The Sustainability Research Group at the University of Basel presents research activities on governance for sustainability.

There is broad agreement among scholars that the transformation towards sustainable societies needs better steering. However, we see at least four reasons why the governance of sustainable development is a challenging endeavour. First, the goals of sustainable transformations are highly ambivalent and contested; second, there is uncertainty regarding future developments to be dealt with; third, sustainability issues are highly complex, covering many different aspects such as agriculture, water, climate change, unemployment, inequality, security, energy supply; and fourth, governance of sustainable development is supposed to take place within a highly differentiated governance system that consists of multiple levels and sectors of policy making and involves many different actors.

The Sustainability Research Group at the University of Basel is doing basic and embedded social science-driven research with the overall goal to provide orientation for dealing with complexity and uncertainty related to sustainable development and its governance. Our research is not concerned with sustainable development as an environmental goal, but rather as an overarching topic of societal change. Therefore, we follow the proposition already made by the Brundtland report for overcoming sector policies towards more integrated approaches. This general analytical orientation is also in line with growing expectations from practice. Policy makers themselves have been increasingly calling for more integrated approaches on policy making and administration to successfully work towards a more sustainable future.

However, we diagnose a tension between expectations and knowledge on how to implement integrative sustainability perspectives into political and administrative practice. Policy makers who strive for integration simultaneously face sectorial duties to be fulfilled. Moreover, political and administrational action is often concerned with the management of acute crises without taking into account possible consequences for future developments. By reacting to practitioners’ needs and in close collaboration with them, we have built up a research stream directed towards the achievement of a better understanding of challenges and opportunities for implementing integrative sustainability perspectives into policy making. Therein we look at three different aspects below.

The first concerns integrative sustainability goals and assessments. Sustainability goals often do not have relevance for the daily work of policy makers. They also do not display the different nexuses, and sustainability assessments are very often simply add-ons. Our research is concerned with finding out how and under which conditions what forms of goals and assessments are integrated into the management process in such a way that they can orientate political-administrative action towards sustainable development.

The second is about integrative policy strategies such as sustainability strategies. These policy schemes and related institutional arrangements have been developed in many contexts to orient policy making towards overall sustainability goals. Our research focuses on whether, how and to what extent these policy schemes serve as sustainability oriented metapolicies that provide orientation and coherence in highly fragmented policy systems.

The third aspect is about opportunity spaces and capacities for integrative practices of policy makers ‘on the ground’. Shaped by institutional settings and administrative culture, policy practices represent important drivers and barriers for change. Our research looks at how and under which conditions integrative practices emerge that are able to transform policy making and governance towards sustainability.

Professor Dr Paul Burger
Head Sustainability Research Group
University of Basel
Department of Social Sciences
+41 61 267 04 03
paul.burger@unibas.ch
https://nachhaltigkeit.philhist.unibas.ch/profile/

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