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Developing effective policy for highly complex, long-term, societal issues requires processes that include systems thinking and behavioural insights. The recent article by Michael Hallsworth (1) presented a rigorous manifesto that formalised a structured approach for the next phase of applied behavioural science which we wholeheartedly welcome. Here, we discuss a case study that embodies the shift to applying behavioural insights and complex adaptive systems articulated in the manifesto. The case study goes beyond behavioural insights and focusses on integrating behavioural science into an organization’s core activities—specifically in environmental policy making in Aotearoa New Zealand. We also propose advice on implementing such initiatives and encourage government bodies to risk investing in systems approaches appropriate to their jurisdiction.

‘Think global, act local’ has been linked with climate change issues for several decades and suggests a simple downscaling of ideas, tools and processes can be relatively easily achieved. Adaptation pathways, for example, are increasingly used to identify and evaluate adaptation options against a range of plausible futures. The process is applied to both large-scale infrastructure and investment decisions, as well as smaller-scale, sub-national issues associated in part, with climate change impacts and implications. Consequently, pathways are being developed in the context of multiple contested values, competing with other, more immediate, non-climate-related or indirectly related planning processes, such as freshwater management, community resilience and wellbeing, and biodiversity conservation. In this Short Communication we reflect specifically on place-based adaptation pathways constructed, presented, and implemented within limited budgets and without recourse to resource-intensive research capacities. We emphasise the need to meet criteria for local credibility, legitimacy, and relevance. Specifically, we suggest there is a need to accommodate the complexities of local conditions; establish affordable and accessible processes; and build technical and participatory capability. These considerations may assist with co-creating place-based pathways and incorporate a wider range of complex issues both political and contextual with multiple constituencies including, as necessary, where science itself is increasingly questioned or disregarded. In turn this might lead to sets of country specific, nested local hierarchical adaptation options developed through pluralist approaches.

As the short to medium-term social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic dominate world issues, longer-term environmental and geopolitical concerns remain of great concern. However, the appetite for tackling complex transdisciplinary anthropogenic change processes may be receding rather than accelerating. In this essay, we propose that Antarctica, the continent of peace and science, a place that assumes a role as the global imaginary Other, where short- and long-term horizons co-exist, is a site where signs of global regeneration in the Anthropocene should be clear. To provoke discussion, we imagine two scenarios set in the five Gateway Cities of Antarctica to 2050. In the ‘Gatekeepers’ scenario, there is a fragmented global order with minimal unregulated behaviour based on narrowly defined national interests; in the ‘Gateways’ scenario, values-based partnerships generate novel institutional arrangements. By contrasting these polar opposites as a performative act, we highlight the need for future-making at the interface between science and policy.

Ushuaia, one of five Antarctic gateway cities worldwide, is one of the most prosperous places in Argentina. However, its initial impression to visitors as a highly affluent town can be misleading. ...

This research note provides guidance for the development of simple indicators set in a dashboard format to illustrate current and future states of Antarctica. It supports increasing interest in the...

Synthetic gene drive approaches are nascent technologies with potential applicability for pest control for conservation purposes. Responsible science mandates that society be engaged in a dialogue ...

The long-term future of the Antarctic is intrinsically connected to climate change and global environmental change processes driven socially and geopolitically as much as they are biophysically. Th...

'COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic' is the aspirational title of the recently released report by the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. This panel, co-chaired by Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was convened in mid-2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) to assess the global handling of COVID-19.

Adaptation pathways is an approach to identify, assess, and sequence climate change adaptation options over time, linking decisions to critical signals and triggers derived from scenarios of future conditions. However, conceptual differences in their development can hinder methodological advance and create a disconnect between those applying pathways approaches and the wider community of practitioners undertaking vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation assessments. Here, we contribute to close these gaps, advancing principles, and processes that may be used to guide the trajectory for adaptation pathways, without having to rely on data-rich or resource-intensive methods. To achieve this, concepts and practices from the broad pathways literature is combined with our own experience in developing adaptation pathways for primary industries facing the combined impacts of climate change and other, nonclimatic stressors. Each stage is guided by a goal and tools to facilitate discussions and produce feasible pathways. We illustrate the process with a case study from Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, involving multiple data sources and methods in two catchments. Resulting guidelines and empirical examples are consistent with principles of adaptive management and planning and can provide a template for developing local-, regional- or issue-specific pathways elsewhere and enrich the diversity of vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation assessment practice.

This research note places interest in the long-term future of Antarctica in a historical context. It then examines the historical development of thinking about the long-term future of Antar...

