Learning Strategies for Sustainable Organisations

Bryan Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000570410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Learning Strategies for Sustainable Organisations explores sustainability in the context of organisational practice and its implications for learning.

Based on a systems thinking approach, it provides a thorough grounding in the principles of systems thinking and tools that can be used to help implement sustainability-focused learning strategies. Increasingly, organisations are recognising the importance of adapting their practices to become more sustainable. Drawing on the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals as a framework, new knowledge, skills and attitudes are required to help provide products and services that align with changing social and ecological environments and better serve the communities of which they are a part. This book is a practical guide showing how to facilitate sustainability learning and development within organisations, explaining how to identify gaps in current practice, take into account different contexts and perspectives about what sustainability means, and evaluate results following implementation. Learning resources include chapter summaries, illustrations, reflection points, mind maps and further reading.

Written by an independent performance and learning consultant with extensive experience working with international organisations, this book provides a necessary toolkit for human resource development directors, training managers, chief sustainability officers and management consultants specialising in sustainable development.

1 Sustainability Development of a concept

DOI: 10.4324/9781003218296-2

When the last tree has been cut down,

the last fish caught,

the last river poisoned,

only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.

Saying attributed to native American culture

1.1 What this chapter covers

The aim of this chapter is to provide a grounding into what sustainability means and how the idea has emerged (Figure 1.1). It starts by tracing the history of the sustainability concept, looking at its origins in concerns about economic development in post-colonial countries which led to the engagement of the United Nations system, and parallel concerns in the scientific and environmentalist communities. It then looks at the problems which have been found in trying to define what sustainability might mean, and examines the three dimensions of sustainability, environmental, social and economic.

Figure 1.1 Map of Chapter 1.

1.2 How a modern understanding of sustainability emerged

We start the story of how a modern understanding of sustainability emerged around the time of the Reformation in England. It is 1533. Henry VIII, King of England, is worried. He is worried about the long-term future of the nation’s hemp crop. He is not interested in hemp’s mood-altering properties that could take his mind off the problems of producing a male heir to the throne. He is worried because hemp is a vitally important raw material in ship construction, for ropes and sails, and England needs to build a navy so that it can defend itself against the threatening maritime states of France and Spain. So he passes a law to make hemp cultivation a legal requirement: farmers will have to set aside about 1/10 hectare for growing flax or hemp; otherwise, they would be subject to a large fine.¹

We do not know if the discussions at court used the word “sustainability”, but this is what the issue at question is: ensuring that future generations of English people would be safe. This story shows that sustainability has a long history (and it also shows that English Europhobia goes back many centuries, but that is for another book). Concerns about sustainability of course go back to the beginning of humanity’s existence: hunter-gatherers moved from one place to another as game became harder to find; early agricultural communities moved onwards as they exhausted one area of land; settled communities looked for ways to keep the land on which they depended for existence fertile.

Figure 1.2 shows a timeline for key developments in the sustainability discourse.

Figure 1.2 Timeline showing the development of the concept of sustainability.

As time progressed the 18th century saw concerns in Germany about maintaining sustainable forestry yields to support the silver-smelting industry² and discussions by moral philosophers such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill about whether the economic changes they could see in their worlds might have negative implications for the fabric of society.³ Writing Capital in the late 19th century, Karl Marx discussed the importance of protecting the natural environment for future generations:

Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].⁴

Marx was also keenly interested in soil fertility and wrote about the impact of the English industrial revolution on the long-term future of agricultural land. He recognised that moving people from an agricultural life into industrial employment would lead to people forgetting the importance of circulating natural waste back into the soil to enrich it:

Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive-power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil.⁵

Present-day Marxist writers translate “circulation of matter” as the “metabolic rift”, “… the material estrangement of human beings in capitalist society from the natural conditions of their existence”.⁶

In more recent times, an interest in sustainability issues emerged in the 1960s, stimulated by such events as the impact of photographs of planet Earth taken during the Apollo programme and of environmentally aware publications such as Rachel Carson’s 1961 Silent Spring.⁷ This was also the period of decolonisation, and as the 1960s and 1970s progressed, there came increasing concerns about the social and economic development of what was then called “the Third World”. As industrialisation spread around the world the negative environmental impacts that this created became more significant, and out of this discourse, the phrase “sustainable development” emerged.

