scholarly journals Towards a Visual Typology of Sustainability and Sustainable Development

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 7935
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Barton ◽  
Felipe Gutiérrez-Antinopai

Representations of sustainability and sustainable development, as images, figures, and models have received relatively little attention in the literature, compared with textual definitions. However, there has been a concerted effort by authors to communicate complexity to specialized and wider audiences over the past fifty years. The purpose of this article is to present a taxonomy of visual representations of sustainability and sustainable development that reveal the conceptual diversity and complexity of these metanarratives of the dynamics of socio-ecological systems (SES). Using an exploratory and interpretive methodology, the principal objective is to describe and interpret the core traits of 18 different representations, which reflect the hybrid nature of sustainability and sustainable development depictions, but also allow them to be categorized into six main types. This exercise is based on the review of images used in the secondary literature on sustainability and sustainable development, and also websites that have compiled sets of images. The shared roots or common traits of the six main types are to be found in the principles of complexity, nonlinearity, holism, projection, and praxis. These roots reflect not only the dynamics of SES, but also how these system representations change according to their purposes and etiologies which are, in turn, defined by the academic, public, and private actors who design them.

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 205-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayelet Berman

In the past two decades, multistakeholder partnerships have been on the rise. With the perceived failure of intergovernmental organizations to get things done, the international system has turned toward partnerships. Allowing for collaboration with private actors, they are increasingly seen as the governance model du jour. They're praised for being democratically legitimate, thanks to their inclusion of a range of public and private stakeholders—most notably the inclusion of developing countries and civil society that had hitherto been excluded from international policy-making processes. My comments address three topics: (1) the rise of partnerships in context, (2) the reasons for their rise, and (3) challenges.


2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 1525-1558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Sarro

Over the past decade and a half, private sector actors have developed innumerable environmental and social standards whose stated intention is to further global public interests, such as sustainable development in less developed countries (LDCs). While some authors have welcomed these standards as a means of addressing transnational problems that governments are ill-equipped to deal with, others argue that these standards often amount to little more than a public relations exercise, with private actors producing high-minded standards on paper but failing to enforce them in practice.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Urban

*Abstract: *Over the past several years, policy makers and private actors have developed an evolving set of approaches for addressing the orphan works problem — a problem that arises when “the owner of a copyrighted work cannot be identified and located by someone who wishes to make use of the work in a manner that requires permission of the copyright owner,” preventing follow-on uses of works. These approaches usually attempt to address the orphan works problem by employing some threshold mechanism to differentiate true orphan works, to which the proposed solutions would apply, from non-orphaned copyrighted works. Satisfying a “reasonably diligent search” is one well-known formulation by which users can designate works as orphaned and therefore subject to a proposed solution, though — as this paper points out — alternative approaches certainly exist. Regardless of the specific formulation, the search for rightsholders (or conversely, the confirmation that no rightsholder can be located) is an integral component of almost every orphan works proposal. This paper examines in detail the core schemes for identifying rightsholders among the leading orphan works regimes and proposals. Although these schemes differ across many variables, three factors predominate: (1) who is expected to participate in the search process, (2) the nature and extent of the required search generally; and (3) specifically what types of resources, tools, registries or other information-sharing mechanisms are required or allowed.This paper compares existing proposals’ approaches with respect to the first factor: who participates in a search? A subsequent paper will focus on the second and third factors.Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2208163


Author(s):  
Bruno Brosnan ◽  
Christine Cheyne

New Zealand’s Local Government Act 2002 ushered in a new phase in local government, a phase that is best characterised by the term ‘empowerment’. Not only were councils empowered to promote social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being, in contrast with previous more prescriptive legislation, but citizens were empowered to engage in community-led strategic planning. In many respects the new statute reflected contemporary international public management trends in which governance is increasingly being conducted via networks of public and private actors. However, with the change of government from a centre-left Labour-led coalition to a centre-right National-led government following the November 2008 general election, it is less certain that local government and communities will continue to experience a strengthening of the pluralisation of governance that has been a feature of the past decade. This article argues that the potential disempowerment of local government, and possible attenuation of community-led strategic planning in New Zealand, comes at a time when the momentum for devolution to local government and other communities is increasing elsewhere.


