Understanding Sustainability

About

This is a course on the very fundamentals of sustainability and sustainable development, giving eight central perspectives on sustainability.

In recent decades, it has become increasingly evident that a key challenge for the global community is to create a more sustainable future. While the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals as well as the Paris Agreement from 2015 are examples of significant international efforts to achieve a more sustainable future, conflict and disagreement remain at all levels of society about what constitutes “sustainability” and how to achieve it. Accordingly, it requires an understanding of the wide variety of ways in which sustainability is defined, conceptualized, interpreted, understood and used among different sciences, stakeholders and decision makers to actively engage in this contested domain of sustainability in practice.

The overall purpose of the course is to provide students from natural science and social science backgrounds with a roadmap to understand different concepts of sustainability and sustainable development, enabling students to qualify and reflect upon sustainability aspects in their own education and future professional practice from an interdisciplinary perspective. The course will outline important underlying empirical and value based assumptions as well as challenges with and potentials of a wide range of different conceptualizations, interpretations and practical uses of sustainability. Offering a broad overview of different theoretical perspectives on sustainability from the social sciences and humanities to broader systems thinking, the course will facilitate productive critical thinking and reflection on both the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainability. This includes inherent tradeoffs and synergies associated with practical operationalization and implementation of sustainability, e.g. in relation to the UN SDGs.

Ensuring a strong link from theory to practice, every year the course will focus on specific cases, topics or themes of particular current interest. Themes could for instance be climate change mitigation and adaptation, energy production, food production, transportation systems, waste and recycling, nature restoration or biodiversity protection. In an interdisciplinary setting considering e.g., social, cultural, economic, environmental, political, governance and philosophical perspectives, the identified sustainability challenges as well as proposed solutions will be addressed, for instance relating to the SDGs or other operational frameworks. Additionally, guest lecturers from private companies, NGOs and public agencies working with implementation of sustainability in practice will present their perspectives on and efforts in implementing sustainability in the organizations they represent.

Course leader

Søren Bøye Olsen, Christian Gamborg and Aske Skovmand Bosselmann

Target group

Bachelor

Course aim

1. Describe different conceptualizations and definitions of sustainability

2. Explain how different definitions of sustainability relate to different ethical perspectives

3. Explain sustainability from different perspectives, including economic, social, governance and ecological dimensions

Skills:

1. Assess how sustainability is operationalized and measured across different levels of scales

2. Identify weaker and stronger conceptualizations of sustainability

3. Identify similarities and differences in value-based and empirical assumptions underlying different conceptualizations of sustainability in practice

Competencies

1. Critically analyze sustainability strategies and plans

2. Reflect on interconnections, tradeoffs and synergies between economic, social, governance and ecological dimensions of sustainability

3. Reflect on different conceptualizations of and strategies to achieve sustainability from an interdisciplinary perspective

Fee info