global change: A survey. Ecological Economics, 32(2), 217–239.
GPSS-GLI. (2015). Retrieved December 20, 2015, from http://www.sustainability.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/.
Gunderson, L. H. (2002). Resilience and the behavior of large-scale systems (Vol. 60). Island Press.
Hawkes, J. (2001). The fourth Pillar of sustainability. Culture’s essential role in public planning. Common Ground, Australia.
Holling, C. S., Gunderson, L., & Peterson., G. (2002). Sustainability and panarchies. In L. G. Holling (Ed.), Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press.
Holling, C. S. (2005). Adaptive environmental assessment and management, Blackburn Press.
Holling, C. S. (1986). The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems: local surprise and global change. Sustainable development of the biosphere, 292–317.
Holling, C. S., Gunderson, L., & Peterson., G. (2002). Sustainability and Panarchies. In L. G. Holling & Panarchy (Eds.), Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press.
Hopwood, B., Mellor, M., & O’Brien, G. (2005). Sustainable development: Mapping different approaches. Sustainable Development, 13(1), 38–52.
Kates, R., William, C., Clark, J., Michael, H., Carlo, J., Ian L., et al. (2000). Sustainability science.
Kates, R., Clark, W., Corell, R., Hall, J., Jaeger, C., Lowe, I., McCarthy, J., Schellnhuber, H., Bolin, B., Dickson, N., Faucheux, S., Gallopin, G., Grubler, A., Huntley, B., Jager, J., Jodha, N., Kasperson, R., Mabogunje, A., Matson, P., & Mooney, H. (2001). Sustainability science. Science, 292(5517), 641–642.
Komiyama, H., & Takeuchi, K. (2006). Sustainability science: Building a new discipline. Sustainability Science, 1–6.
Ladyman, J., Lambert, J., & Wiesner, K. (2013). What is a complex system? European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 3, 33–67.
Lang, D. J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., Stauffacher, M., Martens, P., Moll, P., & Thomas, C. J. (2012). Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: Practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science, 7(1), 25–43.
Lerch, A., & Nutzinge, H. (2002). Sustainability: Economic Approaches and Ethical Implications. Journal of Economic and Social Policy, 6(2), 2.
Levin, S. A. (2006). Learning to live in a global commons: socioeconomic challenges for a sustainable environment. Ecological Research, 21(3), 328–333.
Liu, J., Dietz, T., Carpenter, S. R., Alberti, M., Folke, C., Moran, E., & Taylor, W. W. (2007). Complexity of coupled human and natural systems. Science, 317(5844), 1513–1516.
Lozano, R. (2008). Envisioning sustainability three-dimensionally. Journal of Cleaner Production, 16(17), 1838–1846.
Mikami, T., Shibayama, T., Esteban, M., & Matsumaru, R. (2012). Field Survey of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami in Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures. Coastal Engineering Journal (CEJ), 54(1), 1–26.
Mino, T., & Hanaki, K. (Eds.). (2013). Environmental leadership capacity building in higher education: Experience and lesson from Asian program for incubation of sustainability. Japan: Springer.
Neumayer, E. (2003). Weak versus strong sustainability: Exploring the limits of two opposing paradigms. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Olsson, L., Jerneck, A., Thoren, H., Persson, J., & O’Byrne, D. (2015). Why resilience is unappealing to social science: Theoretical and empirical investigations of the scientific use of resilience. Science Advances, 1(4), e1400217.
Ostrom, E. (2007). A general framework for analyzing sustainability of socio-ecological systems. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B, 274,19–31.
Page, S. E. (2010). Diversity and complexity. NJ: Princeton University Press.
Peter, C., & Swilling, M. (2014). Linking complexity and sustainability theories: Implications for modeling sustainability transitions. Sustainability, 6(3), 1594–1622.
Pezzey, J. (1992). Sustainable development concepts. World, 1, 45.
Robinson, J. G. (2011). Ethical pluralism, pragmatism, and sustainability in conservation practice. Biological Conservation, 144(3), 958–965.
Rockström, J., Steffen, W. L., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F. S., Lambin, E., & Nykvist, B. (2009). Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity.
Satanarachchi, N., & Mino, T. (2014). A framework to observe and evaluate the sustainability of human–natural systems in a complex dynamic context. SpringerPlus, 3(1), 1–21.
Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford UP: Oxford University Press.
Scholz, R. W., & Tietje, O. (2002). Embedded case study methods: Integrating quantitative and qualitative knowledge. Sage.
Scholz, R. W., Lang, D. J., Wiek, A., Walter, A. I., & Stauffacher, M. (2006). Transdisciplinary case studies as a means of sustainability learning: Historical framework and theory. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 7(3), 226–251.
Spangenberg, J. H. (2011). Sustainability science: A review, an analysis and some empirical lessons. Environmental Conservation, 275–87.
Solow, R. (1991). Sustainability: An economist’s perspective. Marine policy centre, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts.
Swart, R. J., Raskin, P., & Robinson, J. (2004). The problem of the future: sustainability science and scenario analysis. Global Environmental Change, 14(2), 137–146.
Takagi, H., Esteban, M., & Tram, T. T. (2014). Coastal Vulnerabilities in a fast-growing Vietnamese city. In D. T. Nguyen, H. Takagi, & M. Esteban (Eds.), Coastal disasters and climate change in Vietnam: Engineering and planning perspectives. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R., & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 9(2), 5.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mino, T. et al. (2016). Philosophy of Field Methods in the GPSS-GLI Program: Dealing with Complexity to Achieve Resilience and Sustainable Societies. In: Esteban, M., Akiyama, T., Chen, C., Ikeda, I., Mino, T. (eds) Sustainability Science: Field Methods and Exercises. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32930-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32930-7_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32929-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32930-7
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)