How much time do we have? Urgency and rhetoric in sustainability science

Abstract

Sustainability challenges are multitudinous, urgent, and complex. They are beyond the capacities of our current institutions to address, caused by path-dependent behaviors, and require substantial change from systems with crippling inertia. These problems are born of largescale industrial economic policy, the rise of materialism, and the supremacy of profit over sustainability. Currently, academia is poorly positioned to address sustainability problems because of anachronistic pedagogy, mismatched incentives, insufficient expertise, lack of personal commitment, and insular products and communication. What transformational methods for research and practice, which involve relevant communities throughout problem-solving processes in meaningful ways, does sustainability science offer? Though rhetoric outweighs real-world sustainability transitions so far, we argue that operationalizing the goals of the field, developing the necessary competencies, and seeking novel partnerships between society and the academy will position academic institutions to make a bigger impact on the transition to sustainability.

Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science at Higher Education Institutions: Science Policy Tools for Incremental Institutional Change

“…The three barriers that received most attention are respectively: First, the lack of appropriate evaluation procedures for research funding [16]; second, the lack of training in key sustainability competences and effective pedagogical approaches for transdisciplinary research at higher education institutions [20,21] and, third, the deeper laying problem of lack of recognition and trust in these new modes of organization of research. This section briefly reviews each of these three barriers.…”

“…Nevertheless, in spite of the wide recognition of the contribution of these initiatives, the efforts of many sustainability science researchers and sustainability stakeholders are hampered in practice by the structural constraints imposed by the current mode of organization of the scientific research system. Indeed, serious obstacles arise from the lack of career incentives in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research in higher education institutions, the shortage of training opportunities in multi-method quantitative and qualitative case study research, and the dominance of mono-disciplinary peer review of research projects, of individual researchers and of higher education institutions themselves [16].…”

Do We Teach What We Preach? An International Comparison of Problem- and Project-Based Learning Courses in Sustainability

“…The innovation lies in adopting them for PPBL courses in sustainability with stakeholder collaboration. Van der Leeuw et al [62] posit that such multilateral relationships might be critical for innovating the next generation of academics: -If students played an equal role in the development of curricula, selection of course content, and initiation of applied projects, how different might the impact of the academy become‖? However, introducing such novel processes requires additional time in courses that already experience time constraints:…”

New directions in sustainability science: promoting integration and cooperation

“…The gains in research, however, do not mean that sustainability science in its present state will fulfill its promise of transformational change (Van der Leeuw et al 2012). Hurdles remain, including insufficient engagement with stakeholder groups , lack of robust communication and entrepreneurial skills on the part of scientists generally (Baron 2010;Brownell et al 2013), the need for better support (structural and intellectual) within the academy to attract and maintain committed scholars to the field, and enhanced qualitative and quantitative meta-studies to make better use of experiences and evidence emerging from sustainability science research .…”

“…But to realize this goal, sustainability science must itself break through formidable barriers of inertia and lack of political will (Van der Leeuw et al 2012).…”