This paper identifies and analyses a specific psychological barrier that plays a crucial role in explaining why the tourism accommodation sector so far has only made a limited contribution to sustainable development. This barrier represents a so-called social dilemma and relates to behavioural patterns and conflicting interests of relevant stakeholders and their inability to resolve the resulting lock-in. Through presenting and reviewing the outcomes of three empirical studies and relating them to relevant literature, this paper explores the details of this particular social dilemma. It also establishes promising avenues for moving beyond the current stagnation point. The paper concludes that there is an urgent need for more research into the social, cultural and psychological structures and barriers that lock-in the behaviour of relevant stakeholders. However, it is also concludes that actually resolving the dilemma is a shared responsibility of all stakeholders and requires more than just research, for instance setting up galvanising action groups and adjusting tourism and hospitality curricula.
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Regional sustainability networks in the Netherlands are rooted in regionalculture and have an emphasis on social learning and effective collaboration between multiple actors. The national ‘Duurzaam Door’ (Moving Forward Sustainably) Policy Programme regards these networks as generative governance arrangements where new knowledge, actions and relations can co-evolve together with new insights in governance and learning within sustainability transitions. In order to understand the dynamics of the learning in these networks we have monitored emergent properties of social learning between 2014 and 2016. Our focus is particularly on the interrelated role of trust, commitment, reframing and reflexivity. Our aim is to better understand the role and the dynamics of these emergent properties and to see which actors and roles can foster the effectiveness of social learning in regional transitions towards more sustainable ways of living. We used a retrospective analysis with Reflexive Monitoring in Action (RMA), which we combined with the Most Significant Change approach. We found that reflexivity in particularis a critical property at moments that can make or break the process.
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Over recent years aspects of sustainability have claimed a central role in many countries. As a result research for sustainability has become an important driver for innovation. This paper describes developing a model that supports SMEs in integrating sustainability in their business and innovation processes. In general innovation and entrepreneurship are important in the realm of national economies because they hold the key to the continuity and growth of companies and economic growth within a country. National governments are spending vast sums of money to enable and improve innovation management and entrepreneurial behaviour within organizations. This is also the case in The Netherlands. Partnerships involving universities (education), companies (preferably SMEs) and industrial associations (business) and representatives from governmental organizations (community) are stimulated and should be geared towards: the development of sustainable networks, a contribution to regional economic growth within sectors, the development of learning communities in which best practices are shared, knowledge circulates and knowledge is created through applied research and last but not least sustainable relations are developed between universities and the business community. Within the centre for innovation and entrepreneurship at our university we have taken the initiative to develop an innovation programme for entrepreneurs in the construction industry to help them integrate sustainability in their business processes, while simultaneously professionalizing students and teachers. Sustainability and concern for the environment are two of the main reasons for entrepreneurs to look for opportunities to innovate. Policy measures are aimed at reduction of CO2 emission, waste management and alternative use of energy sources and materials. In line with these measures companies are urged to integrate sustainability in their business processes and search for innovative sustainable solutions. This paper describes the experiences with a number of SMEs in the construction industry and the barriers entrepreneurs encounter on the road towards sustainability. We focus on the role of the entrepreneur in the process of sustainable innovation and development. We conducted exploratory research and through an organisational analysis and in-depth interviews with the owners/managers of the companies insight was gained in innovation processes towards sustainable development. Conclusions show that one of the main bottlenecks is the dilemma posed by the need for profit for the continuity of a company, while taking into account people and planet. The dilemmas of innovation are described as issues that need to be addressed and which influence the innovative capacity of companies and organizations. This paper deals with the underlying factors related to the dilemma between sustainability and growth/profit.
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“Critical Making in Collaboration with Nature”, discusses the outcomes of the Making Sustainability Work project from Fall 2020. With support of CoECI Zaaigelden scheme, the Critical Making learning community put together a group of makers from research, education and industry to explore the implications of designing with natural materials and biological processes, such as biopolymers, fungal composites and bacteria dye. By following a selection of modules from the Fabricademy global training program, participants explored hands-on techniques to create their own design materials and colours from renewable and biodegradable resources and documented their journeys. The shared experience was reflected upon in a series of interviews and essays touching on the following questions: • In what way do unruly natural materials challenge ways of doing and teaching design? • How do grown materials fit into or challenge makers’ goals of sustainability?• What is needed to bring biological processes into communities of practice in the field of design, art and making?• How and when does criticality emerge in the making process? • How do processes of thinking and doing intersect and what is the role of social interactions and collaboration?
