A Real-World Exploration of Green Human Resources and Sustainability Education in Hyper-Connected and Technology-Driven Organizations

The early concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), also frequently described as corporate citizenship or sustainability, grew from the seminal 1987 Brundtland Report, commissioned by the United Nations. CSR has progressed to the standpoint that in organizations necessitates the synchronized fulfillment of the firm's economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities in ways that focus strategy, operations, and behaviors towards the promotion of sustainability from a construct where organizational strategy is concerned with the care of the planet, people, and profit. This paper explores the role of green human resources interventions focused on creating organizational cultures that support sustainability in technical and hyper-connected organizations. The paper is not intended to reconstitute theory. The paper is highly theoretical and practical with the intention of influencing the world practice from practical real-world problem approaches and theories from the literature.

7. Greener Growth

Sustainable development became the dominant discourse in global environmental affairs in the 1980s, spurred by the landmark Brundtland report to the United Nations, and remains widely popular, embodied for example in the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by an assembly of all the world’s countries in 2015. Sustainable development combines ecological protection, economic growth, social justice, and intergenerational equity, which can be sought globally and in perpetuity. “Green growth” becomes possible, while ecological limits and boundaries fade into the background. However, it is necessary for a collective effort that involves governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations, and citizens to make this happen. Sustainable development is an integrating discourse that covers local and global environmental issues and a host of economic and development concerns. Beyond this shared discourse, different actors (such as corporations and environmentalists) ascribe different means to the idea. Despite its popularity as a discourse, sustainable development has not actually been achieved anywhere.

La sustentabilidad del espacio-tiempo para la reproducción de las naturalezas en El Chaltén (Santa Cruz, Argentina)

Starting with the publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, development policies incorporated sustainability into their discourses as a way of avoiding the socio-ecological problems caused by the capitalist system. However, social and ecological conflicts were not resolved, but have proliferated ever since. Considering the polysemy of the concept of sustainability, in this work it is proposed to understand it from the analysis of spatial production enriched by world-ecology and feminism proposals. For this, the livelihoods of El Chaltén were analyzed through participatory methodologies. The results show that tourism, even under sustainability policies, affects social, community, family, and ecological relations. Therefore, sustainability for El Chaltén would correspond to the possibility of maintaining the spaces-times of reproduction of nature during the year.

Sustainability as a “magic concept”

Sustainability studies have not been able to come up with a consensus conceptualization of “sustainability,” despite many attempts. This article asks what this conceptual confusion means. I do this through a (conceptual history) vertical analysis, and horizontal (discourse) analysis of the current use of the term. It finds that sustainability is a perfect fit for what Hupe and Pollit have called a “magic concept,” in that it is; broad, has a positive normative charge, imply consensus or at least the possibility of overcoming current conflicts, and has global marketability (2011: 643). This has both positive and negative effects: On the one hand, the popularity of the concept of sustainability has enabled an overarching discourse on the responsible use of natural resources. On the other hand, the concept is vulnerable to various strategic misuses, ranging from corporate greenwashing to Luddite passions. Based on a vertical analysis of the history of sustainability, this vagueness is not a coincidence: It was part of a political bargain at its birth, where environmental concerns were grafted onto an older discourse on “development” during the writing of the 1987 Brundtland report. Based on a horizontal analysis, this vagueness is now inherent to the concept and cannot be abandoned without losing the very magic qualities that make sustainability such a rallying point. This finding points to the conclusion that we should be cautious about how sustainability is wielded. Received: 03 February 2021Accepted: 01 March 2021

RESILIENCE COVERAGE OF GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORKS: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

ABSTRACT Sustainable development has been a popular concept since 1987 and the issuance of the Brundtland report. A diverse number of sustainability assessment frameworks are available to examine the environmental performance of buildings and communities. With the current pace of climate change and the increasing threat of stronger, more frequent natural hazards, however, there are doubts that sustainability alone is an effective response. Sustainability assessment frameworks in recent years have been criticized for not incorporating hazard resilience. To better understand the current level of emphasis put on resilience to natural hazards in green building rating systems, this study aims to assess the level of resilience integration in existing sustainability assessment frameworks. The results demonstrate an overall lack of resilience coverage in the frameworks with only four frameworks, CASBEE, LEED, Green Globes, and DGNB having resilience coverage of 27.5%, 15%, 2.6%, and 1.1% respectively. This confirms a need for more systematic integration of resilience indicators into sustainability rating systems to create combined frameworks for sustainability and resilience.

Concepts of Future Generations

This chapter examines how the relationship between present and future generations has been articulated and envisaged in four discussions on climate change and global environmental crises from the late 1980s onward. Nordblad exemplifies how the very concept of future generations harbours disparate and sometimes conflicting views over the extent future generations can be known, and the political, economic, and ethical complexities embedded in constructions of the relationship between present and future generations. She explores climate economics with its presumptions about substitutable and transgenerational values; Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, which describes future generations as a call for moral regeneration; the Brundtland Report, which emphasizes solidarity in the allocation of common resources; and the academic discussion on the non-identity problem, posing our relation to future generations as a moral and political enigma.

Commissions and Panels

The chapter analyzes the over-sized role of one visible component of the Third UN. Prominent individuals—many of whom made their government and international civil servant careers as members of the First and the Second UNs—have come to constitute essential and frequent contributors to the advance of knowledge and norms. The case studies concern peace operations (the Brahimi report of 2001 and HIPPO of 2015); the protection of human beings in war zones (the ICISS report of 2001); and for sustainable development (the Brundtland report of 1987 and the ongoing work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC). Less successful or even counterproductive group efforts also figure in the discussion, but the main examples seek to demonstrate how and when such blue-ribbon groups make a difference.

IAU: The Power to Foster Higher Education for Sustainable Development

Modernization theory, which believes that “development equates economic growth” and changes in social, political, and cultural structures are the pathways for societies to become modernized, has been the predominant paradigm for the development of nations for decades. However, the model was met with a lot of criticism, and there was a movement to rethink the real meaning of development and well-being. Alternatives for development were proposed, but the most widely accepted paradigm is “sustainability” or “sustainable development” which was defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in the 1987 Brundtland Report (also called “Our Common Future”) as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Under this development paradigm, programs, initiatives, and actions aim not only at the preservation of a particular resource but also at other distinct areas: economic, environmental, and social - known as the three pillars of sustainability. The Brundtland Report has had a worldwide impact. “Agenda 21”, a comprehensive plan of action to build a global partnership for sustainable development to improve human lives and protect the environment, was adopted in the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, followed by many other agendas, including the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) (2000–2015) and the present United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development or the 17 SDGs.