The parallel scenario process enables characterization of climate-related risks and response options to climate change under different socio-economic futures and development prospects. The process is based on representative concentration pathways, shared socio-economic pathways, and shared policy assumptions. Although this scenario architecture is a powerful tool for evaluating the intersection of climate and society at the regional and global level, more specific context is needed to explore and understand risks, drivers, and enablers of change at the national and local level. We discuss the need for a stronger recognition of such national-scale characteristics to make climate change scenarios more relevant at the national and local scale, and propose ways to enrich the scenario architecture with locally relevant details that enhance salience, legitimacy, and credibility for stakeholders. Dynamic adaptive pathways are introduced as useful tools to draw out which elements of a potentially infinite scenario space connect with decision-relevant aspects of particular climate-related and non-climate-related risks and response options. Reviewing adaptation pathways for New Zealand case studies, we demonstrate how this approach could bring the global-scale scenario architecture within reach of local-scale decision-making. Such a process would enhance the utility of scenarios for mapping climate-related risks and adaptation options at the local scale, involving appropriate stakeholder involvement.

Trends in digitisation such as virtual reality, citizen science, and big data will impact both tourism and research outreach in Antarctica. We examine one modest but revealing example: geocaching. In particular we review the form and distribution of current geocaching practice in Antarctica and situate that within a global context. Through a self-reflexive examination of our own experiences on Ross Island in the 2018 summer season, we explore some of the ways that digitisation impacts on recreation in Antarctica through our different research lenses. Among other things, we found that geocaching folded into our personal experiences an unanticipated echo of the Heroic Era. Although it is simply our own observations as researchers that we draw on here, we consider that they are usefully suggestive when it comes to the future of human activity in Antarctica as it responds to increasing digitization and to calls for increased public science engagement activity.

The development of futures studies in New Zealand over several decades is reviewed. As in other jurisdictions, early futures studies in New Zealand were predominantly problem-oriented using trend analysis and scenarios. More recently it is heading towards developing more long-term perspectives including crowd-sourcing possibilities through social media. This is supported by the strong sense of stewardship embedded in its indigenous culture and an increasing use of participatory processes in environmental decision-making around highly complex issues. The potential to address complexity through technologies for wicked problems and futures literacy is discussed in detail. While the potential for wider relevance appears to move in disconnected phases of activity, there is a movement towards forms of long-term stewardship, albeit tempered by presentism. One highlight is the 2017 Act providing the Whanganui River with legal status equal to that of a person. Another is the use of collaborative environmental governance such as the Land and Water Forum and the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. Observations are made on how futures studies might develop in New Zealand and may be of significance more broadly. In particular the most significant elements of change may well be inspired through indigenous Māori culture which links, to developments in philosophy such as Dark Ecology which propose a shift in the current anthropogenic perspective.

The title Erebus: The Story of a Ship might suggest a dry naval architecture thesis illustrated with line drawings from which a balsa wood scale model could be authentically lofted, built and caref...

The ability to anticipate, plan for and adapt to the changes of the early Anthropocene is limited by human behaviour, political inertia, and short-termism. This ‘tragedy of the horizon’ is explored through three specific lenses on early Anthropocene futures. We begin with the dominant scientific evidence: mathematical and probabilistic modelling synthesised into increasingly rigorous and sophisticated scenarios for assessing policy options and broadening societal understanding. We then draw on the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole in what Sheila Jasanoff describes as sociotechnical imaginaries. We also draw on institutional epistemologies as reflected in two global assessment initiatives: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been described as a ‘view from nowhere’, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a ‘view from everywhere’, though analysis has concluded that both organisations merely offer ‘views from somewhere’. We then present examples of other early Anthropocene imaginaries from writers, activists, and philosophers. The arc through these suggests both common themes and broad variation in underlying assumptions and world views. We argue that, especially in a post-truth world, a much richer form of (re)visioning the future is required in a project that must span far beyond the biophysical and include the full breadth of the social sciences and humanities. Without the inclusion of multiple underlying, competing, and creative long-term perspectives, society in general, and research in particular, may not adequately illuminate the complex possible future trajectories.

The future is uncertain for Antarctica, with many possibilities – some more plausible, others more preferable. Indeed, the region and its governance regime may be reaching (or may have reached) a crossroads moment as a result of a series of challenges, including the changing Antarctic climate and environment, increasing human activity, shifting values among Antarctic states and a low-cost, somewhat benign governance regime (the Antarctic Treaty System). Within this context there are a number of interdependent drivers that are likely to influence Antarctica's future over, say, 25 years: global environmental and socio-economic developments; Antarctic governance; Antarctic research, including national Antarctic programme operations; and Antarctic tourism. The research presented here involved a thorough examination of Antarctic literature on current Antarctic developments and challenges, and an assessment of global trends. Scenarios were developed through a facilitated workshop process. From these, four future scenarios were developed based on interactions between these drivers. The resulting scenarios provide a dynamic, evolving possibility space to be explored as a means of understanding where Antarctic issues might evolve, depending on the growth or diminishing importance of drivers. In turn these suggest that more structured polar futures are needed based on formal quantitative and qualitative data.

