Dimensions of professional competences for interventions towards sustainability

This paper investigates sustainability competences through the eyes of professional practitioners in the field of sustainability and presents empirical data that have been created using an action research approach. The design of the study consists of two workshops, in which professional practitioners in interaction with each other and the facilitators are invited to explore and reflect on the specific knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours necessary to conduct change processes successfully towards sustainability in a variety of business and professional contexts. The research focuses on the competences associated with these change processes to devise, propose and conduct appropriate interventions that address sustainability issues. Labelled ‘intervention competence’, this ability comprises an interlocking set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours that include: appreciating the importance of (trying to) reaching decisions or interventions; being able to learn from lived experience of practice and to connect such learning to one’s own scientific knowledge; being able to engage in political-strategic thinking, deliberations and actions, related to different perspectives; the ability for showing goal-oriented, adequate action; adopting and communicating ethical practices during the intervention process; being able to cope with the degree of complexity, and finally being able to translate stakeholder diversity into collectively produced interventions (actions) towards sustainability. Moreover, this competence has to be practised in contexts of competing values, non-technical interests and power relations. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and practice

Seeing the wood for the trees: Social Science 3.0 and the role of visual thinking

© 2016 ICCR Foundation. Social Science is increasingly called on to address “grand challenges”, “wicked problems”, “societal dilemmas” and similar problematiques. Examples include climate change, the war on drugs and urban poverty. It is now widely agreed that the disciplinary structure of academic science, with its journals, curricula, peer communities, etc., is not well suited to such trans-disciplinary, ill-bounded, controversial issues, but the ways forward are not yet clear or accepted by the mainstream. The concept of a next generation paradigm of “Science 3.0” has emerged through work on sustainability systems analysis, and for this multiple channels for learning, thinking and communications are essential. Visual thinking in its many forms (from technical representation or mapping, to photography or video, to design or illustration, to fine art) can bring to the table tacit and “felt” knowledge, creative experience and links from analysis with synthesis. This paper first sketches the contours of a Social Science 3.0, and then demonstrates with examples how visual thinking can combine with rational argument, or extend beyond it to other forms of experience

Biodigital philosophy, technological convergence, and new knowledge ecologies

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Postdigital Science and Education on 11/01/2021, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00211-7 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.New technological ability is leading postdigital science, where biology as digital information, and digital information as biology, are now dialectically interconnected. In this article we firstly explore a philosophy of biodigitalism as a new paradigm closely linked to bioinformationalism. Both involve the mutual interaction and integration of information and biology, which leads us into discussion of biodigital convergence. As a unified ecosystem this allows us to resolve problems that isolated disciplinary capabilities cannot, creating new knowledge ecologies within a constellation of technoscience. To illustrate our arrival at this historical flash point via several major epistemological shifts in the post-war period, we venture a tentative typology. The convergence between biology and information reconfigures all levels of theory and practice, and even critical reason itself now requires a biodigital interpretation oriented towards ecosystems and coordinated Earth systems. In this understanding, neither the digital humanities, the biohumanities or the posthumanities sit outside of biodigitalism. Instead, posthumanism is but one form of biodigitalism that mediates the biohumanities and the digital humanities, no longer preoccupied with the tradition of the subject, but with the constellation of forces shaping the future of human ontologies. This heralds a new biopolitics which brings the philosophy of race, class, gender and intelligence, into a compelling dialogue with genomics and information

Il dialogo tra le culture. Diversità e conflitti come risorse di pace

Il volume tratta i temi della pace e del dialogo tra le culture nell'attuale fase di globalizzazione. Esperti di diversi ambiti disciplinari hanno condotto ricerche sulle possibilità e sui limiti della promozione della pace nel mondo globale e nella realtà italiana. A partire dall'analisi della natura della globalizzazione in atto, e più in specifico delle relazioni interculturali che la caratterizzano, ci si sofferma sui temi dell'aggressività in una prospettiva filosofica e antropologica, sulla violenza di massa come dimensione oscura dell'umanità, in una prospettiva storica e letteraria, sulle organizzazioni del diritto internazionale, su vari aspetti della situazione italiana, pwer quel che riguarda i diritti di cittadinanza, i conflitti e gli interventi possibili. Il volume presenta così una riflessione interdisciplinare su questioni che attengono alla sfera quotidiana e insieme alle interconnessioni globali

Enabling assessment of distributive justice through models for climate change planning: A review of recent advances and a research agenda

Models for supporting climate adaptation and mitigation planning, mostly in the form of Integrated Assessment Models, are poorly equipped for aiding questions related to fairness of adaptation and mitigation strategies, because they often disregard distributional outcomes. When evaluating policies using such models, the costs and benefits are typically aggregated across all actors in the system, and over the entire planning horizon. While a policy may be beneficial when considering the aggregate outcome, it can be harmful to some people, somewhere, at some point in time. The practice of aggregating over all actors and over time thus gives rise to problems of justice; it could also exacerbate existing injustices. While the literature discusses some of these injustices in ad-hoc and case specific manner, a systematic approach for considering distributive justice in model-based climate change planning is lacking. This study aims to fill this gap by proposing 11 requirements that an Integrated Assessment Model should meet in order to enable the assessment of distributive justice in climate mitigation and adaptation policies. We derive the requirements from various ethical imperatives stemming from the theory of distributive justice. More specifically, we consider both intra-generational (among people within one generation) and intergenerational (between generations) distributive justice. We investigate to what extent the 11 requirements are being met in recent model-based climate planning studies, and highlight several directions for future research to advance the accounting for distributive justice in model-based support for climate change planning. This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice