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Different ways of knowing: A communicative turn toward sustainability
Abstract
Despite the urgency of the ecological crisis the steady continuation of environmental degradation suggests that new ways of interpreting problems and acting with environmental integrity may need to be considered. This paper draws on a broad range of contemporary theory to argue that the conventional conceptualization of environmental problems has remained a largely disciplinary-based exercise that has relied on abstracting the environmental issues from their real-world complexity. A practical articulation of the main environmental narratives reveals self-referential discourses whose disciplinary-based practices have insulated these approaches from a broad range of contemporary theorising and different ways of knowing. The dominance of these approaches in environmental policy development has led to the continued acceleration of environmental degradation despite widespread political and social interest in its abatement. This paper provides a critique of methodologies derived from the assumptions of instrumental rationalism, and contemplates the potential for alternative ‘communicative’ approaches and strategies for dealing with environmental policy development and implementation. It is argued that a communicative approach to planning for sustainability represents a more appropriate strategy for mobilising a currently impotent environmental movement. A communicative approach by explicitly dealing with the assumptions and motivations of contested positions in the sustainability debate, it is argued, offers the most pragmatic way of developing change strategies to deal with the complex issues surrounding environmental policy development and implementation.
... This increases the context-specific relevance of research (Bracken et al., 2014;Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2006;Lang et al., 2012). The substantive rationale implies the acknowledgment that scientific knowledge is just one of many legitimate bodies of knowledge (Meppem and Bourke, 1999;Nowotny et al., 2001) and aims to give room to all those bodies of knowledge to co-design shared understandings and objectives (Stirling 2008;Wesselink et al., 2011). ...
... Improvement of the quality of research Bracken et al., 2014;Fiorino, 1990;Hage et al., 2010;Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2006;Lang et al., 2012;Meppem and Bourke, 1999;Pohl and Hirsch Hadorn, 2007;Reed 2008;van Kerkhoff and Lebel, 2006 › Consideration of stakeholders' needs and perspectives increases the context-specific relevance; › Integration of all bodies of knowledge available allows a holistic understanding of the problem; › Linking stakeholder knowledge with scientific knowledge helps with identifying locally adapted solutions. ...
... Being conscious and transparent why certain actors are included can help to design processes in a way that mitigates obstacles in the stakeholder landscape. This presupposes the acceptance of researchers to be stakeholders themselves and requires respective processes of reflexivity on their role and possible impact (Meppem and Bourke, 1999;Rosendahl et al., 2015;Spangenberg, 2011). ...
Transdisciplinary research is a well-recognised approach to address complex real-world problems. However, the literature on a central aspect of transdisciplinarity, namely stakeholder involvement, largely lacks a reflection on its objectives. In response, we present a framework defining four general rationales for stakeholder involvement: normative, substantive, social-learning, and implementation objectives. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework and analyse how the design and processes of three collaborative research projects dealing with sustainable land management in Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America were affected by motivations to include stakeholders.
Our assessment indicates that at the projects' outset, many scientists pursued a normative rationale and saw stakeholder involvement as a burden. In the course of the projects, the substantive objective became more relevant as being closely linked to the core mandate of scientists. The projects also aimed for social learning and implementation processes, which, however, did not remain uncontested among team members. Overall, our study indicates that jointly negotiating, clarifying, communicating, and reflecting the underlying objectives of stakeholder involvement can help developing more effective interaction strategies and clarifying expectations. The conceptual framework can guide a systematic reflective and reflexive practise and support the planning and co-designing of future transdisciplinary research projects.
... The emergence of the concept of sustainable economic development (SED) in the 1980s broadened the historic context of environmentalism by embracing a view of a unified global social-economic-ecological system (Barbier, 1987;De Vries 2009). The release of the 1987 Brundtland Report marked a landmark in defining this evolving concept, but this attempt at a universal definition of SED was primarily achieved through ambiguity (Meppem, 1999) and the resulting definition lacks clear goals and is difficult to concretely operationalize in a local context (Grodach, 2011). Subsequently, SED can be described as a 'fuzzy' concept-relatively clear when considered broadly, but vague when closely scrutinized (Barbier, 1987;De Roo, 2007). ...
... Despite there being hundreds of competing definitions of sustainable economic development (Meppem, 1999), the concept is often criticized for being self-contradictory (Dovers, 1993;Holmen, 2001). A pursuit to maximize any of the component concepts, frequently described as economy, society and environment, generally comes at the expense of the other goals (Barbier, 1987). ...
... A pursuit to maximize any of the component concepts, frequently described as economy, society and environment, generally comes at the expense of the other goals (Barbier, 1987). One way to interpret these trade-offs is to view sustainability as a problem statement rather than a solution (Meppem, 1999) and the subsequent competition of narratives that determine what goals are pursued is an inherently value-laden process. ...
... Similarly, the environmental discourse and the area of wildlife management in particular, is dominated by two metaphors which are symptomatic of the dominance of the realist or positive research paradigm in conservation biology. These are the "stocks and assets" metaphor which "assumes that social reality can be captured through measurement" and the "environmental systems and carrying capacity" metaphor, which refers to the "scientific method" to assert its truth claim (Meppem and Bourke 1999). The different research paradigms represent different ways of viewing the world and what we can know about it based on different sets of assumptions. ...
... Although it is possible to draw on more than one paradigm, most research is conducted from within a single preferred paradigm (Terre Blanche & Durrheim 1999). In wildlife management there is a tendency to give preference to the realist or positivist paradigm and consequently there is a strong focus on "objective quantified data" and on "rational" decision-making (Meppem and Bourke 1999). ...
... The positivist paradigm is based on a mechanistic view of nature which is a product of the scientific revolution of the 17 th century (Merchant 1989). Although this epistemology has been "leap frogged" by contemporary science, which emphasises relationships over control, its influence on environmental science prevails (Meppem & Bourke 1999). ...
... In spite of these shortcomings, governments often insist on paying homage to certain paradigms, irrespective of their implementation potential, simply because they are part of the current global thinking. For example, available evidences indicate that sustainability represents more of a concept than an implementable reality (Dragun and Jakobsson 1997;Meppem and Bourke 1999;Meppem and Gill 1998). Hence, it is somewhat unlikely that any government pursuing sustainable development, as it is defined at present, would be able to develop realistic plans that can be properly implemented. ...
... So far, however, there is still no agreement even on the meaning or definition of sustainable development. Thus, it is not surprising that little consensus exists with regard to formulating and operationalizing sustainable development policies, except in broad and general terms (Biswas 1996;Dragun and Jakobsson 1997;Goodland 1997;Meppem 2000;Meppem and Bourke 1999). ...
The objective of this chapter is to analyse the effectiveness of some global paradigms in the field of water, as well as the possibility of moving from concept to implementation, in terms of improving water management processes and practices. Many concepts are used extensively at present, for example sustainable development, environmental sustainability, integrated water resources management, or integrated river basin management. However, this chapter will focus only on the concept of sustainable development.
In spite of the current popularity and widespread mention of the concept of ‘sustainable development’, its origin is not well known. Thus, a brief review of its origin and its evolution is presented. The analyses show that even though many developing countries have adopted the global views in theory, they still need to strengthen their institutions, implement legislations, develop long-term policies, and build administrative, technical, and management capacities so that at least, significant parts of the theories can actually be translated into effective practices.
... Sustainability, ecosystems, health, inequity and health promotion are all terms that do not have set meanings but are often contingent and open to interpretation, and are underpinned by values that may not always be shared and understood. For example, sustainability assumptions found in indigenous ways of knowing reflect very different ontological and epistemological assumptions from the technocratic and technocorporatist forms found in such documents as the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987;Meppem and Bourke 1999). Moreover, certain discourses often dominate because of the domination of certain elites: the domination of the Western biomedical discourse within the health sciences, for example. ...
... Further, PR is not only underpinned by a theoretical and empirical understanding for working for change in ecosystems approaches to health equity; the practice has also generated a range of valuable tried and tested tools for the co-production of knowledge. Through a process of social learning, shared meanings are developed, which are culturally derived and context dependent through communicative practices (Meppem and Bourke 1999). Reflexive processes are critically central, through these processes' critical questioning of surface value-based positions. ...
... Olander and Ladin found that community groups can cause delays and budget increases beyond the control of the project management and design team if their concerns are not considered. CE students need to understand that input from the communities affected by projects is a crucial element in implementing sustainable projects (Meppem and Bourke 1999). In addition, students who understand the importance of community involvement can lead the way in encouraging the industry to consider this social dimension for any proposed construction project. ...
... In fact, those excluded may disproportionately rate the negative impacts of projects or policies, ignoring the positive. Thus, the key challenge for planning and designing sustainable projects is to facilitate a dialogue encouraging reflection on various impacts affecting this group of stakeholders in a framework where these topics can be openly discussed (Meppem and Bourke, 1999). ...