This paper reviews the latest research on scenarios including the processes and products for socio-environmental systems (SES) analysis, modeling and decision making. A group of scenario researchers and practitioners participated in a workshop to discuss consolidation of existing research on the development and use of scenario analysis in exploring and understanding the interplay between human and environmental systems. This paper presents an extended overview of the workshop discussions and follow-up review work. It is structured around the essential challenges that are crucial to progress support of decision making and learning with respect to our highly uncertain socio-environmental futures. It identifies a practical research agenda where challenges are grouped according to the process stage at which they are most significant: before, during, and after the creation of the scenarios as products. These challenges for SES include: enhancing the role of stakeholder and public engagement in the co-development of scenarios, linking scenarios across multiple geographical, sectoral and temporal scales, improving the links between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of scenario analysis, addressing uncertainties especially surprise, addressing scenario diversity and their consistency together, communicating scenarios including visualization methods, and linking scenarios to decision making.

The paper outlines the principles and methodology for sustainability assessment, using multi-actor multi-criteria evaluation practices to articulate competing, un-reconciled and often irreconcilable claims. The impossibility of measurement for quantification of opportunity costs in relation to values to be sustained and the status of stakeholders in sustainability as an impossible social choice problem, describe two complementary thresholds—system complexity and ethical complexity—beyond which assessing trade-offs, choices or consequences of choices through monetary measures alone becomes difficult to justify. We seek by this, to formalise the deliberative and scientific claims for deliberative multi-criteria multi-actor evaluation as an integrative approach to sustainability assessment. The KerBabel™ Deliberation Support Tool (kerDST) on-line system kerDST provides an example of such a framework for the selection and mobilisation of indicators, to highlight significant differences across a representative diversity of stakeholders and performance–quality challenges for a given social choice situation. The paper concludes with a brief appraisal of the implications and complexities of undertaking sustainability assessment using such a system.

Accounting for sustainability is approaching its (metaphoric) teenage years – keen to assert independence, yet still reliant on the security of its background disciplines and not quite mature enough to make its own judgements. One example is the Sustainability Assessment Model, a full-cost-accounting tool that monetizes externalities. This paper examines its application in case studies where it faced issues over assessment boundaries, data limitations, and stakeholder engagement. There is much development needed, especially around engagement and externalities, before such techniques can achieve independent lives of their own away from their research-based caregivers.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to document organizations' self descriptions of why they initiated sustainable development (SD) reporting and explore these explanations using an institutional theory framework.Design/methodology/approachConstructs organizational narratives from semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with reporting champions who participated in an SD reporting workshop series. The narratives are analysed using institutional theory to explore how regulatory, normative and cognitive institutions combine with organizational dynamics to influence SD reporting activity.FindingsFor these particular organizations, choosing to engage in reporting appears not to be a rational choice. Rather reporting is initiated because it has come to be an accepted part of pursuing a differentiation strategy, it offers some contribution to existing business challenges, and organizations value the rewards it offers. This rationale constitutes a cognitive mechanism within institutional theory.Originality/valueThe paper provides useful information on initiating sustainable development reporting based on organizations' self descriptions.

The last two decades have seen the development of an array of techniques and practices aimed at promoting sustainability. For many, results have been disappointing. There are charges that supposedly new organisational approaches remain embedded in managerialist, functionalist and anti-dialogic frameworks that are a significant part of the problem. Similarly the technocratic scientization of public policy is viewed as ill-equipped to deal with the social, economic and ecological issues currently facing neo-liberal societies. In this paper we seek to interpret these frustrations and identify pathways that move beyond this. Specifically, we argue that the gap between sustainability rhetoric and sustainability practices can be reconceptualised through the practice of science as post-normal and through developing the notion of post-normal sustainability technologies (PNSTs). The exponents of post-normal science show why stakeholder engagement in sustainability (and other scientific) issues is critical for the legitimacy and quality of decisions and the admission of complexity in decision-making and accountability processes. Building on this now well-established foundation we seek to characterise, and give examples of, PNSTs as tools for achieving this participation; wherein stakeholders assume expertise and interact with those possessing more traditional forms of expertise in order to co-produce knowledge about sustainability. Recognition of ideological and value diversity is also central to the post-normal sustainability agenda and with PNSTs, the values-based nature of the issues involved is articulated in a way that seeks to bring politics openly into the picture. To this end we identify processes that are emerging in the literature and in practice that will enable PNSTs. These include extended peer communities and multi-actor heuristics, agonistic processes and new characterisations of citizenship that support moves to sustainability. In so doing, we believe that PNSTs offer “clumsy solutions” for “wicked problems” that can be engaged with in both the research and practice arenas as significant contributions to addressing urgent needs.

