Jeppe Læssøe

Learning as democratic action and communication: framing Danish and Swedish environmental and sustainability education

Learning as democratic action and communication : framing Danish and Swedish environmental and sustainability education

Participation and Sustainable Development: The Role and Challenges of Mediating Agents

This chapter proposes a transgression of narrow fixations on top-down versus bottomup approaches to citizen participation. Even though there is good reason to attack top-down approaches, I argue that when, for example, environmental sociologists turn their criticism of the top-down into an idealisation of the bottom-up, they are stuck with a simplistic model. Moreover, when confronted with the quest for sustainable development, an emancipatory conception of participation can neglect the tension between participation as a defence of democratic rights, and participation as a tool for promoting learning processes that aims to replace narrow interests with a collective responsibility for a sustainable future. In this context, this chapter takes a closer look at a new kind of professional agent faced with this tension and charged with implementing participative processes on sustainable development. These professional agents are conceptualised as ‘mediators’, and their role is differentiated into ‘networkers’, ‘interpreters’, and ‘facilitators’. Based on examples from Denmark, this chapter outlines four dilemmas with which these kinds of mediating change agents have to cope and the qualitative differences between them. The dilemmas are:

Opportunities and challenges for multicriteria assessment of food system sustainability

The focus of the Special Feature on “Multicriteria assessment of food system sustainability” is on the complex challenges of making and communicating overall assessments of food systems sustainability based on multiple and varied criteria. Four papers concern the choice and development of appropriate tools for making multicriteria sustainability assessments that handle built-in methodological conflicts and trade-offs between different assessment objectives. They underscore the value of linking diverse methods and tools, or nesting and stepping their deployment, to help build resilience and sustainability. They conclude that there is no one tool, one framework, or one indicator set that is appropriate for the different purposes and contexts of sustainability assessment. The process of creating the assessment framework also emerges as important: if the key stakeholders are not given a responsible and full role in the development of any assessment tool, it is less likely to be fit for their purpose and they are unlikely to take ownership or have confidence in it. Six other papers reflect on more fundamental considerations of how assessments are based in different scientific perspectives and on the role of values, motivation, and trust in relation to assessments in the development of more sustainable food systems. They recommend a radical break with the tradition of conducting multicriteria assessment from one hegemonic perspective to considering multiple perspectives. Collectively the contributions to this Special Feature identify three main challenges for improved multicriteria assessment of food system sustainability: (i) how to balance different types of knowledge to avoid that the most well-known, precise, or easiest to measure dimensions of sustainability gets the most weight; (ii) how to expose the values in assessment tools and choices to allow evaluation of how they relate to the ethical principles of sustainable food systems, to societal goals, and to the interests of different stakeholders; and (iii) how to enable communication in such a way that the assessments can effectively contribute to the development of more sustainable food systems by facilitating a mutual learning process between researchers and stakeholders. The wider question of how to get from assessment to transformation goes across all three challenges. We strongly recommend future research on the strengths, weaknesses, and complementarities of taking a values-based rather than a performance-based approach to promoting the resilience and sustainability of coupled ecological, economic, and social systems for ensuring food security and agroecosystem health in the coming millennium.

Three perspectives on motivation and multicriteria assessment of organic food systems

Organic food systems are based on a complex of value criteria that often are not explicitly considered when agents think, communicate, and make decisions concerning organic food. Multicriteria assessment (MCA) refers to a group of tools that help the user to tackle such highly complex issues. The question is how an MCA tool should be designed to facilitate reflections, communication, and decision making in relation to organic food systems. A key issue is motivation. There are several divergent theories of motivation, and the question cannot be adequately answered by using any single theory. We discuss an economic, a psychosocial, and a relational perspective on motivation and MCA. Using the example of a consumer assessing and choosing products in the supermarket, the economic conception of motivation offers a focus on decision-making processes. The psychosocial approach to motivation draws attention to the influence of cognitive structures and experience-based emotional drivers. Finally, the relational approach stresses that motivation is situated in the relations between agents. We discuss how the three perspectives converge and diverge regarding the purpose of using an MCA tool, the scope of the MCA, the strategic focus, and challenges and potentials associated with an MCA tool. Through this multiple-perspective approach, the general idea of MCA is expanded and elaborated to refine the design of an MCA tool for organic food systems.

Green Flag Eco-Schools and the Challenge of Moving Forward

In this article we look at the Green Flag Eco-school approach in a time perspective. We make a distinction between internal and external time perspectives with the first focusing on the process inside the school and the second on changes in the surrounding world challenging but also opening for new ways forward for the educational approach. Based on a study of four experienced Green Flag schools in Denmark we identify problems with maintaining a dynamic process after the first years of establishment. We also identify problems with the involvement of the whole school and relate this problem of disintegration to the external time perspective where the environmental management approach has been challenged by request for more integrative approaches. In the final section we discuss whether it is possible to open for a more integrative approach to sustainability without losing the strong identity and concrete action orientation which have made the Green Flag approach successful. In line with the concept of responsible living we propose to do so by focusing on practices and products in the lived life as concrete points of departures for exemplary learning on how ecological, economic and socio-cultural issues always are inter-related.

An exploration of sustainability change agents as facilitators of nonformal learning: mapping a moving and intertwined landscape

We explore the variety of ways in which change agents try to contribute to sustainable development and how, by doing so, they enable different forms of learning. Drawing on research literature as well as empirical studies, we distinguish a diversity of change agency roles. We then describe and develop an ideal typology of change agents according to how they relate to two fields of tension: that between instrumental vs. open-ended approaches to change and learning, and that between personal detachment vs. involvement. Finally, we compare the developed ideal types, i.e., Technician, Convincer, Mediator, and Concerned Explorer, with empirical examples and suggest a dynamic reading of the typology as a landscape in which change agents move between and across different positions according to changing and shifting contexts.