Social sustainability is often overlooked in favor of environmental and economic considerations in civil engineering (CE) education. To help address this issue, this paper presents two instructional approaches to introduce students to social sustainability by using a conceptual model derived from four dimensions of social sustainability: community involvement, corporate social responsibility, safety through design, and social design. In the first instructional approach, the instructor is the primary facilitator; in the second approach, the students become the experts, sharing their knowledge with their peers. Methods to assess student understanding of these dimensions, such as concept mapping, are proposed. By providing the conceptual model and methods to teach it, this paper is for the purpose of assisting those teaching the social dimensions of sustainability to CE students, who will gain an understanding of how their technical decisions affect social sustainability. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)EI.1943-5541.0000066. (C) 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
... The orientation of the Talloires Declaration to 'knowledge about' issues might be seen as reflecting an objectivist, scientistic paradigm that has received much criticism both in general (for example, Feyerabend, 1970;Habermas, 1971;MacIntyre, 1981, Bernstein, 1983Toulmin, 1988;Dryzek, 1990) and in particular for its adequacy in relation to solutions for environmental problems (Robottom and Hart, 1993;Huckle, 1993;Sterling, 2004;Meppem and Bourke, 1999;O'Donoghue and Lotz-Sisitka, 2002). Some authors even suggest that technical scientific approaches in environmental education may in fact embody perspectives that perpetuate environmental problems (Robottom, 1987;Huckle, 1991;Fien et al., 1993;Meppem and Bourke, 1999;Bawden, 2004 Sustainability. ...
... The orientation of the Talloires Declaration to 'knowledge about' issues might be seen as reflecting an objectivist, scientistic paradigm that has received much criticism both in general (for example, Feyerabend, 1970;Habermas, 1971;MacIntyre, 1981, Bernstein, 1983Toulmin, 1988;Dryzek, 1990) and in particular for its adequacy in relation to solutions for environmental problems (Robottom and Hart, 1993;Huckle, 1993;Sterling, 2004;Meppem and Bourke, 1999;O'Donoghue and Lotz-Sisitka, 2002). Some authors even suggest that technical scientific approaches in environmental education may in fact embody perspectives that perpetuate environmental problems (Robottom, 1987;Huckle, 1991;Fien et al., 1993;Meppem and Bourke, 1999;Bawden, 2004 Sustainability. Amongst these, there is some more explicit mention of social sciences, values and reflection on norms. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to critique constructively and complement the Talloires Declaration with a focus on social and cultural elements that shape action. These elements are important to achieving the needed response to the environmental issues that the Talloires Declaration highlights. While the Talloires Declaration has been significant and successful in a number of ways, it does not make clearly visible the social conditioning that – beyond information and knowledge about issues – has such a determining influence on action and environmental literacy.
Design/methodology/approach
In this article the action and change the Talloires Declaration seeks to achieve is considered against a backdrop of selected social theory and education for sustainability literature. This literature provides insights on the social change that is part of bringing about environmental improvement.
Findings
Patterns of thinking and acting that determine whether action on the environment is taken, an important aspect of environmental literacy, are on the whole determined intersubjectively and reside in perspectives and orientations that are largely tacit. Guidance to university staff to achieve the aims of the Talloires Declaration should keep in focus the need for transformation of social and cultural conditioning and entrenched, unquestioned perspectives and ways of being that strongly influence student and staff action. Staff committed to sustainability will want to consider modes through which such transformation can be fostered.
Originality/value
For those concerned with the Talloires Declaration, this article offers considerations important in orienting universities' responses to urgent environmental issues. Few articles have proposed that this foundational document for university commitments to sustainability needs to be rethought with the benefit of passing time and in view of a wider, and largely subsequent, literature.
... Culture is seen as a reflection of the material conditions of existence and the product of a society's dominant mode of thinking (Maser 1999). It is not a by-product of primary economic relations, nor merely a superstructure responding to an economic base, but itself a determining agent in the shaping of history (Meppem, Bourke 1999). Culture as a capital yields a flow of services (e.g., attitudes, morals, ethics, and information) that determines a society's relationship to the natural environment, especially its resource management strategies (Jansson et al. 1994). ...
Sustainable development has now become a general, policy goal around the world. However, this concept is open to interpretation depending on different socio-cultural, economic and political circumstances. This is mainly because we are living in a world that is characterised by heterogeneous rather than homogeneous frames of reference, motives and interests, institutional settings and agendas. This chapter provides a brief Chinese cultural context of the sustainability discourse. It is argued that social and cultural considerations will be crucial on the way towards the achievement of sustainable development. The Chinese interpretation of sustainability has reflected the significant influence from the country's unique cultural and philosophical heritage. Although the concept of sustainable development still remains ambiguous and lacks consistency in its use, it has allowed peoples with different backgrounds and often-conflicting interests to reach some common ground upon which concrete policies can be developed and implemented toward a sustainable future. To achieve the goal of sustainable development, it is proposed that one of the priorities at the current stage is to maintain cultural diversity and promote inter- and trans-cultural communications.
... The intractability of problems such as corporate sustainability, sustainable development and climate change challenge the viability of assumptions and paradigms within which these problems were created. The challenges associated with sustainable development can be seen to be partly a consequence of the Newtonian paradigm [24,32,33,60], in which reality is understood through analysis of its components. Periods of "revolutionary science", Kuhn [61] argues, are needed to disrupt "normal science" by challenging the conceptual frameworks or scientific paradigms underpinning scientific theories, thereby avoiding being "caged by the paradigms within which we currently operate" ( [62], p. 98). ...
Escalating climate crisis activism highlights the potential of self-organised approaches in sustainability to address the disconnect between corporate sustainability activities and globally declining ecological systems. This paper argues that corporate sustainability is a co-evolutionary process of emergence which may enable organisations to address this disconnect by creating a context supportive of emergence within the organisation rather than reacting to pressures from outside. An exploratory mixed-methods case study was used to explore how corporate sustainability emerged in two financial services institutions. This article develops the idea of corporate sustainability as a co-evolutionary process of emergence and presents a framework to assist organisations to cultivate sustainability. It adopts a complexity view and posits that reductionism associated with Newtonian thinking has contributed to the sustainability issues faced by humanity. This study suggests that the paradigmatic assumptions that have contributed to the sustainability crisis must be interrogated to create an environment which is conducive to the emergence of corporate sustainability. Through examining corporate sustainability as an emergent process, this paper sheds light on how businesses can foster conditions in which a self-organised response to sustainability challenges is distributed across the organisation whilst being embedded in the containing system.
... It counteracts the prevailing dominant role of science in defining the problem and identifying those who are legitimate and/or beneficial contributors to a solution ( Bracken et al., 2014 ;Rosendahl et al., 2015 ) and might prevent research fatigue. The resulting 'balance of understanding' is an important contribution to the 'balance of power' in participatory transdisciplinary projects, where the powerful position of science in determining the process has to be reduced to the one of a contributor to collaborative initiatives, with responsibility and power shared among all those involved (Meppem & Bourke, 1999;Scholz & Steiner, 2015 ). The crux is a discursive synthesis of different bodies of knowledge while at the same time ensuring the use of robust methodologies, possibly adapted to new circumstances and modified by new insights, but in any case, in compliance with scientific standards. ...
Transdisciplinary research: Practitioners’ lessons on key methodological challenges
... Luederitz et al. (2017) typologized different academically conceptualized complexes of sustainability change in transition studies, as mainstream types of narratives of transitions (further explained in section 3). Transition narratives can be pieced together into tangible elements of change, which creates a persuasive synopsis of a process-oriented transition plan (Meppem and Bourke, 1999). These transition narratives can also be utilised as a means to verbalise the issues, solutions, and actors of the changes needed to move towards sustainability. ...
As sustainability becomes a focal point and important aspect of educational development in several disciplines and universities globally, it is important to critically reflect on the different utilisations of sustainability education. Research on educational aims and the potential transformative impact of sustainability courses is quite timely. Among several others, the theory of interconnected learning has been gaining traction as an approach to transformative sustainability education, as it employs a distinct approach to systemic sustainability awareness. This approach aims to further express the plurality of sustainability, with the aim to foster a deeper comprehension beyond the dichotomous thinking often typical in disciplined science. The aim of our research was to study the efficiency of employing the pedagogy of interconnected learning on the types of sustainability transition narratives produced by the students attending an online sustainability course. The sustainability transition narratives, as expressed through fifty-eight students’ course assignments, were studied pre- and post-course, and analysed against a collection of established narratives drawn from transition studies. The comparison from the pre-to post-course answers revealed that while some of the student narratives remained unchanged, the majority of the narratives were expanded during the course experience. Our analysis revealed that while most of the students’ answers referenced a single type of transition narrative, some students produced narratives that hybridised two or more types of narratives. Additionally, some of the students produced elements of a pathway for a transition narrative that are currently unarticulated in the transition narrative framework employed herein. The elements of this newly articulated narrative focused on changes in the societal mindset, achievable through sustainability education.
... Others, however, turn their attention to addressing the inherent weaknesses in existing models, because they do more harm to environmental systems than good. For example, Meppem and Bourke (1999) content that conventional conceptualisation of environmental challenges has remained a largely discipline based endeavour that has relied on abstracting the environmental issues from their real-world complexities. They note that dominance of these approaches such as 'instrumental rationalism' has led to a sustained increase in environmental degradation in spite widespread political and social interest in its abatement. ...
This thesis applied system dynamics approach based on the principle of systems thinking to develop an integrated simulation model to understand the dynamic interaction between the water-population-food subsystems of the Volta River Basin, West Africa. Built collaboratively with stakeholders, the model serves as a decision support tool for experimentation and simulation of alternative policy scenarios underpinning sustainable water resources management and agricultural development. Scenarios analysis indicate that water infrastructure development would deliver the maximum benefits to people in the basin. In general, the study provides significant insight into the systemic nature of water-food systems in the context of global change.
