Sustainability Networks: Cognitive Tools for Expert Collaboration in Social-Ecological Systems

by Hukkinen; Janne

• ISBN13: 9780415461603
• ISBN10: 041546160X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781134043781
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Sustainability is a word that means different things depending on who is using it, thus underlining the potential problems involved in experts from different fields teaming up to tackle sustainability problems. In this book, Janne Hukkinen argues for a reflexive approach to sustainability as a means of coming to grips with the threatening challenges arising out of human-environment interaction. The author illustrates his argument with a case study of natural resource management in Lapland, showing how sustainability is understood holistically by academics and professionals alike. This book reflects an emerging cognitive turn in sustainability sciences, conceptualizing environmental challenges during action on our social and material environments, rather than in isolation. Hukkinen argues that this conceptual blending enables sustainability experts to hybridize themselves: to immerse themselves in the fields of other experts and imagine the other's work - both prerequisites of trans-disciplinary knowledge integration. This book shows how sustainability experts can reveal their intellectual engagements when designing scenarios and indicators and presents a rigorous framework for organizing expert collaboration.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Bear tracks to sustainability expertise	p. 7
Miserable quarrel in a social-ecological system	p. 23
The commitments of science: dissecting the social-ecological system	p. 46
Reassembling the social-ecological system through analogies	p. 61
Illuminating sustainability with scenarios and indicators	p. 79
Scenarios and power	p. 101
Sustainability experts meet each other	p. 114
Conclusion: hybrid experts	p. 137
Epilogue	p. 150
Notes	p. 158
Index	p. 185
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