Tuesday: Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development
The greatest challenge to nature and people is not climate change, toxicity, shrinking biodiversity, poverty, degradation of food production capacity, or corruption. These are all great challenges, but our greatest challenge, driving it all, is that our political and industrial leaders typically do not know how the myriad impacts are rooted in a set of easy-to-learn overriding mechanisms of destruction of our ecological and social systems. So, leaders do not lead systematically towards sustainability and two doctrines are still dominant in their mindset:
- Sustainability pays off only if all share the burden of doing what is right.
- Sustainability cannot be defined.
A growing number of leaders in business and municipalities know how to work with a Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD), including how a robust definition of ecological and social sustainability and strategic guidelines can be used to aid the selection, use, combination and development of supplementary concepts, methods and tools and for the design of plans for change that contribute to society’s transition towards sustainability while being economically viable. Or in other words, they know how to act systematically for, and how to develop the business case of, sustainability. Professor Robèrt will present the framework, and apply many examples of how it is used and he will moderate a workshop, whereby students will use the framework for group-creativity related to their own research projects. The goal is to contribute to an answer to the 3rd research question of the DK: “What are scientifically sound, technologically and institutionally feasible, economically efficient, and ethically defensible and sustainable strategies to cope with climate change, particularly taking into account the problems of implementation in an environment characterized by uncertainties and thresholds?”
Lecturer/Convenor
Karl-Henrik Robèrt
Karl-Henrik Robèrt is Professor of Strategic Sustainable Development at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. His research and advice on the linkage between ecology, economy and technology has given him the Green Cross Award for International Leadership, and in the year 2000 he won the Blue Planet Prize – “The Ecology Nobel” – for his creation and development of The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD); he was also Ashoka Fellow (2009) and one of Ashoka’s 20 “Globalizers” (2010) and was included in the publication “100 Visionaries of the 20th Century”. Karl-Henrik supervises PhD students on Strategic Sustainable Development, has co-founded the internationally well renowned master’s program on strategic leadership towards sustainability (MSLS). During its 12-year existence, this program has hosted more than 500 students from more than 80 countries.
Rupert Baumgartner
Rupert J. Baumgartner is since 2010 full professor for sustainability management at the Institute of Systems Sciences, Innovation and Sustainability Research (ISIS), University of Graz. Since 2011 he serves as the director of this Institute and since 2012 he is Vice-Dean for research of the Faculty for Regional-, Environmental- and Educational Sciences/University of Graz.
He is board member of the International Sustainable Development Research Society (ISDRS) and subject editor for CSR and industrial ecology of the Journal of Cleaner Production (Elsevier). Before joining the University of Graz he was senior researcher in the field of strategic management and industrial ecology at the Åbo Akademi University in Finland and at the University of Leoben. He finished his post-doc studies in the field of corporate sustainability management at the University of Leoben and received the Venia docendi for business administration from the University of Leoben. His main research interests are (corporate) sustainability management, sustainability assessment, LCA, industrial ecology, interorganisational management and innovation.
