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Sustainability is presented as one of the most effective solutions to climate change, resource depletion and environmental contamination, yet its true function is to serve as a spatial and technical fix to the ecological limits of colonial practices and anthropogenic modes of production. Composed of physical infrastructures and environmental policies and regulations, sustainability enables the expansion of extractive systems and facilitates the fortification of their borders that enclose available resources and previously marginalized ecological bodies to continuously direct them towards the projection of highest production. In 'Hydroponic Hovering', Asli Uludag explores the soilless growing technique called hydroponics, a technical object of sustainability, its colonial history and contemporary instrumentalization in Westland, the Netherlands to investigate the politics of sustainable solutions and speculate on the imagined future they are utilized to realize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main outcomes of the Rio + 20 Conference was the agreement to set Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The most common terms in the17 goals are economic growth, resilience and inclusion, all of which are critically examined in this article. This article discusses how these goals are reflected within existing sustainability programs at a vocational college, and at the undergraduate and postgraduate university levels in The Netherlands. Within all three institutions the author has integrated lectures on sustainable development with specific emphasis on the SDGs. The aim was to engage students in critical discussion, allowing reflection on the issues and paradoxes that characterise the larger discourse of sustainability. The case studies illustrate how curriculum aimed at this awareness can be developed stimulating the students’ recognition of critique of economic development, inclusion and resilience. As a result of the courses, the students were able to develop a certain degree of critical, imaginative, and innovative thinking about sustainable development in general and the SDGs in particular. Cradle to cradle and circular economy approaches were named as more promising for current production systems. This article concludes with the recommendation as to how the SDGs can be critically taught. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001 the Dutch government adopted a new policy in its Fourth National Environmental Policy Plan. Its transitions approach seeks radically more sustainable socio-technical systems, and represents an attempt to reinvigorate ecological modernisation. To explain the rise of this distinct policy storyline, a coalition of researchers and policy-makers forming the transition storyline is analysed. The interpretative flexibility of the storyline in relation to prevailing institutional priorities explains its success but also builds in limits by making subsequent institutionalisation susceptible to capture by incumbent interests, as illustrated by implementation in the energy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan 4 it has been recognised that persistent environmental problems (such as global warming caused by greenhouse gases) cannot be solved by traditional policy instruments or by technological innovation alone. Transitions are necessary and have been defined as long-term, continuous processes in which a society or a subsystem changes fundamentally—interconnected changes that reinforce each other in technology, the economy, institutions, ecology, culture, behaviour and belief systems. One of the examples where transitions are necessary is in the realm of mobility. Although there is currently no accepted single strategy, promising new options are increased multimodal chain mobility (in order to reduce car mobility), and a transition towards a sustainable fuel infrastructure. In the last few years leading car companies have been investing in fuel-cell technologies, possibly requiring new infrastructures based on hydrogen. Innovation in the direction of hydrogen fuel cells requires a future vision that is shared by many stakeholders, collaboration between many public and private stakeholders, and experimentation in bounded socio-technical experiments, in which second-order learning processes take place about the nature of the technology, about collaboration between stakeholders with various interests, and about sustainable solutions for the future. As a case study, consumer acceptance of fuel-cell buses in Amsterdam has been analysed. In this case, special emphasis has been given to social learning among stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]