Designing transformative spaces for sustainability in social-ecological systems

Transformations toward sustainability have recently gained traction, triggered in part by a growing recognition of the dramatic socio-cultural, political, economic, and technological changes required to move societies toward more desirable futures in the Anthropocene. However, there is a dearth of literature that emphasizes the crucial aspects of sustainability transformations in the diverse contexts of the Global South. Contributors to this Special Feature aim to address this gap by weaving together a series of case studies that together form an important navigational tool on the “how to” as well as the “what” and the “where to” of sustainability transformations across diverse challenges, sectors, and geographies. They propose the term “transformative space” as a “safe-enough” collaborative process whereby actors invested in sustainability transformations can experiment with new mental models, ideas, and practices that can help shift social-ecological systems onto more desirable pathways. The authors also highlight the challenges posed to researchers as they become “transformative space-makers,” navigating the power dynamics inherent in these processes. Because researchers and practitioners alike are challenged to provide answers to complex and often ambiguous or incomplete questions around sustainability, the ideas, reflections and learning gathered in this Special Feature provide some guidance on new ways of engaging with the world

La economía social y solidaria en Grecia

On October 31, 2016, the Greek Parliament approved Law 4430/2016 on Social and Solidarity Economy (ESS) in order to disseminate this alternative form of organization of economic activity; support and strengthen self-managed productive projects and collective social entrepreneurship, and regulate Cooperative Social Enterprises and Workers Cooperatives. In this work we have analyzed the main characteristics of the Greek ESS, mainly in relation to other European models; and the different types of companies it integrates, highlighting the differences between them and their main characteristics compared to other nearby institutions such as social cooperatives or social enterprises. Finally we present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the implementation of the ESS in Greece, its magnitudes, its organization and the main promotion measures by the public authorities.El 31 de octubre de 2016 el Parlamento griego aprobó la Ley 4430/2016 de Economía Social y Solidaria (ESS) con el propósito de difundir esta forma alternativa de organización de la actividad económica; apoyar y fortalecer proyectos productivos autogestionarios y de emprendimiento social colectivo, y regular las Empresas Sociales Cooperativas y las Cooperativas de Trabajadores. En este trabajo hemos analizado las principales características de la ESS griega, principalmente en relación con otros modelos europeos; y los distintos tipos de empresas que integra, subrayando las diferencias entre ellas y sus principales características frente a otras instituciones próximas como las cooperativas sociales o las empresas sociales. Por último, presentamos un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de la implantación de la ESS en Grecia, de sus magnitudes, su organización y las principales medidas de promoción por parte de los poderes públicos

Discovering sustainability: A transition approach towards sustainable development

Abstract The concepts of transition and transition management offer a fruitful context for cooperation and debate among scientists, policy makers, and corporate actors. Transition management and transition approach in general provide an integrative approach to analyze and formulate an unconventional pathway towards sustainability. Transitions’ approach is not to achieve fixed goals, but to gradually work towards common ambitions through innovation, integration, and co-evolution. A transition to sustainability is an open-ended societal process of fundamental change in structure, culture and practices that comply with the sustainability values. In this paper we address not only what is a transitions’ approach, but also what transition management can offer to policy makers who position sustainability at the core of the development. Process-oriented tenets of transition management as well as propositions in face of global and local challenges to sustainability are analyzed