... A need for IS evaluation to incorporate social and environmental, as well as economic factors has been supported by Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson (2009). Meppem and Bourke (1999) suggest that much of the discourse to date has been overly focused on discipline-based exercises, fragmented and insulated from the real-world complexity of problems. In their view, there is a need for a 'communicative turn', in which more pragmatic change strategies might be developed. ...
Organizations and their Information Systems (IS) co-evolve. It follows that a need for organizational sustainability (in every sense) must be reflected in IS design, management and use. Much public attention focuses on environmental sustainability, i.e. accounting for the impact that organizations have on the natural world and on communities, as a result of their business practices. However, many external impacts remain invisible, e.g. a stressed workforce makes greater calls upon the resources of healthcare systems. It is important, therefore, that designers and managers pay as much attention to human and social sustainability as to environmental factors. Furthermore, economic sustainability-future prosperity of the business-must be secured in order for operations to continue at all. The authors suggest that a socio-technical perspective has potential to address these concerns, by encouraging all stakeholder groups to contribute their contextual knowledge, supported by appropriate tools and techniques. By way of illustration, the paper reports some results from inquiries into sustainability practices in a number of SMEs. These findings suggest that multiple dimensions of sustainability are not always integrated into work systems and practices effectively. Further work will be needed to explore the potential of socio-technical approaches to improve this.
... In this context, two other considerations deserve to be made: First, supporting productivity is only but one of the many ecosystem services associated with forest soils (Dominati et al., 2010;Paquette and Messier, 2010). Second, under ecological, ethical, cultural, religious, and philosophical bases, ecosystems have values regardless of whether or not they provide direct or indirect benefits to humans (Meppem and Bourke, 1999;Oreskes, 2004). All things considered, forest soil should be preserved to the maximum possible extent. ...
The world's wood demand from planted forests is expected to drastically increase in the following decades. Brazil displays very high levels of forest productivity for Pinus and Eucalyptus planted forests. Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) is the most important species in terms of planted forest area in southern Brazil. There, it is mainly used for paper and pulpwood production, but also allows for multipurpose and high quality wood production. Of particular interest is whether loblolly pine management in southern Brazil comprises a sustainable alternative to world's wood demand. A promising tool to assess forest sustainability is named emergy synthesis (or emergy accounting). It is a top-down environmental accounting approach set out to assess holistically nature and so-ciety's contributions toward a production process. It converts all forms of energy, materials, and human services into equivalents of one form of energy: Emergy, expressed in solar emjoules (seJ). This study aimed to assess the emergy-based sustainability of a loblolly pine wood production system practiced by a private forest company in southern Brazil (municipality of Rio Negrinho, Santa Catarina State). Data on society's input (materials, fuels and labor) were provided by the company itself and subsequently checked through field measurements and personal communication with the forestry staff. Nature's input was segregated into renewable and non-renewable resources , with their estimates being derived from literature information. Renewable natural resources in the form of rainfall comprised 82.4% of total emergy. The organic fraction of soil loss represented the emergy flow of non-renewable natural resources and accounted for 0.85% of total emergy. The remaining 16.75% of total emergy comprised society's contribution. The loblolly pine system outperformed large-scale, intensively managed agriculture and eucalyptus production systems in Brazil as regards the emergy index of renewability. In relation to planted forests worldwide, this loblolly pine system displayed the lowest transformity, indicating that it was the most efficient system at producing a joule of wood per emergy investment. From the perspective of emergy synthesis, this loblolly pine production system is a feasible alternative to world's wood demand and to sustainable land use in southern Brazil. While we perceived emergy synthesis to be an important tool to assess forest sustainability, we strongly argue that it should be complemented by other assessment approaches in order to consider, inter alia, short-term adverse impacts on soils and the socioeconomic benefits of providing job opportunities and ecosystem services.
... Narrative (Hausberg 2014). Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Gefahr wird in der Diskussion zum Einsatz narrativer Erzählformen gefordert, mögliche Wirkungen kritisch daraufhin zu prüfen, inwiefern sie tatsächlich dazu beitragen, Problemlösekompetenz bei Menschen zu entwickeln und diese zu einer aktiven Auseinandersetzung mit Nachhaltigkeitsfragen anzuregen -wozu eben auch das Aufzeigen von Unsicherheiten und verschiedenen Interessenslagen gehört (Leach et al. 2010;Meppem und Bourke 1999). Auch hier sollte angemerkt werden, dass die aufgeführten Risiken wiederum im Gegensatz zur Alternative gesehen werden müssen: Geschichten können manipulativ oder kreativ gestaltet werden, zum blinden Folgen antreiben oder zum Reflektierten und kritischen Denken anregen. ...
Der Begriff des Storytellings hat in vielen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen Interesse geweckt, wird mit ihm doch auf das Potenzial von Geschichten verwiesen, Informationen zu transportieren, Probleme zu erklären und Emotionen hervorzurufen. Der Beitrag bilanziert, wie vielseitige Formen des Storytellings eine Reihe von Chancen für die Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation bieten, breiteren Zielgruppen einen Zugang zu komplexen Zusammenhängen zu verschaffen und dabei auch eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Normativität der Nachhaltigkeitsidee anzustoßen. Diesen Chancen stehen jedoch auch die Risiken gegenüber, durch Storytelling zu manipulieren oder durch Komplexitätsreduktion in Geschichten Fehlvorstellungen zu befördern. Sich hieraus ergebender Klärungsbedarf stellt ein vielversprechendes Feld für weitere angewandte Forschung im Bereich der Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation dar.
... This is seen in increasing calls for multi-stakeholder environmental management approaches based on social learning (Brown & Lambert 2012;Collins & Ison 2009;Pahl-Wostl et al. 2008;Tàbara & Pahl-Wostl 2007), such as communicative planning (e.g. Meppem & Bourke 1999;Wondolleck & Yaffee 2000) and adaptive co-management (e.g. Armitage et al. 2008;Berkes 2009;Olsson et al. 2004), and the use of knowledge brokers to facilitate interaction and flow of information between scientists and stakeholder groups (Healy et al. 2016;Michaels 2009;Moore & Westley 2011), and overcome cultural barriers between them (as per Roux et al. 2006). ...
Knowledge exchange involves a suite of strategies used to bridge the divides between research, policy and practice. The literature is increasingly focused on the notion that knowledge generated by research is more useful when there is significant interaction and knowledge sharing between researchers and research recipients (i.e., stakeholders). This is exemplified by increasing calls for the use of knowledge brokers to facilitate interaction and flow of information between scientists and stakeholder groups, and the integration of scientific and local knowledge. However, most of the environmental management literature focuses on explicit forms of knowledge, leaving unmeasured the tacit relational and reflective forms of knowledge that lead people to change their behaviour. In addition, despite the high transaction costs of knowledge brokering and related stakeholder engagement, there is little research on its effectiveness. We apply Park's Manag Learn 30(2), 141-157 (1999); Knowledge and Participatory Research, London: SAGE Publications (2006) tri-partite knowledge typology as a basis for evaluating the effectiveness of knowledge brokering in the context of a large multi-agency research programme in Australia's Ningaloo coastal region, and for testing the assumption that higher levels of interaction between scientists and stakeholders lead to improved knowledge exchange. While the knowledge brokering intervention substantively increased relational networks between scientists and stakeholders, it did not generate anticipated increases in stakeholder knowledge or research application, indicating that more prolonged stakeholder engagement was required, and/or that there was a flaw in the assumptions underpinning our conceptual framework.
... Therefore, to argue that sustainable development is simply a matter of improving our ability to manage resources more efficiently and effectively is, at the very least, disingenuous. As a solution 'sustainability' merely suspends the crisis and defers the real terms of conflict between the environment and economic development for another day (Meppem and Bourke, 1999). Inescapably, once one accepts that resources are in-I deed limited, one has to have a means of sharing the right to use those resources not only among the present population but also with future generations, who can make no claim to use them through today's free-market mechanisms (Douthwaite, 1999). ...
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is argued to be a flawed concept in the same way as sustainable development in that it seeks to combine two aspects which are incommensurable. Nevertheless CSR contains an expanding space for social and environmental concerns under the guise of stakeholder management which undoubtedly influences the commercial bottom line. It is proposed that the concept of corporate citizenship is separated from what is now termed corporate social responsiveness to encompass truly ethical and normative considerations which in business should be manifested by a wholehearted acceptance of the need for regulation, lobbying for the universality of that regulation and an avoidance of undue influence on government. Proper roles for the three partners in society, namely government, commerce and civil society are explored together with the nature of citizenship.
... A need for IS evaluation to incorporate social and environmental, as well as economic factors has been supported by Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson (2009). Meppem and Bourke (1999) suggest that there is a need for researchers to reconsider the way in which sustainability is conceptualised, since much of the discourse to date had focused on discipline-based exercises, fragmented and insulated from the real-world complexity of problems. They call for a communicative turn in which more pragmatic change strategies might be developed. ...
