Essay from the year 2019 in the subject Economy - Environment economics, grade: 81/100, University of Leeds (School of Earth and Environment), course: Introduction to Sustainability, language: English, abstract: This essay will critically analyse the notion of sustainability as a wicked problem by showing the congruencies between both concepts and examine the implications of wickedness on sustainability policies. It focuses on the applicability of participatory methods to address and manage its challenges, since they have been identified as a dominant approach in sustainability policy making in the literature. Issues such as global warming, climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and increasing poverty are just a few of many other problems we are currently facing. Dooming projections about the future has inflamed the discourse on sustainability and resulted in ongoing debates and commentaries about its definition across varying disciplines, each elaborating different perspectives of the concept. Due to its complexity it has been argued that achieving sustainability represents a ‘wicked problem’, a term describing problems that are impossible to be solved, but can only tamed (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Some even argue, that significant sustainability issues are beyond the scope of wicked problems and distinguish these as ‘super wicked problems’.

Provides a global analysis of policies to address deforestation, an important driver of climate change.

Business Strategies for Sustainability brings together important research contributions that demonstrate different approaches to business strategies for sustainability. Many corporate initiatives toward what firms perceive to be sustainability are simply efficiency drives or competitive moves – falling far short of actual strategies for ecological sustainability. To suggest true ecological sustainability strategies, this new research anthology adopts an interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary, approach to discern what business strategies might look like if they were underpinned by environmental and ecological science. The 23 chapters in this anthology reflect five main topic sections: (a) delineating sustainability challenges and visions; (b) contradiction, integration and transformation of business and sustainability logics; (c) innovating and developing strategic capabilities for sustainability; (d) assessing and valuing sustainability; and (e) toward multi-level engagement and collaboration.

"Wicked" problems are large-scale, long-term policy dilemmas in which multiple and compounding risks and uncertainties combine with sharply divergent public values to generate contentious political stalemates; wicked problems in the environmental arena typically emerge from entrenched conflicts over natural resource management and over the prioritization of economic and conservation goals more generally. This new book examines past experience and future directions in the management of wicked environmental problems and describes new strategies for mitigating the conflicts inherent in these seemingly intractable situations. The book: reviews the history of the concept of wicked problems examines the principles and processes that managers have applied explores the practical limitations of various approaches Most important, the book reviews current thinking on the way forward, focusing on the implementation of "learning networks," in which public managers, technical experts, and public stakeholders collaborate in decision-making processes that are analytic, iterative, and deliberative. Case studies of forest management in the Sierra Nevada, restoration of the Florida Everglades, carbon trading in the European Union, and management of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania are used to explain concepts and demonstrate practical applications. Wicked Environmental Problems offers new approaches for managing environmental conflicts and shows how managers could apply these approaches within common, real-world statutory decision-making frameworks. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with managing environmental problems.

With this book, we aim to help communities initiate and sustain local systems change. Experiences from a variety of transfer projects between universities and civil society in different countries and cultures are included. The focus is on the development of methodological competencies, which we explain along the Design Thinking process and provide with practical implementation recommendations. This is followed by a case study detailing how business models are developed from tested prototypes for social innovations and social enterprises and how business plans are created. The book is aimed at anyone involved in working in and with communities. This includes students, teachers, and action researchers from academia as well as staff in city governments or NGOs and, of course, members of communities who want to grow into the role of community promoter.

The aim of this book is to support and inspire teachers to contribute to much-needed processes of sustainable development and to develop teaching practices and professional identities that allow them to cope with the specificity of sustainability issues and, in particular, with the teaching challenges related to the ethical and political dimension of environmental and sustainability education. Bringing together recent scholarship on the topic, this book translates state-of-the-art academic research into teaching models, methods and tools. Starting with an outline of the challenge of sustainability, it offers insights and models for understanding the interesting yet ambiguous concept of ‘sustainable development’ and the complex process of transforming society in a more sustainable direction (Part I). It then goes on to provide a guide to preparing courses and lessons as well as tools for reflection about teaching practices and the multiplicity of approaches to addressing ethical and political challenges in sustainable development teaching (Part II). Finally, the book offers useful conceptual frameworks, models and typologies about the concrete design and implementation of sustainable development teaching (Part III). This book will be essential reading for students of education, as well as teachers in compulsory and higher education and sustainability education researchers.

This groundbreaking handbook leads the way in accelerating the transition to a sustainable circular economy by introducing the concept of a catalyst as a positive and enhancing driving force for sustainability. Catalysts create and maintain favourable conditions for complex systemic sustainability transition changes, and a discussion and understanding of catalysts is required to move from a linear economy to a sustainable and circular economy. With contributions from leading experts from around the globe, this volume presents theoretical insights, contextualised case studies, and participatory methodologies, which identify different catalysts, including technology, innovation, business models, management and organisation, regulation, sustainability policy, product design, and culture. The authors then show how these catalysts accelerate sustainability transitions. As a unique value to the reader, the book brings together public policy and private business perspectives to address the circular economy as a systemic change. Its theoretical and practical perspectives are coupled with real-world case studies from Finland, Italy, China, India, Nigeria, and others to provide tangible insights on catalysing the circular economy across organisational, hierarchical, and disciplinary boundaries. With its broad interdisciplinary and geographically diverse scope, this handbook will be a valuable tool for researchers, academics, and policy-makers in the fields of circular economy, sustainability transitions, environmental studies, business, and the social sciences more broadly.