Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

How to ... be a reflective practitioner.

Organizational learning II: Theory, method and practice

Abstract Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.

Planning in the Face of Power.

Existing approaches to sustainability assessment are typically characterized as being either “top–down” or “bottom–up.” While top–down approaches are commonly adopted by businesses, bottom–up approaches are more often adopted by civil society organizations and communities. Top–down approaches clearly favor standardization and commensurability between other sustainability assessment efforts, to the potential exclusion of issues that really matter on the ground. Conversely, bottom–up approaches enable sustainability initiatives to speak directly to the concerns and issues of communities, but lack a basis for comparability. While there are clearly contexts in which one approach can be favored over another, it is equally desirable to develop mechanisms that mediate between both. In this paper, we outline a methodology for framing sustainability assessment and developing indicator sets that aim to bridge these two approaches. The methodology incorporates common components of bottom–up assessment: constituency-based engagement processes and opportunity to identify critical issues and indicators. At the same time, it uses the idea of a “knowledge base,” to help with the selection of standardized, top–down indicators. We briefly describe two projects where the aspects of the methodology have been trialed with urban governments and communities, and then present the methodology in full, with an accompanying description of a supporting software system.

Reframing social sustainability reporting: towards an engaged approach

Indicators‐based projects are currently central to many local, city‐wide, national and international sustainability initiatives. The quantitative basis of many such projects means that achieving sustainability through them is often undertaken as a technical task. The size, scope and sheer number of indicators included within many such projects means that they are often unwieldy and resist effective implementation. Arguably, the techno‐scientific ‘edge’ inherent in them tends to blur the possibilities for bringing into question the structures of power and criteria by which values are translated into practice. It limits the way that a community may use indicators to support sustainable practices or to challenge unsustainable practices. The article discusses some of the methodological issues that arise when setting out to develop and implement qualitative indicators of sustainability that incorporate some quantitative metrics. This alternative approach involves people in actively learning and negotiating ove...

Accounting for sustainability: combining qualitative and quantitative research in developing ‘indicators’ of sustainability

Efforts to measure social and community sustainability confront a series of methodological dilemmas. We present four key distinctions that tend to orient such efforts: between objective and subjective assessment; between “communities” as the sum-of-their-parts, or as holistic and distinct entities in themselves; between present and future aspects to be measured; and between use of “top–down” and “bottom–up” indicators. We then propose a questionnaire for sustainability assessment in light of these. We administered the questionnaire to various communities in the Middle East, South and South East Asia between 2006 and 2010, and present descriptive summaries and a factor analysis of the results here. The results serve two aims: to augment existing qualitative research conducted in the respective areas, and to test the validity and reliability of the instrument itself. Several limitations of the questionnaire emerged during analysis, which we discuss. The results also show strong correlation with national Human Development Index figures for the communities surveyed and moreover, point to several interesting attitudinal divergences between the communities sampled. We conclude with an outline of a revised sustainability assessment instrument that has application for research looking to bridge the gap between psychological orientations towards wellbeing, on the one hand, and sociological or organizational studies on sustainability, on the other hand.

Measuring Social Sustainability: A Community-Centred Approach

Since the 1990s, politicising the environment has often involved the development of green concepts of citizenship. Informed by these concepts, cultural anthropology is used to examine prevailing ideas and practices of stakeholder citizenship. Of central concern are conditions wherein heightened individuation coincides with increased awareness of environmental issues. In the prevalence of stakeholder citizenship norms, the social task of addressing the ecological challenge is represented as individual opportunities and personal responsibilities. One upshot of this is that, as stakeholders, citizens are led to feel personally responsible for resolving socially created problems. In such contexts, increased awareness of environmental issues has the paradoxical effect of compromising citizens' ethical commitments within the ecosphere. By privileging managed consultation over motivating citizens politically, the normalising of stakeholder citizenship poses a problem for green politics by making it difficult to ...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09644010903007344

Paradoxes of increased individuation and public awareness of environmental issues

Contributors to this collection offer a “reflective and theoretically developed accompaniment” to the “critique of ‘capitalocentrism’” (p. 10) found in J.K. Gibson-Graham’s earlier works The End of...

Andy Scerri

Papers

Reframing social sustainability reporting: towards an engaged approach

Accounting for sustainability: combining qualitative and quantitative research in developing ‘indicators’ of sustainability

Measuring Social Sustainability: A Community-Centred Approach

Paradoxes of increased individuation and public awareness of environmental issues

Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies