Suchergebnisse

Sustainable development has become an overarching policy target for the global policy arena. However, the international policy-making process and that of the individual countries remains largely sectoral in nature: a wide spectrum of international policies pursue narrow sectoral concerns and do not contribute fully enough to the achievement of broader sustainability targets. New policy tools such as Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) have therefore been adopted by the European Union to ensure that sectoral policies can be evaluated in relation to their wider sustainability impacts. However, what is really needed is a cross-sectoral approach to assessing sustainable development at an even higher, much more strategic level: Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA). ISA involves a longterm, comprehensive assessment of international and national policy programmes against sustainability targets and criteria. In order to perform ISA at the international level, new assessment tools and methods are needed which are rooted in a new paradigm. Sustainable development is a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon, with a breadth and depth that cannot be fully covered by the current portfolio of ISA tools. We therefore need a new generation of ISA tools, in particular modelling tools that can (semi-)quantitatively assess the multiple dimensions of sustainable development, in terms of multiple scales, multiple domains and multiple generations. Although a new paradigm is on the horizon and its contours are gradually becoming clearer, it will take a while before it can be used to develop practical ISA tools. Within the context of the European MATISSE project we therefore propose a two-track strategy: find new ways to use the current portfolio of ISA tools as efficiently and effectively as possible, while at the same time developing building blocks to support the next generation of ISA tools.

It's not surprising if you feel uneasy right now. In fact, it would be strange if you didn't. The world has become a very turbulent place and it feels like we're in a state of permanent crises. We are living on the cusp of a new era, in which everything that we took for granted is being called into question. COVID-19, climate change, loss of biodiversity, energy crises, migration and droughts regularly make the headlines. In this ground-breaking book, Professor Jan Rotmans, a global authority on sustainable development and transition, analyses the world through a set of systemic crises: a financial-economic crisis, an ecological crisis, a moral crisis and a democratic crisis, all of which interact and reinforce each other. This multiple-system crisis affects us deeply and confronts us with persistent problems in our vital social systems. These systems are nearing their end and no longer meet the demands that we, as humans, place on them. The systems must now reinvent themselves, but we humans must reinvent ourselves too. That is the essence of system change. Exploring these crises from an individual, corporate and national perspective - including a bold 100-year plan for the future of the Netherlands - Rotmans offers fascinating examples of successful change and encourages us to act decisively and embrace the chaos in order to build a more optimistic future.

We are living on the cusp of a new era, in which everything that we took for granted is being called into question. Professor Rotmans offers fascinating examples of successful change and encourages us to act decisively and embrace the chaos in order to build a more optimistic future.

This article conceptualizes power in the context of long-term process of structural change. First, it discusses the field of transition studies, which deals with processes of structural change in societal systems on the basis of certain presumptions about power relations, but still lacks an explicit conceptualization of power. Then the article discusses some prevailing points of contestation in debates on power. It is argued that for the context of transition studies, it is necessary to develop an interdisciplinary framework in which power is explicitly conceptualized in relation to change. Subsequently, such a framework is presented, with reference to existing literature on power. Starting with a philosophical and operational definition of power, a typology is developed of the different ways in which power can be exercised, explicitly including innovative power and transformative power. Finally, the presented power framework is applied to transition studies, redefining pivotal transition concepts in terms of power and formulating hypotheses on the role of power in transitions. By doing so, the article not only offers an interdisciplinary framework to study power in the context of transition studies, but also contributes to power debates more generally by including innovation and transformation as acts of power, and thereby proposes a re-conceptualization of the relation between power and structural change.