Strategy for Sustainability Transitions:Goveance, Community and Environment

by: Kristof Van Assche (Author),Raoul Beunen(Author),Monica Gruezmacher(Author)&1more

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Publication Date: 2024/4/10

Language: English

Print Length: 316 pages

ISBN-10: 1035323990

ISBN-13: 9781035323999

Book Description

In this innovative work, Kristof Van Assche, Raoul Beunen and Monica Gruezmacher analyse the challenges and possibilities of sustainability transitions, presenting the dilemmas facing the path to more sustainable communities and societies, as well as proposing creative solutions. The authors deploy evolutionary goveance theory as a conceptual framing for transition strategy, highlighting the importance of understanding goveance and community strategy in any potential response to environmental crises.This timely book expertly draws on a wide range of disciplines and theories, in considering the limitations imposed by unpredictable dynamics of power, discourse and affect and the shifting boundaries of what is goveable. The authors demonstrate the creative potential of both instabilities and rigidities in goveance. Chapters detail the basics of evolutionary goveance theory, developing and applying it to transition strategy by engaging in an accessible manner with post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, institutional economics, systems theory and critical management studies. In a clearly constructed theoretical narrative, the results of this engagement become clear, in a new understanding of the weight of the past on goveance and community, the construction of temporality, change and strategic change, contextual notions of good goveance, and how these affect major shifts towards sustainability.Strategy for Sustainability Transitions is an important addition to an ever-expanding and crucial field. Particularly relevant to practitioners and policy makers interested in sustainable development and environmental goveance, it will greatly appeal to students and scholars of human geography, public policy and administration, environmental politics and planning and development studies.

About the Author

In this innovative work, Kristof Van Assche, Raoul Beunen and Monica Gruezmacher analyse the challenges and possibilities of sustainability transitions, presenting the dilemmas facing the path to more sustainable communities and societies, as well as proposing creative solutions. The authors deploy evolutionary goveance theory as a conceptual framing for transition strategy, highlighting the importance of understanding goveance and community strategy in any potential response to environmental crises.This timely book expertly draws on a wide range of disciplines and theories, in considering the limitations imposed by unpredictable dynamics of power, discourse and affect and the shifting boundaries of what is goveable. The authors demonstrate the creative potential of both instabilities and rigidities in goveance. Chapters detail the basics of evolutionary goveance theory, developing and applying it to transition strategy by engaging in an accessible manner with post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, institutional economics, systems theory and critical management studies. In a clearly constructed theoretical narrative, the results of this engagement become clear, in a new understanding of the weight of the past on goveance and community, the construction of temporality, change and strategic change, contextual notions of good goveance, and how these affect major shifts towards sustainability.Strategy for Sustainability Transitions is an important addition to an ever-expanding and crucial field. Particularly relevant to practitioners and policy makers interested in sustainable development and environmental goveance, it will greatly appeal to students and scholars of human geography, public policy and administration, environmental politics and planning and development studies.