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This booklet is the third of its kind and, as such, the sequel to ‘Critical Issues in Sustainability – Part I’ and ‘Critical Issues in Sustainability – Part II’. It contains several of our reflections as they have appeared in writing throughout 2020, notably but not exclusively through opinion articles. Just as much as we hope this booklet will challenge your ideas and actions and will provide you with the inspiration to change our world for the better, we hope it will be the ancestor of our and others’ future work. In any case, we invite you to let us know what you think about it and how we might join forces
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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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Honger is nog steeds een wereldwijd probleem, terwijl iedereen genoegte eten zou hebben als we het beschikbare voedsel goed zoudenverdelen en benutten, en het niet zouden verspillen. Maar alleen al inNederland gooien we ruim 33 kilo voedsel per persoon per jaar weg. Datmoet anders!Door voedsel slimmer te verpakken, kunnen we voedselverspilling énonnodig verpakkingsafval voorkomen. Binnen het project Goed Verpakthebben we verschillende partijen samengebracht om integraal aan ditonderwerp te werken. Het breed samengestelde consortium bestond uitkennisinstellingen, producenten van aardappels, groente en fruit,producenten van maaltijden en portieverpakkingen, producenten vanverpakkingsmaterialen en een brancheorganisatie.Onze centrale onderzoeksvraag was:Hoe kunnen bedrijven in de voedingssector op een meer duurzamemanier in de behoefte van de eindgebruiker voorzien, waarbij degekozen totaaloplossing van de product-verpakkingscombinatie pastbinnen een circulaire economie en aansluit bij de vereisten van de heleketen?Samen hebben we naar slimmere product-verpakkingscombinatiesgezocht, waarbij we hebben geanalyseerd welke duurzaamheidsdilemma’s partijen in de keten ervaren en hoe we die kunnen oplossen of wegnemen. Daarbij hebben we ook in beeld gebracht wat de betrokken partijen zelf kunnen doen en wat zij voor elkaar kunnen krijgen door een nauwere samenwerking binnen de keten.Voor slimmere product-verpakkingscombinaties is ook de overheid eenonmisbare partner. Onduidelijkheid, een gebrek aan daadkracht en teeenzijdige wet- en regelgeving werken averechts en ondermijnen hetstreven naar meer duurzaamheid binnen de sector. Beleidsmakersonderschatten de expertise die nodig is om dit goed te regelen.Meer verduurzaming is dus vooral een kwestie van nauwersamenwerken. Met partners binnen de branche, met interessantepartijen buiten de branche én met de overheid. We formuleren in ditdocument alvast onze negen gouden regels van integraal duurzaamverpakken.Daarnaast blijven de betrokken kennisinstellingen onderzoek doen naardit onderwerp. Bijvoorbeeld naar consumentengedrag en –intenties ennaar de inzet van de Rethink-methode voor het herontwerpen vanproduct-verpakkingscombinaties. Zo zorgen alle betrokken partners voor een circulaire toekomst waarin voedsel steeds slimmer verpakt wordt en we met een minimum aan afval zo veel mogelijk voedsel beschikbaar maken voor iedereen.
