In the book Sustainability Science, I have argued that the location of sustainability is in the center of worldview space, where the balance is found between individual and collective and between material and immaterial (§6.3). The notion of two opposite forces in dynamic equilibrium provides an ingenious description of what is called worldview dynamics in [...]
An analysis of the outcomes of the World Value Survey (§4.2) over the period 1989-2004 has been used to identify popular support for the transition to a market economy in India and China (Migheli 2010). It is based on a set of questions about the role of competition, government intervention, income inequality, hard work and [...]
Cultural Theory interprets social-cultural change as a continuous, dynamic interplay between the adherents of the four perspectives (Thompson 1992, 1997; Vries 2023). Individuals alter their perspective when it is no longer reconcilable with their experience. Collective, institutional change happens whenever larger groups of people start to doubt the correctness and adequateness of the dominant perspective [...]
[see also this link here.] Global Sustainability 27 september 2019 (e18). The seven-plus billion human beings on the planet are increasingly connected through material and informational exchanges. Their everyday behaviour and their desires, emotions, aspirations and expectations are still very different and diverse, yet there seems to be a shared universal idea(l) about ‘the good [...]
Values and knowledge are two important concepts in sustainability science. Recently, new framings for these concepts have been proposed, both of which place our social relationships at the centre of the discussions: one is the notion of relational values, the other one of relational cognition. One assumption is that it is our values that shape [...]
Living on a plane. "Ana-Maria P. is the president of Powerstorm, a US company working on sustainable telecom solutions focused on reducing CO2 emissions in emerging markets. How often do you travel? I basically live on a plane. I recently calculated this and in the last four years, I spent only three months at home…The [...]
The consumption of meat is increasingly becoming controversial as a spectrum of activists point at the negative side-effects for animal welfare, human health, local pollution and climate change inducing greenhousegas emissions. The meat industry and its suppliers see their profits and expansion opportunities under threat, arguing that there are already many regulations in place and [...]
Every now and then I meet friends who have given up on changing the world: “It is too complex, too violent, too far away, and I feel powerless in the face of it. So I try to focus on my own family, neighbourhood…”. Somewhat paradoxical, this attitude is partly a response to the information overload [...]
Reading the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were agreed upon by the United Nations in 2015 in the document Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (sustainabledevelopment.un.org), I am struck by the high level of aspiration not to say idealism. The Goals do indeed demand a transformation and, besides focused technological innovations, crucial [...]
Worldviews often orient themselves to particular ideals, about human individuals and societies. Famous descriptions of an ideal society in literature are known as utopias: a place (τοπος) that is good (ευ) – or, in another interpretation, is not (ου). In his book Utopia (2006), Achterhuis proposes three criteria for a imagined future to be a [...]