Steering transformations under climate change

In light of the persistent failure to reduce emissions decisively, facilitate long-term resilience against climate change and account for the connectedness of climate change with other social, environmental and economic concerns, we present a conceptual framework of capacities for transformative climate governance. Transformative climate governance enables climate mitigation and adaptation while purposefully steering societies towards low-carbon, resilient and sustainable objectives. The framework provides a systematic analytical tool for understanding and supporting the already ongoing changes of the climate governance landscape towards more experimental approaches that include multi-scale, cross-sectoral and public-private collaborations. It distinguishes between different types of capacities needed to address transformation dynamics, including responding to disturbances (stewarding capacity), phasing-out drivers of path dependency (unlocking capacity), creating and embedding novelties (transformative capacity) and coordinating multi-actor processes (orchestrating capacity). Our case study of climate governance in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, demonstrates how the framework helps to map the activities by which multiple actors create new types of conditions for transformative climate governance, assess the effectiveness of the capacities and identify capacity gaps. Transformative and orchestrating capacities in Rotterdam emerged through the creation of space and informal networks for strategic and operational innovation, which also propelled new types of governance arrangements and structures. Both capacities support stewarding and unlocking by integrating and mainstreaming different goals, connecting actors to each other for the development of solutions and mediating interests. Key challenges across capacities remain because of limited mainstreaming of long-term and integrated thinking into institutional and regulatory frameworks. As the ongoing changes in climate governance open up multiple questions about actor roles, effective governance processes, legitimacy and how effective climate governance in the context of transformations can be supported, we invite future research to apply the capacities framework to explore these questions

Designing a knowledge co-production operating space for urban environmental governance lessons from Rotterdam, Netherlands and Berlin, Germany

Challenges for a sustainable urban development are increasingly important in cities because urbanization and related land take come up with negative challenges for the environment and for city residents. Searching for successful solutions to environmental problems requires combined efforts of different scientific disciplines and an active dialogue between stakeholders from policy and society. In this paper, we present a comparative assessment of the way policy-science dialogues have achieved knowledge co-production about strategic urban environmental governance action using the cities of Berlin in Germany and Rotterdam in the Netherlands as case studies. The ecosystem services framework is applied as a lens for policy-science interaction and a 'knowledge co-production operating space' is introduced. We show how policy officers, urban planners, practitioners and scientists learned from each other, and highlight the impact of this knowledge co-production for governance practice. We found that the concerted collaboration and co-creation between researchers and policy officers have led to mutual learning and establishment of relationships and trust in both cities. Not only the policy-relevance of research and its policy uptake were achieved but also new insights for research blind spots were created. In our conclusions we reflect on co-production processes with two types of conditions that we introduced to be most influential in the way knowledge can be co-created. These are conditions that relate to the way knowledge co-production processes are set-up and, conditions that relate to the expected value or benefit that the co-produced knowledge will bring across society, policy and practice

Mismatches between ecosystem services supply and demand in urban areas : a quantitative assessment in five European cities

Assessing mismatches between ecosystem service (ES) supply and demand can provide relevant insights for enhancing human well-being in urban areas. This paper provides a novel methodological approach to assess regulating ES mismatches on the basis of environmental quality standards and policy goals. Environmental quality standards (EQS) indicate the relationship between environmental quality and human well-being. Thus, they can be used as a common minimum threshold value to determine whether the difference between ES supply and demand is problematic for human well-being. The methodological approach includes three main steps: (1) selection of EQS, (2) definition and quantification of ES supply and demand indicators, and (3) identification and assessment of ES mismatches on the basis of EQS considering certain additional criteria. While ES supply indicators estimate the flow of an ES actually used or delivered, ES demand indicators express the amount of regulation needed in relation to the standard. The approach is applied to a case study consisting of five European cities: Barcelona, Berlin, Stockholm, Rotterdam and Salzburg, considering three regulating ES which are relevant in urban areas: air purification, global climate regulation and urban temperature regulation. The results show that levels of ES supply and demand are highly heterogeneous across the five studied cities and across the EQS considered. The assessment shows that ES supply contributes very moderately in relation to the compliance with the EQS in most part of the identified mismatches. Therefore, this research suggests that regulating ES supplied by urban green infrastructure are expected to play only a minor or complementary role to other urban policies intended to abate air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions at the city scale. The approach has revealed to be appropriate for the regulating ES air purification and global climate regulation, for which well-established standards or targets are available at the city level. Yet, its applicability to the ES urban temperature regulation has proved more problematic due to scale and user dependent constraints

