Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

Sustainable development and innovations: lessons from the Red Queen

As sustainable development has to support an adaptive and flexible process towards inevitable changes in environmental as well as in socioeconomic systems, the notion of innovations must be a key issue of sustainability. While there is an increasing awareness that sustainable change is essentially based on the innovative process, the theoretical approaches to analyse innovations are limited and, for the most part, embedded in the static framework of neoclassical economics. It is argued that this framework is sealed off from the complexity and constraints of real-life phenomena and is consequently insufficient to understand innovations in the integrative context of sustainable development. As an alternative perspective, this paper examines the importance of evolutionary theorising about innovative activities, and argues that the essential task of dealing with innovations as multi-dimensional phenomena is best addressed through an interdisciplinary approach. Thus, attention is devoted to evolutionary insights that come from different disciplines, such as biology, economics, and history. Highlighting evolutionary features of innovations, such as path-dependence, uncertainty, cumulativeness, irreversibility and adaptive variations, it is shown that, in contrast to the standard economic understanding, innovations are driven by non-optimal changes and a dynamics far away from any stable equilibrium. Considering the dominance of the standard economic approach to innovations, the inevitable trade-off between economic efficiency and adaptive flexibility is stressed. The consequences of this trade-off are compared with the long-term issues of sustainability.adaptive flexibility; economic efficiency; evolution; innovations; sustainable development; Red Queen.

Managing complex adaptive systems: a co-evolutionary perspective on natural research management

The overexploitation of natural resources and the increasing number of social conflicts following from their unsustainable use point to a wide gap between the objectives of sustainability and current resource management practices. One of the reasons for the difficulties to close this gap is that for evolving complex systems like natural and socio-economic systems, sustainability cannot be a static objective. Instead sustainable development is an open evolutionary process of improving the management of social–ecological systems, through better understanding and knowledge. Therefore, natural resource management systems need to be able to deal with different temporal, spatial and social scales, nested hierarchies, irreducible uncertainty, multidimensional interactions and emergent properties. The co-evolutionary perspective outlined in this paper serves as heuristic device to map the interactions settled in the networks between the resource base, social institutions and the behaviour of individual actors. For this purpose we draw on ideas from complex adaptive systems theory, evolutionary theory and evolutionary economics. Finally, we outline a research agenda for a co-evolutionary approach for natural resource management systems

De * para * a la gobernanza para el desarrollo sostenible en Europa: ¿Qué está en juego para futuras investigaciones?

Following conferences in Pignans, Maastricht, Vienna and Cologne and many e-mail exchanges, the participants of the GoSD-research initiative have identified a path for future research that describes not only governance and sustainable development but also how governance can be *for* sustainable development. This concluding paper gives an account of the pre-analytic vision, hypotheses and questions that have so far emerged from this process. Given the difficulty and importance of the task, a first section focuses on methodological questions. Consecutive sections elucidate *for sustainable development*, as well as 'governance for'. The emerging pre-analytic vision then receives some in-depth treatment and we consider how to measure the *for* of governance for sustainable development through objectives and indicators, taking into account the paradox of change with conservation. This sets the stage for a final section on research hypothesis and questions that give a meaning to governance for sustainable development, and that will allow this research project to develop in a way that makes insight and useful policy recommendations possible