Project: 2010 – 2020
Contributing to Overall Sustainability from the Perspective of the SQA
Since 2010, a Dutch think-tank ‘social quality and the challenge of sustainability’ tried to pave the way for adapting aspects of the SQA in such a way, that this approach could be made functional for a contribution to the overall sustainability. This resulted into a document, published in 2012, Development toward sustainability: the need for a comprehensive conceptual and methodological framework for new politics and policies. Since then, SQ-scholars changed the SQA’s orientation. Comments have been made on the well known points of departure of the 1987 Brundtland report, published by the UN. In this report explained is, that the three fundamental dimensions of sustainability are ‘the economic, the social and the environmental dimension’. Seen from the perspective of the SQA, the social dimension is changed into the socio-political and socio-cultural dimensions. The tripartite points are changed into a four-fold points of departure.
The second change refers to the SQA’s construction of logical connected frameworks, to analyze and understand processes which determine the increase or decrease of sustainability. The third change is, that social quality indicators are made suitable to analyze the consequences of these processes. This theoretical construction – which is made suitable for empirical research – is presented in the recent Working Paper Ideas and Reflections about the application and elaboration of the social quality approach This elaboration delivered the points of departure for the publication of the Manifesto on climate Change, signed by 400 scholars all over the. It proposed first, to pave the way for a comprehensive approach to the study of sustainability, overcoming traditional dividing lines, second, the creation of academic change-agent centers to develop a common work plan and start the implementation of this plan, third to support governments all over the world for establishing these centers and facilitating their work’.
Four Dimensions of Sustainability
Already before and but also since then, from the side of the IASQ specific projects are stimulated to realize elements of its own manifesto, for example:
- The publication of a project in 2016 - with support by the Dutch University in Utrecht- about the destruction of old forests in Western Australia for reasons of profit-making and how community groups combatted this destruction without really support from policy-makers or universities in,
- Introduction from the side of the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics in 2017 about the development toward sustainability, based on the noosphere paradigm of global societal development, seen also from the perspective of the SQA
- The presentation of the study in 2018 about the current state of the art of greening British businesss from the Liverpool Hope University.
- The study about the outcomes of the Climate Change negotiations held in Poland, 2018 with support from Australian, European and American academic institutes.
- The publication in 2018 of the project on the work of the Plastic Soup Foundation and the four-dimensional application of the SQA.
- The publication of the project about the challenges of geoengineering to compensate the insufficiency of politics oriented on the expulsion of CO2 bfro the Australian and Austrian academic institutes.
This increasing attention in the context of the SQA for parts of the four dimensions of sustainability – playing a role in (1) the field of societal complexities, (2) urban/rural transformations and (3) ecosystems inspired to develop the first connections with the Japanese Center of southeast Asian Studies of the Kyoto University, resulting in already 2017 the publication of the Humanosphere Potentiality Index. The challenge is what the SQA has to say to the Humansphere approach and vice versa.