Suchergebnisse

Purpose
Education in sustainability science is largely ignorant of the implications of the environmental crisis on inner dimensions, including mindsets, beliefs, values and worldviews. Increased awareness of the acuteness and severity of the environmental and climate crisis has caused a contemporary spread of hopelessness among younger generations. This calls for a better understanding of potential generative forces of hope in the face of climate change. This paper aims to uncover strategies for fostering constructive hope among students.


Design/methodology/approach
This study examines, through qualitative interviews, the characteristics of constructive hope amongst proactive students enrolled in university programs related to global environmental challenges. Constructive hope describes a form of hope leading to sustained emotional stability and proactive engagement through both individual and collective actions.


Findings
The findings are presented according to four characteristics of constructive hope: goal, pathway thinking, agency thinking and emotional reinforcement. This shows how students perceive the importance of: collaboratively constructing and empowering locally grounded objectives; reinforcing trust in the collective potential and external actors; raising students' perceived self-efficacy through practical applications; teaching different coping strategies related to the emotional consequences of education on students' well-being.


Originality/value
We outline practical recommendations for educational environments to encourage and develop constructive hope at multiple levels of university education, including structures, programs, courses and among students' interactions. We call for practitioners to connect theoretical learning and curriculum content with practice, provide space for emotional expressions, release the pressure from climate anxiety, and to foster a stronger sense of community among students.

Transdisciplinary research and collaboration iswidely acknowledged as a critical success factor for solution-oriented approaches that can tackle complex sustainabilitychallenges, such as biodiversity loss, pollution, andclimate-related hazards. In this context, city governments'engagement in transdisciplinarity is generally seen as a keycondition for societal transformation towards sustainability.However, empirical evidence is rare. This paper presentsa self-assessment of a joint research project onecosystem services and climate adaptation planning(ECOSIMP) undertaken by four universities and sevenSwedish municipalities. We apply a set of design principlesand guiding questions for transdisciplinary sustainabilityprojects and, on this basis, identify key aspects for supporting university–municipality collaboration. Weshow that: (1) selecting the number and type of projectstakeholders requires more explicit consideration of thepurpose of societal actors' participation; (2) concrete,interim benefits for participating practitioners and organisationsneed to be continuously discussed; (3) promotingthe 'inter', i.e., interdisciplinary and inter-city learning, cansupport transdisciplinarity and, ultimately, urban sustainabilityand long-term change. In this context, we found thatdesign principles for transdisciplinarity have the potentialto (4) mitigate project shortcomings, even when transdisciplinarityis not an explicit aim, and (5) address differencesand allow new voices to be heard. We proposeadditional guiding questions to address shortcomings andinspire reflexivity in transdisciplinary projects.

Abstract
Transformation, transition and regime shift are increasingly applied concepts in the academic literature to describe changes in society and the environment. Ecosystem services represent one framework that includes the implicit aim of supporting transformation towards a more sustainable system. Nevertheless, knowledge and systematic reviews on the use of these concepts within ecosystem services research are so far lacking. Therefore, we present a systematic literature review to analyse the interlinkages between these concepts and ecosystem services. Using a search string we identified 258 papers that we analysed based on 40 review criteria. Our results show that transformation was mentioned most often (197 articles), followed by transition (183 articles) and regime shifts (43 articles). Moreover, there is no consolidation of these concepts. Only 13% of all articles gave definitions for the three concepts. These definitions strongly overlapped in their use. Moreover, most papers described changes that happened in the past (73%). We conclude that research would benefit from being directed towards the future rather than evaluating what has happened in the past. Based on our results, we present: i) clear definitions for the three concepts; and ii) a framework highlighting the interlinkages between the ecosystem services cascade and the concepts of change.