Sustainability Scientists and Scholars Research Working Groups
Several working groups will formulate a collective vision of where the Institute and the University could or should be in 5-10 years’ time, and offer concrete suggestions for steps that can be taken to achieve those goals (including offering advice on hiring plans, resource allocation, and training and education priorities). Working groups have full latitude to refine or change the focus of their groups, but the intent is to take a long-term view and consider where the major gaps are in sustainability science at large (not just at ASU), and how ASU can position itself to fill those gaps.
We have organized working groups around the six strategic areas presented. Please let me know if you would like to join one or more of these groups by e-mailing me at kinzig@asu.edu. I will pass names on to group leaders (you are welcome to contact the leaders directly). Participation is voluntary, but we welcome all voices.
Working group topics include:
Sustainable Development
The Global Institute of Sustainability's program in sustainable development aims to develop a research program and long-term agenda at ASU based on the idea of re-imagining and promoting societal transformations that enhance human health, well-being, and capability while preserving environmental qualities and functioning (ecosystem processes and services), today and into the future. In our view, such transformations must be broadly social and cultural, not narrowly economic or technological, and will be reciprocal in nature, accomplished collaboratively by partners whose roles are as equal as possible.
Our group aims to engage in the following broad questions : What are ASU's strengths and comparative advantages in the domain of sustainable development? What roles, in research and education, do we want to be playing in this domain in the next decades?What steps are necessary to achieve this vision?
Leads: Hallie Eakin and Ed Hackett
Urban Sustainability
How do decisions made in one urban context reverberate, regionally and globally, through other urban areas, and with what consequences for broader social and ecological “landscapes”? Do the same dynamics apply to neighborhoods within a city?
Most urban sustainability programs consider sustainability of particular urban areas and their surroundings. There is a compelling need to look at networks of cities, and how development trajectories in one urban area constrains or facilitates development in other, with consequences for much broader landscapes. The same network (off-site impact) approach could be extended to neighborhoods within cities.
Lead: Charles Redman
Understanding Innovation
How do we understand, predict, and manage social, biological, and technological innovation and the interaction of innovation among domains? A transition to sustainability will require innovations–technological, biological, and social. Few if any universities or research centers excel in synthetic assessment of innovation.
- Will technologies be socially acceptable?
- How do policies or new technologies alter social norms?
- How can society induce, manage, or predict innovation?
Lead: Sander van der Leeuw
Anticipating the Future
How do we increase our capacity to understand how decisions made today influence future outcomes? To be effective, sustainability science must increase its capacity to give decision makers information on how decisions made today are likely to play out in the future.
- Conditional, probabilistic prediction
- Modeling complex systems
- Understanding and portraying uncertainty
Leads: Ann Kinzig and Cynthia Selin
Decision Making
How do we increase the capacity of sustainability science to be responsive to the needs of society? The academy in general, and sustainability science in particular, believes that better (more) information leads to better decisions. How do we better understand the role of information in decision making, and use that knowledge to guide sustainability science?
Lead: TBD
Human and Cultural Dimensions of Sustainability
More than a problem of science and technology, sustainability is a complex, value-laden concept. Questions about what sustainability means, the values that ground it, the role of power and justice in shaping it, and how cultures have addressed it or failed to do so, are critical to understanding sustainability. Sustainability concerns are present in popular media and film, as well as literature, music, art, philosophy, religion, indeed all the varied forms of human expression contribute to the evolution of the idea of sustainability. A world class sustainability studies program should have a strong cohort of faculty who specialize in exploring the ethics and cultural values that underlie–explicitly or implicitly–sustainability problems, solutions, and inquiry. This working group will pursue the humanistic dimensions of sustainability to ensure that pedagogy and practice in this emerging discipline is informed by an integrated scientific and humanistic perspective.
Leads: Joan McGregor and Aaron Golub