Research has shown that sustainability is a critical issue for organizations. There are many dimensions to this concept, notably economic, social and environmental sustainability. When considering development of Information Systems, it is necessary to take these factors into account. However, although developers wish to deliver a package of sustainable benefits, the values that these benefits represent to different stakeholder groups will vary. Approaches will be needed that can provide support to resolve divergent and conflicting requirements within a transformation process, and help to surface contextual understandings of sustainable performance. Poorly-designed systems lead to work activity that is less than optimal, and thus fails to achieve a level of excellence in performance that is a significant prerequisite for competitiveness and economic sustainability. This paper introduces an investigation into understanding of a socio-technical systems framework that could function as a trigger for sustainability development where a suitable agenda already exists within an organization. Preliminary results, and their limitations, are discussed and a tentative agenda for further research is presented.
... Therefore, to argue that sustainable development is simply a matter of improving our ability to manage resources more efficiently and effectively is, at the very least, disingenuous. As a solution 'sustainability' merely suspends the crisis and defers the real terms of conflict between the environment and economic development for another day (Meppem and Bourke, 1999). Inescapably, once one accepts that resources are in-I deed limited, one has to have a means of sharing the right to use those resources not only among the present population but also with future generations, who can make no claim to use them through today's free-market mechanisms (Douthwaite, 1999). ...
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is argued to be a flawed concept in the same way as sustainable development in that it seeks to combine two aspects which are incommensurable. Nevertheless CSR contains an expanding space for social and environmental concerns under the guise of stakeholder management which undoubtedly influences the commercial bottom line. It is proposed that the concept of corporate citizenship is separated from what is now termed corporate social responsiveness to encompass truly ethical and normative considerations which in business should be manifested by a wholehearted acceptance of the need for regulation, lobbying for the universality of that regulation and an avoidance of undue influence on government. Proper roles for the three partners in society, namely government, commerce and civil society are explored together with the nature of citizenship.
... The central metaphor of the communicative formation is the network. Knowledge is structured into decentralized and distributed networks, discursive communities (Meppem & Bourke, 1999), and spaces where participants aspire to "engage in Habermasinspired deliberations and achieve communicative rationality" (Turnhout, 2010; see also the deliberative patterns of organizing public expertise in Halffman & Hoppe, 2005). Thus, specific types of knowledge are deployed and recognized, such as citizen knowledge, indigenous knowledge, local knowledge, and community knowledge. ...
To increase the uptake of research findings by policy makers and to encourage European researchers to better reflect policy needs, we facilitated the development of a joint research agenda (JRA) on sustainable food consumption (SFC) involving scientists, policy makers, and other stakeholders. Pursuing interpretive action research and using a number of data sources, we tried to understand how the "fit" between the characteristics of policy makers' organizational contexts and the attributes of the JRA development process affects the reception of the JRA and its outcomes. Our framework was based on three distinct formations of discursive and material practices related to the use of knowledge in public policy making: bureaucratic, managerial, and communicative. Two dominant patterns seem to be represented in SFC consumption in the European Union: a transition between the bureaucratic and the managerial formation and a highly developed managerial formation with occasional communicative practices. We found that reflecting national policy priorities would help overcome some of the structural barriers between science and policy, whereas other barriers could be addressed by designing the process to better fit with the logics of the three formations, such as the fragmentation of knowledge (bureaucratic formation) or breadth of participation (communicative formation).
... Those excluded may disproportionately rate the negative impacts of projects or policies, ignoring the positive. Thus, one key challenge for planning sustainable projects is to facilitate a dialogue encouraging reflection of issues and concerns (Meppem andBourke 1999, Thomson et al. 2003). Thus, the social choice of including end-users, the communities impacted by the project, and various public agencies has been argued as being crucial for implementing sustainable projects. ...
Sustainable construction requires improvements not only in the environmental and economic
pillars of sustainability but also in its social one. Social sustainability is fundamentally about people,
both current and future. For the construction industry, this concept needs to integrate processes for
improving social safety, health and well-being during the project life cycle. While social sustainability
involves action during the construction and operation phases of a project, improved benefits are possible
if it is first addressed during the planning and design phases where the greatest opportunities exist for
influencing project performance. To help address this issue, this paper introduces a preliminary
model for social sustainability considerations during construction project design. Based on a synthesis
of the current literature, this model includes four primary dimensions of social sustainability: community
involvement, corporate social responsibility, safety through design, and social design. This model aims
to create awareness about social dimensions that must be taken into account for truly sustainable
construction. The model provides a starting point that can be refined with the input of experts from
academia and industry.
... The normalization of market-oriented conceptions of sustainability facilitates intersubjective realms, where ideas surrounding how to create sustainable landscapes are conceptually limited to those that befit the dominant narrative. The problem with this narrative of language, process, and practice is that by assiduously adhering to it, policy-makers appear to be attempting to solve environmental problems, such as anthropogenic climate change, while ignoring or avoiding the institutionalized truths, such as globalized economics, that created the vast majority of these problems in the first place [54]. Moreover, the regime of truth that is ecological modernization informs a model of environmental governance that requires specific historical conditions, such as well-functioning institutional settings, significant private purchasing power, and a citywide ecosocial morality [1]. ...
In recent decades, urban greening has been conceptualized, and subsequently marketed, as a way of making cities more sustainable. Urban greening has been actualized in large global cities, regional centers, and also in many cities in the Global South, where it has been touted as a potential solution to the urban heat island (UHI) effect and as a way of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This involves planting street trees and installing curbside gardens, bioswales, green walls, green roofs, and the redevelopment of former industrial zones into urban parklands. This paper questions the assumption that this “greening” of the city must necessarily lead to positive environmental impacts. While such infrastructure itself might be constructed with environmental principles in mind, wider questions concerning the production of such landscapes, and the consumption-orientated lifestyles of those who inhabit these urban landscapes, are seldom considered. Moreover, green aesthetics and environmental sustainability are not always as mutually inclusive as the concepts might suggest, as aesthetics are often a dominating influence in the process of planning green urban environments. This review reorients the focus on the way in which the UHI effect and CO2 emissions have been framed by utilizing Foucault’s (1980) “regimes of truth,” where environmental issues are contextualized within the “colonised lifeworld” of free-market forces. This review suggests that for sustainability to be achieved in urban contexts, the process of urban greening must move beyond quick techno-fixes through engagement in the co-production of knowledge.
... Culture is seen as a reflection of the material conditions of existence and the product of a society's dominant mode of thinking (Maser, 1999). It is not a by-product of primary economic relations, nor merely a superstructure responding to an economic base, but itself a determining agent in the shaping of history (Meppem and Bourke, 1999). Culture as a capital yields a flow of services (e.g., attitudes, morals, ethics, and information) that determines a society's relationship to the natural environment, especially its resource management strategies (Jansson et al., 1994). ...
Sustainable development has now become a general policy goal around the world.
However, this concept is open to interpretation depending on different socio‑cultural,
economic and political circumstances. This is mainly because we are now living in a
world that is characterised by heterogeneous rather than homogeneous frames of
reference, motives and interests, institutional settings and agendas. This paper provides
a brief Chinese cultural context of the sustainability discourse. It is argued that social and
cultural considerations will be crucial on the way towards the achievement of sustainable
development. Chinese interpretation of sustainability has reflected the significant influence
from the country’s unique cultural and philosophical heritage. Although the concept of
sustainable development still remains ambiguous and lacks consistency in its use, it has
allowed peoples with different backgrounds and oftenconflicting
interests to reach some
common ground upon which concrete policies can be developed and implemented toward
a sustainable future. To achieve the goal of sustainable development, it is proposed that
one of the priorities at the current stage is to maintain cultural diversity and promote
inter‑ and trans‑cultural communications.
... Ideas of transdisciplinarity and partnership in research are not new. Yet the concept of sustainable development has brought them to the fore (Meppem and Bourke 1999;Standing and Taylor 2007). Consequently, Northern approaches to combining knowledge systems, integrating stakeholders from society in attributing weight and value to knowledge generated by science, and conducting various types of action research have fruitfully been merged with a Southern perspective on integrating local actors into development agendas, bottom-up and participatory development, and local partnership (Wiesmann 2009;Zingerli 2010). ...
The present article elaborates on the specific approach to and practice of research for sustainable development as conceptualised and implemented by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North- South. At the core is the overarching understanding of sustainable development as a normative concept demanding goal-oriented collaboration among disciplines as well as co-production of knowledge at the interface of scientific communities and society. Transdisciplinarity, research partnerships, and a recursive research approach are necessary pillars in the quest to bridge disciplines and paradigms, as well as science and society in sustainability-oriented research. We argue that research for sustainable development faces major conceptual challenges related to system definition, linking to disciplinary discourses and progress, and bridging contextuality and generalisation, alongside operational challenges of conflicting reference systems, conflicting basic objectives, and complex science–society interfaces. With reference to the NCCR North-South we show how these challenges can successfully be dealt with. Finally, we argue that sustainability-oriented development research, transdisciplinarity, and research partnerships can be strengthened in science and knowledge societies by systematically addressing the basic challenges at the levels of scientific concepts and methodologies, underlying ontologies, and scientific and social interactions and collaborations, as well as at the level of management and communication. This will require major efforts within broadly based research networks backed by political commitment and support – as is the case in the NCCR North-South.
