International Journal of Sustainable Development 

About: International Journal of Sustainable Development is an academic journal published by Inderscience Publishers. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Sustainable development & Sustainability. It has an ISSN identifier of 0960-1406. Over the lifetime, 443 publications have been published receiving 7328 citations.

Social sustainability: a catchword between political pragmatism and social theory

Abstract: The sustainability concepts of the 'Brundtland-Report' and the 'Rio documents' call for a combination of ecological, economic, social and institutional aspects of social development. This paper describes briefly, several models of sustainability and discusses social sustainability as conceptualised in selected sustainability indicators. In an attempt to remedy the lack of sociological theory, the paper proposes a sustainability concept, which is based on the concepts of needs and work, as an activity to fulfil these needs and as the principal exchange process between society and nature. Moreover, this paper argues in favour of recognition of social sustainability as both a normative and analytical concept.

Governance for sustainable development: moving from theory to practice

Abstract: In this paper we examine and elaborate on the central elements of sustainable development and governance, considering their interrelations as they have emerged from the core themes in sustainable development discourses over the past decade and a half. We argue that sustainability is best viewed as a socially instituted process of adaptive change in which innovation is a necessary element. We discuss four key elements of governance for sustainability, which are integrated into the concept of transition management. The result is a conceptual framework for policy-making and action-taking aimed at progress towards sustainability.

Governing societal transitions to sustainability

Abstract: Our paper addresses the inherent tension between the open-ended and uncertain process of sustainability transitions and the ambition for governing such a process. We explore this tension from two theoretical angles: the sustainability and the governance angles; by showing the implications of sustainability targets in governance processes and governance attempts. We propose transition management as a governance approach that has the potential to overcome this tension through selective participatory processes of envisioning, negotiating, learning and experimenting. Transition management includes a portfolio of tools that have a common objective to enable change in practices and structures directed towards sustainable development targets. We present the transition arena and the transition experiments as two transition management tools elaborating on their process design, expected outcomes and illustrating their application in the Dutch construction transition.

Economic sustainability of the economy: concepts and indicators

Abstract: Every society can be described as comprising four dimensions, the economic, social, environmental and institutional. Each of them is a complex, dynamic, self-organising and evolving entity in its own right, making the coupled system one of tremendous complexity. For this system to be sustainable, each of the four subsystems has to maintain its capability to survive and evolve, while the interlinkages of the subsystems must enable a permanent co-evolution. Finding the appropriate level of complexity for descriptions and models is a necessary precondition for adequate analysis and to avoid wrong prognoses. As this level of complexity is beyond the analytical capacities of current economic theories, a system analysis perspective is presented as a framework for discussing the co-evolution of economy, society, and nature. In this context, the economic, social, environmental and institutional sustainability of the economy can be defined and economic theories can be assessed regarding their usefulness for the description of a complex evolving system, like the economy. Unfortunately, there are few applications of the rather abstract system analysis of complex evolving systems to the economy so far. Consequently, before using it for assessing the sustainability of economic development processes, sustainability must be defined for such systems. This is the raison d'etre of Orientor Theory, providing the means to assess the sustainability of the economic system, albeit still on a rather abstract level. Based on systems and Orientor theory, the paper derives suggestions for criteria of the sustainability of the economy, and in particular its economic sustainability.