Author(s):  
Steven Bernstein

The United Nations – with the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development playing a leadership role – is a central and necessary governance node to make progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. However, their scope and nature as goals and the normative character of sustainable development that demands integrative and coherent governance create significant challenges not easily met by traditional tools of multilateralism. Governance arrangements must therefore balance political authority at the global level with recognition that action and resources must also be mobilized at regional, national, and local levels and by a wide range of public and private actors. The High-level Political Forum must, therefore, be an orchestrator of orchestrators that promotes coordination within a fragmented governance space. This chapter assesses the prospects of UN-led governance under these circumstances and identifies key institutional mechanisms and conditions under which they have the best likelihood of mobilizing action on the Sustainable Development Goals.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Postel

China's growing presence in Africa is not news: the expansion of bilateral trade and investment ties has garnered intense media and political focus over the past decade. However, less is known about the people accompanying these increasingly intensive flows of goods and capital. This paper focuses on Zambia, drawing on multiple primary datasets to shed light on both the scale and nature of Chinese migration to the continent. Two years of Department of Immigration employment-permit data serve as the basis for the first quantitative analysis of the “Chinese” in “Africa,” illuminating the increasing diversity of this population flow. While the growing Chinese presence in Africa is often viewed as a coherent neocolonialist strategy planned and implemented by the Chinese state, this paper demonstrates that it is in fact typified by a multitude of both public and private actors with independent motives.


2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (136) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Tobias Wölfle ◽  
Oliver Schöller

Under the term “Hilfe zur Arbeit” (aid for work) the federal law of social welfare subsumes all kinds of labour disciplining instruments. First, the paper shows the historical connection of welfare and labour disciplining mechanisms in the context of different periods within capitalist development. In a second step, against the background of historical experiences, we will analyse the trends of “Hilfe zur Arbeit” during the past two decades. It will be shown that by the rise of unemployment, the impact of labour disciplining aspects of “Hilfe zur Arbeit” has increased both on the federal and on the municipal level. For this reason the leverage of the liberal paradigm would take place even in the core of social rights.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sung-Ae Lee

To displace a character in time is to depict a character who becomes acutely conscious of his or her status as other, as she or he strives to comprehend and interact with a culture whose mentality is both familiar and different in obvious and subtle ways. Two main types of time travel pose a philosophical distinction between visiting the past with knowledge of the future and trying to inhabit the future with past cultural knowledge, but in either case the unpredictable impact a time traveller may have on another society is always a prominent theme. At the core of Japanese time travel narratives is a contrast between self-interested and eudaimonic life styles as these are reflected by the time traveller's activities. Eudaimonia is a ‘flourishing life’, a life focused on what is valuable for human beings and the grounding of that value in altruistic concern for others. In a study of multimodal narratives belonging to two sets – adaptations of Tsutsui Yasutaka's young adult novella The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Yamazaki Mari's manga series Thermae Romae – this article examines how time travel narratives in anime and live action film affirm that eudaimonic living is always a core value to be nurtured.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
S. Karly Kehoe ◽  
Chris Dalglish

Evidence of how history and culture have been or should be harnessed to promote sustainability in remote and rural communities is mounting. To be sustainable, development must come from within, it must serve future generations as well as those in the present and it must attend to the vitality of culture, society, the economy and the environment. Historical research has an important contribution to make to sustainability, especially if undertaken collaboratively, by challenging and transcending the boundaries between disciplines and between the professional researchers, communities and organisations which serve and work with them. The Sustainable Development Goals’ motto is ‘leaving no one behind’, and for the 17 Goals to be met, there must be a dramatic reshaping of the ways in which we interact with each other and with the environment. Enquiry into the past is a crucial part of enabling communities, in all their shapes and sizes, to develop in sustainable ways. This article considers the rural world and posits that historical enquiry has the potential to deliver insights into the world in which we live in ways that allow us to overcome the negative legacies of the past and to inform the planning of more positive and progressive futures. It draws upon the work undertaken with the Landscapes and Lifescapes project, a large partnership exploring the historic links between the Scottish Highlands and the Caribbean, to demonstrate how better understandings of the character and consequences of previous development might inform future development in ways that seek to tackle injustices and change unsustainable ways of living. What we show is how taking charge of and reinterpreting the past is intrinsic to allowing the truth (or truths) of the present situation to be brought to the surface and understood, and of providing a more solid platform for overcoming persistent injustices.


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