... Through the deliberative process, the search for collective interests or the common good takes precedence over individual interests. These studies, and others (O'Hara, 1996;Meppem and Bourke, 1999;Howarth and Wilson, 2006;Spash, 2008;Dietz et al., 2009;Vatn, 2009;Lo, 2013), pay particular attention to discursive exchanges between the parties involved in deliberation, since group deliberation cannot be understood without analyzing the language through which it occurs. Thus, they highlight the usefulness of Habermas' (1981) theory of communicative action for understanding how the mechanism of discussion may facilitate the actors' adoption of a moral stance. ...
... However, it is important to have a full understanding of what is meant by the term sustainable development; otherwise the outcome is likely to be far removed from development objectives, even to the point of running counter to the original intent [7]. ...
This research proposes a sustainable development evaluation index for the Taiwan Taoyuan Aerotropolis development project in response to related development strategy, planning, and future development needs. The framework for a Taiwan Taoyuan Aerotropolis Sustainable Development Index Evaluation System includes 8 aspects, 37 evaluation indices and 104 secondary evaluation indices. In determining what to include in the evaluation index, the writers referenced national sustainable development policies and invited governmental agencies involved with the project to engage in focused interviews with experts so as to enhance the drafting of the Taiwan Taoyuan Aerotropolis Sustainable Development Index Evaluation System Framework. The results of this research work can be used as a basis for evaluating the future efficacy of the Aerotropolis development.
... Those excluded may disproportionately rate the negative impacts of projects or policies, ignoring the positive. Thus, one key challenge for planning sustainable projects is to facilitate a dialogue encouraging reflection of issues and concerns (Meppem andBourke 1999, Thomson et al. 2003). Thus, the social choice of including end-users, the communities impacted by the project, and various public agencies has been argued as being crucial for implementing sustainable projects. ...
Sustainable construction requires improvements not only in the environmental and economic pillars of sustainability but also in its social one. Social sustainability is fundamentally about people, both current and future. For the construction industry, this concept needs to integrate processes for improving social safety, health and well-being during the project life cycle. While social sustainability involves action during the construction and operation phases of a project, improved benefits are possible if it is first addressed during the planning and design phases where the greatest opportunities exist for influencing project performance. To help address this issue, this paper introduces a preliminary model for social sustainability considerations during construction project design. Based on a synthesis of the current literature, this model includes four primary dimensions of social sustainability: community involvement, corporate social responsibility, safety through design, and social design. This model aims to create awareness about social dimensions that must be taken into account for truly sustainable construction. The model provides a starting point that can be refined with the input of experts from academia and industry.
... Levin 1999, Holling 2001, Folke 2003, Walker and Salt 2006. As stressed by Meppem and Bourke (1999), conventional NRM unrealistically abstracts, usually unidisciplinary, interests from real-world complexity. ...
We aimed to contribute to the field of natural resource management (NRM) by introducing an alternative systemic context-based framework for planning, research, and decision making, which we expressed practically in the development of a decision-making "tool" or method. This holistic framework was developed in the process of studying a specific catchment area, i.e., the Sand River Catchment, but we have proposed that it can be generalized to studying the complexities of other catchment areas. Using the lens of systemic resilience to think about dynamic and complex environments differently, we have reflected on the development of a systemic framework for understanding water and livelihood security under transformation in postapartheid South Africa. The unique aspect of this framework is that allows researchers and policy makers to reframe catchments as being recognizable as complex social-ecological systems, and by doing so, the possibility is opened to understand resiliency in the face of rapid transformation and crisis. Ultimately, this holistic approach can be used to understand the translation of policy into practice. We have emphasized our reflections on the development and use of the framework and the challenges and successes faced by collaborators in the process of adopting such an orientation. Because these are likely to characterize policy and decision-making processes in NRM in general, we have suggested that such a systemic framing can assist researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to adopt systems and resilience analyses in the process of planning and implementation.
... In response to criticisms of conventional environmental NMV methods for assuming respondents have well formed and informed preferences, and also for excluding various sustainability issues like rights and fairness, some economists (mainly ecological economists) have proposed and explored alternative approaches. Much of the emphasis of ecological economists (e.g., Funtowicz et al. 1990;Meppem et al. 1999) has been on enhancing quality in the social process of valuation, with deliberative and participatory fora seen as a way of continuing to help decision makers while avoiding the need for NMV studies and BCA more generally. ...
The purpose of this document was to lay the foundations for identifying an approach to economic accountability that is: (a) consistent with stated reasons for adopting a community-based strategy for environmental management; (b) cost-effective to apply given the capacities of community-based organizations; and (c) consistent with an ‘economic way of thinking’.
... For knowledge generation, participatory processes are required to involve and evolve stakeholders' perceptions and values through learning. PAR can be considered as a social learning process, requiring continuous learning and reflections on consequences of processes and policy decisions (Meppem-Gill, 1998;Meppem-Bourke, 1999). ...
A Participatory Action Research (PAR) pro-ject on conserving crop genetic resources was con-ducted in the most western landscape of Hungary. A conventional economic valuation of agro-biodiversity project turned to PAR aiming at taking specific actions with local women farmers in order to raise awareness of their important contribution to in situ conservation of local bean landraces. The paper presents both sub-stantial and methodological reflections on this project with particular attention to difficulties of participation of local female farmers. Their contribution to local agricultural production and cultural heritage has be-come more visible during the bean festival. The social need for and special responsibility of the researchers attempting to initiate ecological projects calls into question existing social relations that structure in rural areas.
... The need for broad participatory processes and stakeholder consultation in natural resource management is widely recognized in the literature (e.g. Meppem and Bourke 1999, Venema and van den Breemer 1999, Meppem 2000, Roe et al. 2001, Harrison et al. 2001, Lackey 2001, Norton and Steinemann 2001, van der Linde et al. 2001, Food and Agricultural Organisation 2003, Murphree 2003, Hay and McKenzie 2005, Misund and Skjoldal 2005, Vierros et al. 2006. There is little guidance on how to identify stakeholders and evaluate their interests. ...
... Many authors offered new epistemological standpoint for ecological economics (Tacconi, 1998;Norgaard, 1994;Funtowitz-Ravetz, 1993). O' Hara (1996) has introduced the idea of discourses and discursive ethics to the field of ecological economics and environmental evaluation, while Meppem similarly, has brought communicative approaches to ecological economics (Meppem-Bourke, 1999;Meppem-Gill, 1998). Aldred and Jacobs (2000) have offered Citizens' Jury, another constructive methodological proposal for ecological economics. ...
In this paper, we present a complex participa-tory rural development project in a socio-economically disadvantageous floodplain area of Hungary derived from a framework and common ground of ecological economics. We discuss the difficulties encountered during the fieldwork and reflections of the research team on the research processes. This still ongoing re-search project directed towards the issues of bottom-up sustainability planning can be conceptualised as a mu-tual learning between local and scientific perspectives with a strong commitment to a participatory approach. Its community-based appreciative research framework anchored in a hermeneutic and constructivist episte-mology puts special emphasis on the systematic testing of ecological economics' theoretical bases in live-action contexts and development of deliberative insti-tutional arrangements in order to offer valuable meth-odological tools and insights for ecological economics.
... For knowledge generation, participatory processes are required to involve and evolve stakeholders' perceptions and values through learning. PAR can be considered as a social learning process, requiring continuous learning and reflections on consequences of processes and policy decisions (Meppem-Gill, 1998;Meppem-Bourke, 1999). ...
A Participatory Action Research (PAR) project on conserving crop genetic resources was conducted in the most western landscape of Hungary. A conventional economic valuation of agro-biodiversity project turned to PAR aiming at taking specific actions with local women farmers in order to raise awareness of their important contribution to in situ conservation of local bean landraces. The paper presents both sub-stantial and methodological reflections on this project with particular attention to difficulties of participation of local female farmers. Their contribution to local agricultural production and cultural heritage has become more visible during the bean festival. The social need for and special responsibility of the researchers attempting to initiate ecological projects calls into question existing social relations that structure in rural areas.
... RiVAS values categories were put forward and selected by a small group of RiVAS developers in a meeting in 2008 (see Section 5), and the need for procedures that facilitate democratic deliberation about relevant categories of value remains to be acknowledged and developed. Meanwhile, by measuring some categories and not others, RiVAS is liable to systematically exclude groups of people and particular 'ways of knowing' the world, especially those which cannot be quantified or translated across spatial contexts (Meppem and Bourke, 1999). Hillman et al. (2008) refer to such exclusions as barriers, or institutional obstructions to authentic connections between people and landscapes. ...
Life in the Anthropocene is characterized by many environmental problems, and unfortunately, more continue to emerge. Although much effort is focused on identifying problems, this does not necessarily translate to solutions. This situation extends to the training environment, where students are often adept at understanding and dissecting problems but are rarely explicitly equipped with the skills and mindset to solve them. Herein, a group of undergraduate students and their instructors consider the concept of becoming environmental problem solvers. We first identified themes associated with historical and contemporary environmental successes that emerged from our reading, or more specifically, we identify the elements that underlie environmental success stories. The key elements of success involved setting clear objectives, identifying the scale of the problem, learning from failure, and consulting diverse knowledge sources. Next, we reflected on the skills and mindset that would best serve environmental problem solvers and enable future successes. Essential skills include innovative and critical thinking, ability to engage in collaborative teamwork, capacity to work across boundaries, and resilience. In terms of mindset, key attributes include the need for courage, enthusiasm and commitment, optimism, open mindedness, tenacity, and adaptability. We conclude with a brief discussion of ideas for revising training and curriculum to ensure that students are equipped with the aforementioned skills and mindset. The ideas shared here should contribute to ensuring that the next generation of learners have the ability to develop solutions that will work for the benefit of the environment, biodiversity, and humanity. Solving environmental problems will increasingly fall to the next generation, so it is time to ensure that they are prepared for that task.
