Simon BeaudoinFifty years after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), a comprehensive environmental governance architecture is still needed. This article investigates the potential for adapting policies to synergies among socio-ecological issues. Aiming to identify promising avenues for transformative change, it presents lenses through which adapted governance arrangements across sectors can be crafted. The guiding question of the research asks How can interdependent social and environmental issues be governed synergistically? Seeking to move beyond inconsistencies, dreadlocks, fragmentation, and overlaps in global environmental governance, it argues in favour of a comprehensive approach to the governance of socio-ecological issues. Through multidisciplinary lenses, the paper offers pragmatic pathways toward governing synergies among social and ecological spheres and building adapted governance architecture. I first identify key connections stretching across the Earth System and societies. Second, I identify interdependencies and overlaps between areas where integrated and coordinated governance arrangements could prove beneficial. Third, building on the notion of synergies, I propose a framework for their integration. Based on the analysis of international, national, and local realities and programs, I show that synergies can be harnessed under a comprehensive multi-level framework, within common timeframes, and lead to concerted actions. This paper brings together the theoretical and empirical insights of the last decades of research in social and natural sciences to develop governance architectures that work ‘beyond silos’. It closes with the investigation of how governing synergies could help achieve collective goals. Ultimately, it aims to support the work underway to deploy and support solutions to contemporary socio-ecological issues. Keywords: Synergies; Transformations; Governance Architecture; Policy Synergies; Socio-ecological issues; Policy mixes; Policy integration; Multidisciplinarity.
Sustainability in a turbulent future: A horizon scan of necessary leadership capabilities
Christopher Ives
In the context of impending climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse, future scenarios are often framed as two possible pathways: system ‘breakdown’ where planetary thresholds are transgressed or ‘breakthrough’ where societies are reoriented towards sustainability. However, growing evidence highlights interactions that may accelerate feedbacks among phenomena such as climate extremes, crop failure, energy stress and geopolitical conflict. To date, there has been scant consideration of the kind of leadership that will be required to guide future action in this context of accelerating ecological, socio-cultural and political turbulence. This study aimed to address this gap through an interview-based horizon scanning exercise to explore (1) what mental models of the future do environmental practitioners possess? (2) what challenges to leading change may emerge with increasing uncertainty and turbulence? and (3) what skills and competencies may be required to deliver effective change in 2040? While horizon scanning has been widely used to anticipate future trends or events, this study innovatively applies it to capacities for leading change. 28 members of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) from various professional contexts were interviewed by students from University of Nottingham in March 2023. Thematic coding of transcripts was employed to elicit key insights, and deliberative discussion amongst students and IEMA staff used to distil core challenges for future sustainability leadership. Results showed that environmental professionals displayed limited awareness of future global systemic complexities and how these may challenge current leadership norms. In many instances there was a disconnection between personal visions of the future and current professional practices. Anticipatory competence for sustainability (c.f. Wiek et al., 2011) therefore must be extended to include future practical responses. There is an urgent need to translate insights from global sustainability science to practical leadership. Communities of practice such as IEMA will be vital in this endeavour.
Cross-sectoral partnerships & knowledge co-production to activate regenerative place-based mindsets in youth
Angela Moriggi
Young people are key stakeholders in the sustainable transformations of any territory, and yet often left out of planning and decision-making processes. Youth engagement is crucial not only to voice ideas and desires, but also to enhance knowledge and skills, including the capacity to think and act in regenerative ways. This is especially needed in rural areas affected by marginalization, depopulation, ecological degradation, and socio-economic decay, amongst others issues. Such processes often push young people away from their territories, in search of “better” opportunities in urban centres. This presentation focuses on a partnership established amongst inter-disciplinary scholars at the University of Padova and a local Foundation (Fondazione Angelini – Centre for Mountain Studies) active in a rural area in the Italian South-Eastern Alps, within the context of two concurrent (2022-2024) projects: VERVE and RIGENERA MONTAGNA. Both projects aim to enhance young people’s awareness around key sustainability topics, including biodiversity loss and conservation, sustainable water management, place-based regeneration, rural areas abandonment and rewilding processes, and the climate crises. We combine scientific and technical knowledge with emotional and embodied approaches, to elicit participants’ sense of place, care, and agency. To do so, we experiment with innovative creative, visual, and experiential methods (also outdoor), engaging youth between 16 and 30 years of age. In the presentation, we focus on a series of Creative Labs that combine the use of Photo-Voice with nature-based experiential and somatic exercises. We introduce the conceptual framework guiding the activities, which aims to activate “regenerative mindsets”, understood here as ways of thinking, beliefs, and assumptions that value the interconnections between humans and non-humans, and that inform practices for the well-being and thriving of both. We also provide key insights regarding the process of knowledge co-production undergoing between the actors engaged in the partnership, highlighting crucial enabling and dis-enabling factors.
Re-imagining “Societal Readiness” in Research and Innovation Policy for Transformation
Michael Bernstein
An increasing concern of research and innovation (R&I) policy in Europe, in the context of the twin green and digital transitions, is to ensure scientific, technological, and social innovations do not undermine transformation for sustainability. There has been increasing attention to aligning R&I to similar ends across European R&I policy Framework Programmes. One may observe the success of such efforts over the long-term, for example, with gender equality—started in Framework Programme 5, and now, several decades later, an eligibility requirement for all organizations seeking European Research funding in Framework Programme 9 (although still far from fully realized). In Framework Programme 8 (H2020), the predominant character of efforts to center societal concerns could be found in the “societal challenges” funding pillar, as well as a cross-cutting set of concerns: “responsible research and innovation” (RRI). Responsible research and innovation sought to enhance a general regard of and care for future social and environmental impacts of research. As a cross-cutting investment in H2020, almost 500 million Euro went toward building RRI community, methods, and toolkits. Implementation of RRI, however, faced numerous challenges, from being obscure and siloed, to overly fixated on projects, rather than research agendas or Framework Programmes themselves. Now in Framework Programme 9, RRI has been “mainstreamed” (i.e., discontinued), and there is increasing talk about an initiative related the “societal readiness” of R&I. Challenges with current thinking about societal readiness include: homogenized views of society; linear thinking equating “readiness” with “acceptability”; an under-theorization of how readiness is moderated by various social phenomena (e.g., trust, legitimacy, etc.); and falling prey to the pitfalls of operationalizing “readiness” in the same manner as RRI without learning from failures. In this presentation, I invite a reimagining of “societal readiness” in R&I and discuss the potential of this policy idiom for sustainability transformations.
Olsson
Per Olsson