A transition research perspective on governance for sustainability

In this paper we present the transition approach as an integrated perspective to understand and possibly orient our society towards sustainable development. Transition management is based upon complex adaptive system thinking and seeks to deal with ongoing changes in society in an evolutionary manner so as to influence these ongoing changes in terms of speed and direction: towards sustainability. Since the concept of sustainability is inherently normative, subjective and ambiguous, we argue that (unlike some more traditional approaches to sustainable development) we should focus on an open facilitation and stimulation of social processes towards sustainability. Transition perspective poses novel challenges for research: there are no unequivocal answers, nor is it clear how these processes should be governed. We thus end this paper by formulating the basic research questions central to the search for governance for sustainability

The sour and sweet grapes of an institutional transition: Impacts of institutional transition on public policy design in water management sector in the Netherlands

The last decade a general shift has been realized in the water management sector in the Netherlands. The shift from a top-down (cooperative monopoloid) to a bottom-up institutional setting (cooperative multi-centric) was accompanied by various effects on the societal context. The benefits of the institutional shift do not only involve the most important actors (e.g. the Ministry of Transport and Water Management, the Municipalities) but also allows them to achieve their goals. The disadvantages of the institutional shift concern the long duration of the policy design process since issues and perceptions are steered in multiple phases and negotiated at all levels of institutional structuration. These undesirable effects can be considered as the impacts of the institutional transitions and can be alleviated by a more thorough design of the policy design process along the administrative layers as well as by the sustaining of openness and diversity of actors in the policy design process. The fruitful cooperative climate between the involved administrative bodies of water management sectors need to be conserved for forthcoming water policy challenges

Transformative spaces in the making: key lessons from nine cases in the Global South

Creating a just and sustainable planet will require not only small changes, but also systemic transformations in how humans relate to the planet and to each other, i.e., social–ecological transformations. We suggest there is a need for collaborative environments where experimentation with new configurations of social–ecological systems can occur, and we refer to these as transformative spaces. In this paper, we seek a better understanding of how to design and enable the creation of transformative spaces in a development context. We analyse nine case studies from a previous special issue on Designing Transformative Spaces that aimed to collect examples of cutting-edge action-oriented research on transformations from the Global South. The analysis showed five design phases as being essential: Problem Definition Phase; Operationalisation Phase; Tactical Phase; Outcome Phase; and Reflection Phase. From this synthesis, we distilled five key messages that should be considered when designing research, including: (a) there are ethical dilemmas associated with creating a transformative space in a system; (b) it is important to assess the readiness of the system for change before engaging in it; (c) there is a need to balance between ‘safe’ and ‘safe-enough’ spaces for transformation; (d) convening a transformative space requires an assemblage of diverse methodological frameworks and tools; and (e) transformative spaces can act as a starting point for institutionalising transformative change. Many researchers are now engaging in transdisciplinary transformations research, and are finding themselves at the knowledge–action interface contributing to transformative space-making. We hope that by analysing experiences from across different geographies we can contribute towards better understanding of how to navigate the processes needed for the urgent global transformations that are being called for to create a more equitable and sustainable planet Earth

Organising a safe space for navigating social-ecological transformations to sustainability.

The need for developing socially just living conditions for the world's growing population whilst keeping human societies within a 'safe operating space' has become a modern imperative. This requires transformative changes in the dominant social norms, behaviours, governance and management regimes that guide human responses in areas such as urban ecology, public health, resource security (e.g., food, water, energy access), economic development and biodiversity conservation. However, such systemic transformations necessitate experimentation in public arenas of exchange and a deepening of processes that can widen multi-stakeholder learning. We argue that there is an emergent potential in bridging the sustainability transitions and resilience approaches to create new scientific capacity that can support large-scale social-ecological transformations (SETs) to sustainability globally, not just in the West. In this article, we elucidate a set of guiding principles for the design of a 'safe space' to encourage stronger interactions between these research areas and others that are relevant to the challenges faced. We envisage new opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration that will develop an adaptive and evolving community of practice. In particular, we emphasise the great opportunity for engaging with the role of emerging economies in facilitating safe space experimentation