Contemporary approaches to river repair are economically driven. A competitive (Medean) worldview separates humans from nature, managing rivers as resource and service providers using top-down, command and control practices. In contrast, a cooperative, collaborative, more-than-human (Gaian) approach to living with rivers sees humans as part of nature, conceptualizing the Earth System as a living and emergent superorganism. Bottom-up inclusionary approaches to engagement, participation and governance are framed as holistic and ongoing commitments to place-based, catchment-specific endeavours. Contrasting approaches to conservation planning, restoration activities and co-governance and co-management arrangements are engendered through these alternative framings. Recent river rights legislation offers an intriguing prospect to reframe societal relations to rivers.
Brazil is much privileged with biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, the poor implementation of its environmental policies may offer fertile ground for corruption, thereby endangering ecosystem protection. It is widely agreed that corruption thrives where impunity prevails. This view lies with principal-agent theory. Nevertheless, the limited outcomes of anti-corruption interventions worldwide cast doubts on whether corruption can be sufficiently explained by principal-agent theory alone. In this context, we discuss corruption in Brazil’s environmental governance in light of the theoretical viewpoints of collective action and problem-solving. Drawing on these two perspectives, we argue that environmental policy instruments, such as environmental licensing, might be less prone to corruption by eliminating their major inefficiencies. That is, procedural problems (e.g., excessive bureaucracy, ambiguity in legal procedures and lack of electronic information systems) and absence of legitimacy and scientific credibility. Finally, we introduce the anti-corruption coalition Watershed Environmental Net—Coastal Watershed, from Public Prosecutor’s Office of Paraná State, and touch on corruption from a more closely principal-agent perspective. These three perspectives shed light on distinct and yet important issues regarding curbing corruption in Brazil’s environmental governance. Therefore, it is imperative that they be viewed as complementary rather than alternative approaches.
This chapter presents the Media Watch on Climate Change, a publicly available Web intelligence portal that collects, aggregates and visualizes large archives of digital content from multiple stakeholder groups (documents and user comments from news media, blogs, user-generated content from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, corporate and NGO Web sites, and a range of other sources). An visual dashboard with trend charts and complex map projections not only shows how often and where environmental information is published, but also provides a real-time account of concepts that stakeholders associate with climate change. Positive or negative sentiment is computed automatically, which sheds light on the impact of education and public outreach campaigns that target environmental literacy, and helps to gain a better understanding of how others perceive climate-related issues.
In recent decades, urban greening has been conceptualized, and subsequently marketed, as a way of making cities more sustainable. Urban greening has been actualized in large global cities, regional centers, and also in many cities in the Global South, where it has been touted as a potential solution to the urban heat island (UHI) effect and as a way of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This involves planting street trees and installing curbside gardens, bioswales, green walls, green roofs, and the redevelopment of former industrial zones into urban parklands. This paper questions the assumption that this “greening” of the city must necessarily lead to positive environmental impacts. While such infrastructure itself might be constructed with environmental principles in mind, wider questions concerning the production of such landscapes, and the consumption-orientated lifestyles of those who inhabit these urban landscapes, are seldom considered. Moreover, green aesthetics and environmental sustainability are not always as mutually inclusive as the concepts might suggest, as aesthetics are often a dominating influence in the process of planning green urban environments. This review reorients the focus on the way in which the UHI effect and CO2 emissions have been framed by utilizing Foucault's (1980) “regimes of truth,” where environmental issues are contextualized within the “colonised lifeworld” of free-market forces. This review suggests that for sustainability to be achieved in urban contexts, the process of urban greening must move beyond quick techno-fixes through engagement in the co-production of knowledge.
Universities worldwide have recognized their responsibilities for transformative learning to promote sustainability. To meet this challenge requires extensive curriculum innovation, but substantial progress has been made only in some institutions. Expedient strategies are urgently required to reshape teaching and research to make a significant contribution to sustainability through higher education. This chapter describes some influential initiatives emerging from a single project concerned with education for sustainability. These initiatives include a dedicated community of practice, professional staff development activities, and ongoing action research in teaching by a few sustainability champions. Several key influences on outcomes are identified. In particular, it is the formative, defining relationships that academics have with their disciplines, or professional fields, that influence the diffusion of sustainability education. This means that the impetus for sustainability education must begin from within local disciplinary contexts, if it is to engage and resonate with teaching and research staff. From this point, it was possible to develop the tools and processes to support a wider university community in recognizing responsibilities for sustainability education. Finally, a model explains the synergistic effects of these initiatives, emerging from this single project, for collaborating to build an effective multidisciplinary frontline for curriculum change.
A critical review of the environmental and ecological literature on sustainable development reveals a lack of a conceptual framework for understanding sustainability. A review shows that the definitions of sustainability differ from one disciplinary field to another. Therefore, this article aims to conceptually synthesize the interdisciplinary literature on sustainability, from environmental and ecological perspectives. This article critically explores environmental and ecological literature on sustainability recognizing the views of the two perspectives, and then synthesizes concepts, where each concept has distinctive synergetic meanings. The analytical process elaborates a set of concepts that together assemble the conceptual framework for enhancing our understanding about sustainability. The research question which this article tries to answer is whether environmental and ecological economics as two perspectives adequately provide synergetic views for enhancing our understanding in view of sustainability. If so, what is the conceptual framework for enhancing our understanding about sustainability?
The field of extension is quite dynamic and new con fi gurations and alternative extension systems and approaches have been emerging. This chapter explores the recent developments and debates critical questions such as: Is extension still relevant? What are the current trends and challenges in the field of agriculture and rural development and how are they affecting the structure, mission and delivery of extension services? How is extension being considered in the frame of the EU Common Agriculture Policy? We stress the growing involvement of multi-stakeholder networks of different sorts in extension work (with emphasis on private-profit or non-profit?organisations) as well as the adoption of participatory approaches. We also analyse the complex relationships between extension agents and rural actors. The major focus is on the changing roles of extension agents, underlining their current roles as learning-innovation-change facilitators and knowledge brokers. Examples drawn from proceedings of the European IFSA Symposia specifically address European cases, and illustrate the analysis.
In this article, the authors review reactions to recent events in irrigated regions in north-western New South Wales, as reported in the print media. Discourse analysis is applied to the media reports to identify differences in perception about irrigationenvironment interactions. Our aim is to provide a simple introduction to the method of discourse analysis, followed by a brief discussion of how the results of that analysis might be applied to environmental dispute management. Critical analysis (using discourse analysis) of the language used by advocates of different arguments may provide a number of potential benefits to both public policy makers and industry organisations. The method could be used in the implicit mediatory environment of public policy development, the explicit mediatory environment of dispute management, and for industry public relations analysis.
The Royal Society report updates the anthropogenic impacts on ecosystems services and our inability to rise to this challenge. Sustainable development is argued to be a linguistic device that has been instrumental in deflecting us from addressing the paradox at the heart of the oxymoron. The relationships between the social, environmental, and economic are explored together with the utility of the I = PAT equation, with reference to the Hardin Taboo, Jevons's, and Easterlin's paradoxes. A more prominent role for phronesis in the management of human affairs and the adoption of ethics as the language for dealing with such issues are advocated.
This action-research project aimed to test a participatory mapping methodology using Google Earth to develop shared understandings among participants about sustainability and climate change. The process focused on improving knowledge uptake and enabling dialogue among participants in order to develop adaptation strategies for Rottnest Island, off the Western Australian coast. Project results indicate increased levels of knowledge and commitment to active involvement in sustainability and climate change issues. Common threads came together in a coherent set of recommendations that will contribute to ongoing climate change and sustainability planning by the Rottnest Island Authority. Major conclusions drawn include: the usefulness of Google Earth for participatory planning for climate adaptation and sustainability; the methodology enables social, economic, ecological and cultural layers to be considered without any having primacy; care must be taken to ensure knowledge and power differential are managed effectively; and, the methodology brought together stakeholders and scientists to co-produce knowledge and decisions.
Federal agencies, scientists, and others are increasingly calling for ecosystem management as a new approach to resource management. This approach represents a change in philosophy for resource management that will require changes in how we view nature, science and politics. This paper draws upon critical theory to examine this shift in philosophy. The paper focuses on the influence of Enlightenment thought on U.S. Western resource policy and examines four dimensions including the relationship between humans and nature; the concept of rationality; the nature of science; and social relations among humans. Alternative theoretical principles suggested by ecosystem management are discussed. Examples of natural resource management projects that reflect ecosystem management in practice are also presented.
Keywords: natural resource policy, political thory, ecosystem management, U.S. west land management, critical theory, enlightenment thought.
