There are many different uses of the term sustainability as well as its derivatives, such as social sustainability, environmental sustainability, sustainable development, sustainable living, sustainable future, and many others. Literally, the word sustainability means the capacity to support, maintain or endure; it can indicate both a goal and a process. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse, robust, resilient and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other species. As the environment and social equality became increasingly important as a world issue, sustainability was adopted as a common political goal. The concept of sustainability the way most of us use it today emerged in the 1960s in response to concern about environmental degradation. This degradation was seen by some to result from the consequences of industrial development, increase in consumption and population growth and by others as poor resource management or the result of underdevelopment and poverty. Sustainability was linked to ethical concerns, typically involving a commitment to justice between generations involving issues such as equal distribution of wealth, working conditions and human rights, and possibly between humans and nonhumans, as discussed in chapters of Robert Garner, Holmes Rolston III and Haydn Washington. We can distinguish between different types of sustainability, for example between social (in terms of promoting equality, health, human rights), economic (in terms of sustaining people’s welfare, equitable division of resources) and environmental (in terms of sustaining nature or natural resources for humans and for nonhuman species) sustainability, as well as combinations of them. The study of sustainability involves multidisciplinary approaches, anthropology, political ecology, philosophy and ethics and environmental science. This type of multidisciplinary combination enables us to explore this new form of institutionalized sustainability science in a neoliberal age of environmental knowledge production and sustainability practice. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "Sustainability: Key Issues" on 07/19/15, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203109496 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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Recently environmental education (EE) literature has been supportive of pluralistic rather than goal-oriented learning. Researchers argue that sustainability is not fixed but socially constructed and that sustainability issues should not be represented as indisputable targets. Countering this trend in environmental education research, this article argues that unsustainability should be treated as a concrete challenge that requires concrete solutions. The author will argue that there is a need for clear articulation of (1) what (un)sustainability is; (2) what are the key challenges of (un)sustainability; and (3) how the sustainability challenges can be meaningfully addressed. This article will outline a number of helpful frameworks that address obstacles to sustainability, ranging from population growth to unsustainable production and consumption practices. Solutions include investment in family planning to counter the effects of overpopulation, and alternative production frameworks, such as Cradle to Cradle that differs from the conventional frameworks. This article will conclude with the broader reflection that without goal-oriented critical learning explicitly providing sound models of sustainability, open learning may never permit transcendence from unsustainability. This article will develop a number of comprehensive frameworks targeted at solutions to sustainability issues both from ethical and practical perspectives. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in "Environment, Development and Sustainability". The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-014-9584-z https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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Sustainability and economic growth—the integration and balance of social, environmental, and economic needs—is a salient concern for sustainable development and social well-being. By focusing on a sustainable innovation project, we explore how entrepreneurial ecosystems become sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems and investigate the interactions of entrepreneurial actors. We conducted an inductive, single-case study of a specific collaborative innovation project in the denim industry specialized in a specific geographic location. From our data, we show that the presence of four conditional aspects foster sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems. These include sustainability orientation of actors, recognition of sustainable opportunities and resource mobilization, collaborative innovation of sustainability opportunities, and markets for sustainable products. We make two observations that contribute to the literature. First, we see that in a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurial experimentation is a highly interdependent and interactive process. Second, we see that recognition of sustainable opportunities is distributed among different actors in the ecosystem. Our findings also have implications for practitioners and policy-makers.
