Understanding Sustainability

This is a course on the very fundamentals of sustainability and sustainable development, giving eight central perspectives on sustainability.

In recent decades, it has become increasingly evident that a key challenge for the global community is to create a more sustainable future. While the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals as well as the Paris Agreement from 2015 are examples of significant international efforts to achieve a more sustainable future, conflict and disagreement remain at all levels of society about what constitutes “sustainability” and how to achieve it. Accordingly, it requires an understanding of the wide variety of ways in which sustainability is defined, conceptualized, interpreted, understood and used among different sciences, stakeholders and decision makers to actively engage in this contested domain of sustainability in practice.

The overall purpose of the course is to provide students from natural science and social science backgrounds with a roadmap to understand different concepts of sustainability and sustainable development, enabling students to qualify and reflect upon sustainability aspects in their own education and future professional practice from an interdisciplinary perspective. The course will outline important underlying empirical and value based assumptions as well as challenges with and potentials of a wide range of different conceptualizations, interpretations and practical uses of sustainability. Offering a broad overview of different theoretical perspectives on sustainability from the social sciences and humanities to broader systems thinking, the course will facilitate productive critical thinking and reflection on both the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainability. This includes inherent tradeoffs and synergies associated with practical operationalization and implementation of sustainability, e.g. in relation to the UN SDGs.

Ensuring a strong link from theory to practice, every year the course will focus on specific cases, topics or themes of particular current interest. Themes could for instance be climate change mitigation and adaptation, energy production, food production, transportation systems, waste and recycling, nature restoration or biodiversity protection. In an interdisciplinary setting considering e.g., social, cultural, economic, environmental, political, governance and philosophical perspectives, the identified sustainability challenges as well as proposed solutions will be addressed, for instance relating to the SDGs or other operational frameworks. Additionally, guest lecturers from private companies, NGOs and public agencies working with implementation of sustainability in practice will present their perspectives on and efforts in implementing sustainability in the organizations they represent.

The course will tentatively follow the structure outlined below (a detailed course plan will be available on Absalon shortly before the course starts):

Part 1 (What is sustainability?)
How do different disciplines and theories in the fields of natural science, social science and humanities understand and define sustainability, and what are their tools, measures and approaches for achieving a more sustainable development in terms of e.g., production or consumption of certain goods?

Conceptualizing sustainabiliy:

1. Definitions and history of the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development (e.g., the Club of Rome, the Brundtland report, the SDGs, etc.)
2. Fundamental distinctions and underlying ethical aspects (e.g., contradictions, dilemmas, paradoxes, weak versus strong sustainability)
3. Philosophy of sustainability (e.g., human-nature relationship, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, individual and collective responsibility)

Interpreting and measuring sustainability:

1. Ecological perspectives (e.g., non-equilibrium ecology, risk and planetary boundaries, systems analysis, global to local, life-cycle analysis)
2. Economic perspectives (e.g., externalities, regulation, cost-benefit analysis, environmental economics versus ecological economics, green growth versus de-growth)
3. Political science perspectives (e.g., public policy, policy instruments, agenda setting political ecology, environmental justice, capitalism versus marxism, sustainability transition)
4. Governance and law (e.g., interventions, regulation, incentives, environmental law, institutions, collaboration, participatory processes)
5. Sociological perspectives (e.g., cultural conditions, habit formation)

Practising sustainability:

1. Stakeholder perspectives (e.g., sustainability along agricultural and food value chains, standards and certification, corporate governance, private and public policies)
2. Solution space perspectives (e.g., incrementalism versus transformation, ecomodernism versus de-growth)

Part 2 (Applications in practice)
How do different stakeholders in agricultural and food value chains approach and use sustainability, and what is the importance of public and corporate governance? On-site visits to decision-makers at various scales, e.g., European and national, governmental and non-governmental organisations, advisory bodies, production facilities, start-ups etc., will provide real-life examples of how work with sustainability is done in practice.

Part 3 (Relating to student’s own scientific field)

Writing an individual take-home exam assignment on a specific case of relevance for the student’s own scientific field reflecting on lessons learned from Part 1 and 2, i.e. including different perspectives, analysing solution spaces, and discussing potential challenges and benefits.