The relation between science and governmental policy is one of functional authority. Whenever policy makers rely on the data of scientific research they admit their belief in a scientific System which has produced that Information. This belief or trust in an authority is functional since it is not founded on the veracity and blessed knowledge of individual research workers but on the competency of a scientific System (Luhmann, 1973). This trust in the transfer of truth by science is based on a functional neces-sity. The complexity of certain questions and problems is so enormous that we have to depend on an intermediate party for the production of informa-tion. Such information can only be utilized in a meaningful way when available in a reduced and simplified form fit for practical purposes. The scientific System can fulfil a social function since science is acknowledged as being a reliable source of supplying and production of information. The appeal to an authority depicts this function. We do appeal to an authority in those cases where we lack the ability, or do not have at our disposal the means, to verify particular Statements. In such cases social actions are freed from discussions. In situations where we are forced to act without delay we can make the right decisions because of our trust in an authority. We assume the truth of the Statements of an authority and we orientate our actions in accordance with the truth of such Statements.
This paper uses the concepts of human carrying capacity and natural capital to argue that prevailing economic assumptions regarding urbanization and the sustainability of cities must be revised in light of global ecological change. While we are used to thinking of cities as geographically discrete places, most of the land "occupied' by their residents lies far beyond their borders. In effect, through trade and natural flows of ecological goods and services, all urban regions appropriate the carrying capacity of distant "elsewhere', creating dependencies that may not be ecologically or geopolitically stable or secure. The global competition for remaining stocks of natural capital and their productive capacity therefore explains much of the environment-development related tension between North and South. Such macro-ecological realities are often invisible to conventional economic analyses yet have serious implications for world development and sustainability in an era of rapid urbanization and increasing ecological uncertainty. -from Author
The services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocksthat produce them are critical to the functioning of the
Earth’s life-support system. They contribute to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, and therefore represent
part of the total economic value of the planet.We have estimated the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services
for 16 biomes, based on published studies and a few original calculations. For the entire biosphere, the value (most of
which is outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of US$16–54 trillion (1012) per year, with an average of
US$33trillion per year. Because of the nature of the uncertainties, thismust be considered a minimum estimate. Global
gross national product total is around US$18 trillion per year.
As an extension of my recent policymaking chapter, Institutionalist Policymaking [Hayden 1993, 283-331], this paper deals with policy criteria in an instrumentalist or pragmatist framework. The works of Charles Peirce and Thorstein Veblen emphasized criteria-Peirce with explicit discussion of their character and Veblen with active application in his evaluations of various economies and institutions. Few scholars have continued in their tradition; Seymour Melman [1983], with his excellent Veblenian application of criteria in industrial policy studies, is a notable exception. Interest in the subject of criteria, except by individualist philosophers, has been scarce in the twentieth century until recently. Thirty years ago, it was unique to find a discussion of criteria even briefly presented in books concerned with policymaking, planning, political science, economics, and the like. Today, such discussion has become much more robust. Given the fact that we are the political descendants of the Greeks, one might have expected evaluative criteria to have been a major concern all along. As the interest in the subject has grown, so has the breadth of its definition. In current literature, the term "criteria" is often used interchangeably with standards, goals, decision rules, particle levels, and so forth. For the purpose here, its original definition as standards for judgment is recaptured-policy judgment in this case. In a policy paradigm, policy criteria are prior to policy evaluation, and policy evaluation is prior to and determines the establishment of goals, program standards, decision rules, and so forth. Or stated differently, we need to judge policy before we can know what goals, decision rules, or particle standards are to be implemented. For example, applying the decision rule of producing where marginal costs are equal to marginal benefits is not a policy judgment. The judgments have been made prior to that decision by establishing a system that calls for such a misguided rule.
Ecology and economics share the same Greek root. Both address complex systems. Ecology consists of numerous approaches to understanding natural systems: energetics, population biology, food-web models, hierarchy theory to mention just a few. Within ecology, field knowledge and the reporting of new observations are well respected. Economics, on the other hand, is dominated by one pattern of thinking and standard of “proof”, the market model and econometrics. Within economics, field knowledge and observations per se are little valued. Agreement on a correct method is frequently taken as an indication of the maturity of a science. The argument is developed in this paper that all the aspects of complex systems can only be understood through multiple methodologies. The agreement on method within economics, however, seems to reflect stronger pressures within the discipline for conformity than for truth relative to ecology. Since ecological economics seeks to understand a larger system than either economics or ecology seeks to understand, a diversity of methodologies is appropriate and pressures to eliminate methodologies for the sake of conformity should be avoided.
Discursive ethics has its origin in the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As an applied ethic it is also associated with practical philosophy. In this paper discursive ethics is discussed as a conceptual and practical framework for ecosystems valuation and environmental policy. The discussion focuses on three main strengths of discursive ethics: (1) it offers an integrated process for ecosystems valuation; (2) it offers a decision-making framework for responding to uncertainty and risk and the reality of action-in-indeterminacy; (3) it offers a process for deconstructing common valuation concepts and identifying conditions for their critical reconstruction. The theoretical discussion is followed by a case study example which illustrates the usefulness of discursive ethics in identifying valuation biases hidden behind disciplinary assumptions and conceptual norms. These include cultural norms of rationality, information biases which consider “hard facts” over “soft values”, and disciplinary valuation biases which distinguish between “hard” and “soft” expert contributions. As the case study illustrates, a successful application of discursive ethics in ecosystems valuation and environmental policy demands sensitivity to such underlying biases. Beyond its policy relevance discursive ethics may also offer a framework for an extended peer discourse through which new foci in research and education can be identified.
Collaborative learning is an innovation in public participation theory and practice. It is designed to address the complexity and controversy inherent in public land management by combining elements of systems methods and mediation/dispute management. Collaborative learning activities put more emphasis on experiential learning theory, systemic improvement, and constructive discourse than do typical public participation programs. Collaborative learning was used in a series of public meetings held as part of the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area land management planning process. The final plan incorporated several ideas that emerged from the process, and a follow-up survey of participants found favorable impressions of the collaborative learning framework.
Sumario: I. Developing an ecological economic world view -- II. Accounting, modeling and analysis -- III. Institutional changes and case studies.
The services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocks that produce them are critical to the functioning of the Earth's life-support system. They contribute to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, and therefore represent part of the total economic value of the planet. We have estimated the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services for 18 biomes, based on published studies and a few original calculations. For the entire biosphere, the value (most of which in outside the market) in estimated to be in the range of US$16-54 trillion (1012) per year, with in average of US$33 trillion per year. Because of the nature of the uncertainties, thin must be considered a minimum estimate. Global gross national product total is around US$18 trillion per year.
Discourse ethics (communicative ethics) as developed by K.-O. Apel and J. Habermas postulates a number of procedural conditions for rational consensus formation with regard both to normative and factual issues. In the first part of this chapter I present an outline of the theoretical and the practical level of discourse ethics. I claim that discourse ethics provides a critical yardstick for evaluating processes of consensus formation about public policy decisions. I introduce the normative concept of the “consensual etiology” of an existing institutional arrangement. In the second part of the chapter I apply the concept of a consensual etiology in order to evaluate critically the history of public consensus formation about the civil use of nuclear power. Public consensus formation about nuclear power falls short of certain morally relevant constraints. Furthermore, I discuss how political decision making concerning nuclear power relies on “mandated science”, i.e. science used or interpreted for the purposes of making policy, as a questionable Surrogate of morally required consensus.
This paper explores the ways we learn about value in deliberative settings. In planning and many kinds of participatory processes more generally, such learning occurs not just through arguments, not just through the re-framing of ideas, not just through the critique of expert knowledge, but through transformations of relationships and responsibilities, of networks and competence, of collective memory and memberships.
Some philosophers in recent discussions concerned with current ecological crises have attempted to address and sometimes to utilize poststructuralist thought. Yet few of their studies have delineated the ecological orientation of a specific poststructuralist. In this paper, I provide a discussion of the naturalistic ontology embraced by the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, one of the most significant voices in poststructuralism. I interpret Deleuze as holding an ecologically informed perspective that emphasizes the human place within nature while encouraging awareness of and respect for the differences of interconnected life on the planet. I also suggest that this view may be joined with Deleuze's innovative ethical-political approach, which he refers to as micropolitics, to create new ways of thinking and feeling that support social and political transformation with respect to the flourishing of ecological diversity. Finally, I briefly show how Deleuze's ecological orientation compares to several versions of ecological theory and politics.
This book details work by the Town & Country Planning Association on the need for a social and planning dimension to policies concerning sustainability. It begins by arguing for changes in both the social and planning frameworks of society. The book then indicates particular areas which require consideration from the sustainability point of view. These include ecosystems and natural resources, energy policy, pollution and waste, the environment, public and private transport, economic development, and urban form and development. The book concludes with suggestions of how to incorporate sustainability by using an imaginary town as a demonstration of the ideas suggested throughout the book. -S.Tanner
The author argues that ecological economics is developing a blind spot: an unwillingness to consider explicitly social and natural power relations. Following a review of the concept of power in neo-classical economics, ecological economics, political science and sociology, an ecocentric conception of power is developed. The author defines power as 'the production of (or the capacity to produce) effects' and examines some of the implications of this re-definition for natural and social relations. He argues that ecological economics must situate itself within a broader theoretical framework that recognizes the historicity of modern social structures and the need for a fundamental restructuring of social power relations to achieve strong sustainability.