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Since the film of Al Gore An inconvenient truth, sustainability stands high on the national agenda of most countries. Concern for the environment is one of the main reasons in combination with opportunities to innovate. In general, innovation and entrepreneurship are important in the realm of national economies because they hold the key to the continuity and growth of companies (e.g. Hage, 1999; Cooper, 1987; Van de Ven, 2007) and economic growth within a country. It is therefore obvious that national governments are investing money to enable and improve innovation management and entrepreneurial behaviour within organizations with sustainability in mind. Policy measures are aimed at reduction of carbon dioxide emission, waste management and alternative use of energy sources and materials. In line with these measures companies are urged to integrate sustainability in their business processes and search for innovative sustainable solutions. While on a national level policy measures towards a more sustainable society are defined, enterprises - and especially small and medium sized companies - lag behind and fail in incorporating these measures appropriately in their day-to day business. As a result research for sustainability has become an important driver for innovation. Within the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CI&E) at The Hague University of Applied Sciences we have taken the initiative to develop an innovation and research program for the construction industry to help small and medium sized companies (SME's) integrate sustainability in their business processes, while simultaneously professionalizing students and lecturers. This paper is part of ongoing research among 40 companies in the region of South-Holland. The companies are mostly SME's varying from very small (6 employees) to middle-sized (more than 100). According to Rennings (2000) while innovation processes toward sustainable development have received increasing attention during the past years, theoretical and methodological approaches to analyse these processes are poorly developed. This paper describes a theoretical approach developed at our university's Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which combines education and research. It is an inductive approach that departs from real-life problems encountered by companies, and is aimed at developing a model that supports companies in integrating sustainability in their business and innovation processes. We describe the experiences so far with a number of companies in the construction industry, which participate in the innovation and research program described above and the barriers they encounter. Our sustainable program is centred on four themes: cradle-to-cradle, social corporate responsibility, climateneutral construction and sustainability and customer orientation in the building process. It is an exploratory research in which students and undergraduates are involved under the supervision of a lecturer as senior researcher of this program. Through an in-depth analysis of the companies, participant observation and indepth interviews with the owners/directors of the companies, experts and prominent sustainable trendsetters, insight is gained in innovation processes towards sustainable development. Preliminary conclusions show that on a company level one of the main bottlenecks is the dilemma posed by the need for profit for the continuity of a company, while taking into account people and planet. The main bottleneck is however the inability of companies to translate policy measures into strategy and operations. This paper is set up as follows. In section 2 we give an account of European and Dutch policy measures geared at stimulating sustainability in a business context and especially the building and construction industry. In section 3 an overview is given of the economic importance and characteristics of the Dutch building and construction industry and the problems in this sector. These problems are offset against the opportunity of sustainability as a strategic option for SME's in this sector. In section 4 the innovation and research program developed at the CI&E is introduced in the context of the main research question. Following that in section 5, methodological choices are addressed and the research design is presented. We finalize this paper in section 6 with our conclusions and recommendations for further research.
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Higher education has the potential to act as ecosystem catalysts, connecting with the places our institutions which they are a part of, for learning-based changes with wicked (sustainability) challenges. This, however, calls for reorienting and rethinking of the higher educational narratives and subsequent practices towards more ecological and relational ones. In this study, a pilot aimed to connect a course at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands) to an industrial park next to the university which is undergoing transition towards a sustainable living space. The pilot, which ran from September 2020 to February 2021, included 17 students from 9 nationalities and 12 different bachelor programmes, and was designed according to the concepts of an ‘ecology of learning’. In this semester long course, called Mission Impact, students reflected every five-weeks, to capture their learning experiences using a combination of arts-based and narrative reflection methods. Two questions guided the analysis: (1) what are the key design characteristics of an ecological approach to higher education that connects to sustainability transformations (in times of COVID-19) and (2) what does this type of education asks from to learners. The reflective artefacts were analysed using Narratives of T-Mapping and juxtaposed with autoethnographic insights maintained by the first author for triangulation. Preliminary results of this pilot include the structure in chaos, space for transformation, openness for emerging futures & action confidence as components of such an ecological education that connects to and co-creates sustainability transformations.
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We aim to understand the interaction between shifting organizational field logics and field actors’ responses to reconcile logic plurality and maintain legitimacy through business model innovation. Drawing on a multimethod, longitudinal field study in the fashion industry, we traced how de novo and incumbent firms integrate circular logics in business models (for sustainability) and uncover how productive tensions in field logics lead to experimental spaces for business model innovation. Our findings showed a shift in the discourse on circular logic that diverted attention and resources from materials innovation (e.g. recycling) to business model innovation (e.g. circular business models). By juxtaposing the degree of field logic tension and the degree of business model innovation, we derive four types of business model hybridization responses that actors engaged in to maintain legitimacy – constrained, limited, integrated, and expanded. Our study generates new insights on business models for sustainability as vehicles for organizational field change.
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