Awareness of environmental degradation was also growing in the developed world. The problem of acid rain falling on Scandinavia in the 1960s caused by industrial pollution from the United Kingdom proved to be an important spark in the United Nations’ engagement in sustainability.⁸ The acid rain crisis prompted the Swedish government to introduce a resolution to the United Nations’ General Assembly in 1968 calling for a conference on environmental matters, and the resulting 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm was the first international conference focusing on the environment. It led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and initiated political processes which ultimately led to the establishment of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (also known as the Brundtland Commission). In 1987, the WCED published the report Our Common Future, a particularly significant moment in the evolution of the sustainability concept as it provided what is often seen as the basic definition of sustainability: sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.⁹

The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, popularly known as the “Earth Summit”, led to the publication of Agenda 21, which was an attempt at establishing a framework for global sustainable development. It led to the development of international standard ISO 14001 covering sustainable development which requires organisations to develop and implement management systems that continually reduce environmental impacts.¹⁰ Twenty years after UNCED, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), or Rio+20, was held, again in Rio de Janeiro. An outcome of Rio+20 was a decision to convene a working group which eventually published Agenda 2030,¹¹ which defined the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Figure 1.3 The 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

There are 17 SDGs (Figure 1.3), the first 16 of which address sectoral issues and the final one looks at partnerships needed to enable achievement of the other goals. Within the SDGs, there is a clear attempt to address the range of social, economic and environmental issues associated with the development and to highlight the interlinkages between sectors and issues. Each goal is broken down into a number of targets, which both help to make tackling the goals less daunting and create flexibility so that countries can adapt them to their particular context.¹² They also make it a little easier to see connections between the sectoral goals, which is useful as the official presentation of the SDGs provides little discussion about their systemic interactions.¹³

The SDGs have been well received and praised for making a significant step forward in addressing both social and environmental aspects of sustainability, and for, albeit in a limited way, recognising the complex interactions between these dimensions. However, in the words of one major review of the SDGs, while “ambitious and aspirational”, they are “… necessary but not sufficient to lead humanity towards long-term sustainable development”.¹⁴ One reason offered for this is that they do not challenge the power structures and systems of political economy which have contributed to the damaging global dynamics which operate in the early 21st century: for example, they still focus on the importance of economic growth (Goal 8) as a means for achieving the goals.¹⁵ In that respect, they have been described as representing a contemporary, institutional interpretation of sustainable development, based on a somewhat unquestioning acceptance of contemporary neoliberal political economy.¹⁶ There is a more detailed discussion about neoclassical and neoliberal perspectives on sustainability and economic growth in Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2.

As well as this history of sustainability in the intergovernmental system, there is another timeline involving concerned practitioners and academics. In 1972, The Ecologist magazine dedicated a whole issue to its Blueprint for Survival manifesto, a strategy for a sustainable society (in fact, one of the earliest uses of the term in this context) which would cause minimum disruption to ecological processes, conserve materials and energy, enable a stable population, and create “… a social system in which the individual can enjoy, rather than feel restricted by, the first three conditions”.¹⁷ It also offered, 50 years before the COVID-19 pandemic, the prescient warning that:

Not only is it increasingly difficult to cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Cover illustration
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Sustainability: development of a concept
• 2 Systems thinking, complexity and sustainability
• 3 The political economy of sustainability
• 4 The sustainable organisation
• 5 Developing a learning strategy 1: what to learn
• 6 Developing a learning strategy 2: how people learn
• 7 Developing a learning strategy 3: designing formal learning
• 8 Developing a learning strategy 4: informal learning and the learning environment
• 9 Preparing the final strategy
• 10 Evaluating learning about sustainability
• 11 Reflecting on learning about learning
• Index