It is generally assumed that sustainable development and economic growth are compatible objectives. Because this assumption has been left unspecified, the debate on sustainability and growth has remained vague and confusing. Attempts at specification not only involve clarification of the interrelation of the two concepts, but also, we argue, require a philosophical approach in which the concepts of sustainability and economic growth are analyzed in the context of our frame of reference. We suggest that if the notion of sustainability is to be taken seriously, the conflicting conceptual and normative orientations between the two concepts require the reconsideration of our frame of reference.
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Planning arguments are characteristi cally expressed as stories. As they both tell and manage these stories, planners maintain and redesign com munities. The essay describes five management (and hence design) modes for dealing with narrative conflicts. It focuses particularly on the fifth (postmodernist) strategy that sustains the differences inherent in a field of open moral communi ties.
Science always evolves, responding to its leading challenges as they change through history. After centuries of triumph and
optimism, science is now called on to remedy the pathologies of the global industrial system of which it forms the basis.
Whereas science was previously understood as steadily advancing in the certainty of our knowledge and control of the natural
world, now science is seen as coping with many uncertainties in policy issues of risks and the environment. In response, new
styles of scientific activity are being developed. The reductionist, analytical world-view which divides systems into ever
smaller elements, studied by ever more esoteric specialties, is being replaced by a systemic, synthetic and humanistic approach.
The old dichotomies of facts and values, and of knowledge and ignorance, are being transcended. Natural systems are recognized
as dynamic and complex; those involving interactions with humanity are “emergent,” including properties of reflection and
contradiction. The science appropriate to this new condition will be based on the assumptions of unpredictability, incomplete
control, and a plurality of legitimate perspectives.
Since planning is a normative activity one would expect public planning to be based on moral foundations. Unfortunately, post-WWII mainstream planning theory became divorced from ethical theory. Ironically, this cleavage reflected an erroneous shared premise—that each discipline was technical in nature and should eschew value questions. This fallacious premise is now largely rejected. Contemporary planning theory fully recognizes the inherently normative nature of public planning processes. However, it still makes little use of normative ethical theory to illuminate the issues raised by this recognition. In this article we will present a spectrum of five normative ethical theories and show how these theories provide the underlying normative foundation for six theories of planning. Thus many debates about planning theories can be understood as debates about underlying normative ethical theories
The paper contributes to the growing body of work on planning discourse. In the context of the current 'greening' of British land-use planning, it poses the question: ''How is the term environment, articulated within planning discourse?'' With the use of material from development plans and development-control decision letters, an analysis is made of the term 'environment' which distinguishes 'mundane and 'sublime' interpretations. The function of the texts analysed is then related to the dominant meaning given to the term. This raises further questions concerning the current preoccupation with using the land-use planning system to implement environmental policy and identifies the problems of moving between strategic planning and detailed development-control levels, a problem reflected in and compounded by the distinct operation of planning discourse at the two levels.
A variety of collective movements (including women, gay males and lesbians, African Americans, and members of the 3rd world), in arguing that members have been denied their own voice in establishing the conditions of their lives and in determining their own identity and subjectivity, pose a serious challenge to psychology's suitability as a discipline capable of responding to the full diversity of human nature. This article explores these claims on behalf of voice, develops a discursive framework as an alternative to current psychological analysis, and suggests how that framework would require a transformation in current psychological theory, research, and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The basic thesis of the work is that environmental problems are only to be solved by people - people who will be required to make value judgements in conflicts that go beyond narrowly conceived human concerns. Thus people require not only an ethical system, but a way of conceiving the world and themselves such that the intrinsic value of life and nature is obvious, a system based on 'deep ecological principles'. The book encourages readers to identify their own series of such parameters - their own ecosophies. Ecology, Comunity and Lifestyle will appeal to philosophers, specialists working on environmental issues, and the more general reader who is interested in learning some of the foundational ideas of the rapidly expanding field of environmental philosophy.
The public domain is said to be necessary for a "just and attractive" democratic culture, for meaningful freedom of speech, and for the economically efficient production of information. Though each of these justifications counsels robust access to information, what kind of public domain we should have depends largely on why we want one in the first place. This Note argues that social science research on human motivation suggests that we make the public domain most efficient only by making it more liberal and more republican. In other words, the leading economic theory of the public domain, enriched by an understanding of pro-social motivation, is compatible with liberal and republican theories. This Note organizes research on pro-social motivation around the motivation-fostering effects of empowerment, community, and fairness. By incorporating these norms into the cultural architecture of the public domain, we can promote greater information production at less cost than by relying solely on the intellectual property system's traditional tools of exclusion.
Environmentally sustainable development's final aim is to bring a better quality of life for all time. To reach that objective, some economists see man-made capital as the main constraining factor for economic growth. Others argue that such a unidirectional search for growth will not bring economic development since natural capital is the main constraint to long-term growth. A reconciliatory position is proposed in this paper by which the search for improved general welfare over time can only be pursued with consideration of the earth's sustainable capability to produce the resources we need and to absorb the waste we generate. Once the sustainability constraints are set, a benefit/cost framework is useful to establish development project priorities. Projects need to be monitored carefully and be the object of homeostatic feedbacks similar to those encountered in natural ecosystems, if they are to fit in a strategy of sustainable development. Following this approach of appraisal and monitoring proejcts once an appropriate policy framework has been set in place, development banks are attempting to translate the concept of sustainability into economic development incrementally, project by project. -from Authors
Mark Sagoff draws on the last twenty years of debate over the foundations of environmentalism in this comprehensive revision of The Economy of the Earth. Posing questions pertinent to consumption, cost-benefit analysis, the normative implications of neo-Darwinism, the role of the natural in national history, and the centrality of the concept of place in environmental ethics, he analyses social policy in relation to the environment, pollution, the workplace, and public safely and health. Sagoff distinguishes ethical from economic questions and explains which kinds of concepts, arguments, and processes are appropriate to each. He offers a critique 'preference' and 'willingness to pay' as measures of value in environmental economics and defends political, cultural, aesthetic, and ethical reasons to protect the natural environment.
The major theme of the following discussion is the importance of a transdisciplinary approach to guide sustainability-related planning and management activities. The proposed approach involves much more than the usual interaction between partners from different disciplines. A revised process is needed to allow real cooperation in sustainability planning. This process will require a more open recognition of the subjective priorities that become the framework of sustainable development issues of various interest groups and disciplines. The sustainable development agenda should be more geared towards learning processes than projected future outcomes. Learning is enhanced through a participatory framework inclusive of stakeholder interests. Insights from a broad range of disciplinary areas including the science of complexity, sociology, philosophy, law, economics and management are presented to support this position. The conventional stranglehold of disciplinary thinking in policy circles limits the capacity of our decision makers to unravel the complexity of all real world environmental policy and management problems. Policy making needs to embody respect for that complexity and allow flexibility to promote perpetually evolving learning. As a fundamentally transdisciplinary framework, ecological economics has some prospect to represent these interests in a purposeful and necessarily pragmatic way.
The conventional economic paradigm assumes that tastes and preferences are exogenous to the economic system, and that the economic problem consists of optimally satisfying those preferences. Tastes and preferences usually do not change rapidly and, in the short term, this assumption makes sense. Sustainability is an inherently long-term problem and in the long run it does not make sense to assume tastes and preferences are fixed and given. If preferences are expected to change over time and under the influence of education, advertising, changing cultural assumptions, etc., the old assumption of `consumer sovereignty' is not adequate. Different criteria of optimality are needed. How preferences change, how they relate to the goal of sustainability, and how they can or should be actively influenced to satisfy the new criteria needs to be determined. Ecological economics has emphasized the three rank ordered goals of ecological sustainability, fair distribution, and allocative efficiency. This paper examines how preferences evolve and change over time and the implications of this for developing policies that meet these three goals in democratic societies.
Positivist philosophy has dominated scientific research throughout most of the twentieth century. Positivism has been discredited within the philosophy of science but this has only had limited impact on research practices in the social and natural sciences. Economists have called for the adoption of positivism in economics, however, economic methodologists have noted that this application has not taken place and, because of the limitations of positivism, it is unlikely that it will take place. Ecological economists should learn from the methodological failures of economics and look for alternatives. Since the 1970s, several alternative paradigms to positivism have emerged. Post-normal science and constructivism are critically considered and their significance for the discipline of ecological economics is addressed in this paper. I propose a modification of the paradigmatic basis of constructivism and suggest that the revised constructivist paradigm should be seriously considered for adoption by ecological economists. I also point out that there are complementarities between post-normal and constructivist methodologies that deserve further exploration. This could enrich the methodological base of ecological economics.
The basic thesis of the work is that environmental problems are only to be solved by people - people who will be required to make value judgements in conflicts that go beyond narrowly conceived human concerns. Thus people require not only an ethical system, but a way of conceiving the world and themselves such that the intrinsic value of life and nature is obvious, a system based on 'deep ecological principles'. The book encourages readers to identify their own series of such parameters - their own ecosophies. Ecology, Comunity and Lifestyle will appeal to philosophers, specialists working on environmental issues, and the more general reader who is interested in learning some of the foundational ideas of the rapidly expanding field of environmental philosophy.
Sumario: The new environmental conflict -- Discourse analysis -- The historical roots of ecological modernization -- Accumulating knowledge, accumulating pollution?. Ecological modernization in the United Kingdom -- The micro-powers of apocalypse: ecological modernization in the Netherlands -- Ecological modernization: discourse and institutional change Bibliografía: P. 297-318