The May 1996 `disaster' on Mount Everest in which eight mountaineers died and its subsequent media exposure is re-examined from the perspective of discourse, myth, and spectacle. We draw from Foucault to talk about the disciplinary aspects of the discourse of `disaster and tragedy', and how Jon Krakauer's Into thin air, as the leading text in this episode, has perpetuated explanations of disaster that are rooted primarily in notions of failed leadership and decision-making, dysfunctional group dynamics, flawed personality, and the absence of appropriate planning and control. We also discuss how, in part through this discourse, the May 1996 episode has evolved into myth and spectacle that have spawned even more fantastic spectacles while being devoid of contextual influences and the voices of other silent members (Sherpas and participants on the climb). By considering other contextual variables and listening to other voices, we try to unpack the dominant narrative and show how it has both entertained and served various parties (the public, media companies, publishers and authors, governments) while tending to normalize disaster and leadership in a psychological, gendered way. We also consider how the dominant narrative has migrated into the management classroom in the form of `leadership lessons', a predictable outcome, we suggest, given the fascination that the field holds for other masculine adventures and misadventures such as the explorations of Shackleton.

Society requires new forms of science and technology to productively accommodate the intrinsic value-laden judgments needed to manage the high uncertainties and considerable long-term impacts of sustainable urban planning. Responses to these ‘wicked’ problems include the development of postnormal science in the early 1990s. In subsequent literature on postnormal sustainability technologies, multiactor approaches to decision making are beginning to emerge. I examine an example: the development in New Zealand of a 100-year vision: the Auckland Sustainability Framework. Developed over fifteen months through ‘messy’ consultation across stakeholders, it has provided a clumsy’ outcome, namely one which enabled multiple viewpoints to be expressed and responded to by others. The process adopted offers evidence in support of the development of sustainability frameworks over much longer timescales than the current norm in local authorities, and indications of how such processes may unfold.

This paper investigates the social marketing of sustainability in New Zealand and examines the usefulness of advertising campaigns to enlist and empower people, as both consumers and citizens, towards environmental care. It draws on discussions about ‘citizen-consumer subjectivities’ and the model of the ‘political economic person’, which link sustainability and consumption through asserting people’s capacities as reflecting citizens. Printed advertisements by local and national government agencies about air pollution, fuel dependency and energy consumption are analysed to see whether advertising campaigns can operate on multiple levels for a range of audiences – desirable for broadening understanding of sustainable consumption and dealing with the complexity and experiential aspects of ‘doing’ sustainability. The advertisements analysed have an authoritative dimension that downplays this complexity and variability. The paper concludes that these advertisements do not go far enough to involve individuals in processes of co-producing knowledge about sustainability, and to vest them with expertise in exercising sustainability in their daily lives. The implications are that advertising campaigns that engage with the complexity surrounding consumption in people’s modern lives, and with variability in meanings of sustainability, have the possibility of inciting citizen-consumer political subjectivities.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to discussions about engagement in social and environmental accounting, drawing on dialogic theory and philosophy. A dialogic approach, building on existing critical inquiries, is introduced to derive principles to inform “on the ground” engagements. Applying dialogic thinking to social and environmental accounting encourages the development of dialogic forms of accountability, more authentic engagements and is more likely to contribute to sustainable social and environmental change.Design/methodology/approachContains a synthesis of literature from within and beyond social and environmental accounting to shed light on the issues addressed by the special issue.FindingsResearch engagements in social and environmental accounting need not be taken in a haphazard manner uninformed by theory. In particular, the “learning turn” in social sciences has generated a large body of theorizing (informed by concrete engagement activities) that can be used to shape, guide and support engagement.Practical implicationsThe principles developed can be used to inform future research design, with the aim of increasing the likelihood that such engagements will yield outcomes of “value” usually defined as emancipatory changes.Originality/valueThis paper develops a new (to accounting) theoretical perspective.

Within ecological economics there is recognition of the need for new approaches to decision-making to support sustainable development initiatives. There is an increasing acknowledgement of the limitations of cost–benefit analysis approaches as a measure of the (un)sustainability of organizational activities. These are viewed as particularly inappropriate within the participatory settings that sustainable development proponents seek to foster. They also fail to deal with the highly contested nature of sustainable development discourse in contemporary pluralist democracies. While advances have been made in the field of multi-criteria decision-making, there is still a relative dearth of versatile models that accommodate monetization in a way that recognizes the limits of calculative technologies. This article introduces readers to developments within the accounting discipline designed to support sustainable development decision-making and evaluation. In particular, it proposes sustainability assessment models as a viable alternative to cost–benefit analysis. Sustainability assessment models are based on an inter-disciplinary approach that recognizes the need for “accountings” that facilitate more participatory forms of decision-making and accountability. As such, they address many of the weaknesses in current approaches to cost–benefit analysis. The authors’ first experiences with sustainability assessment models were with BP and the United Kingdom oil and gas sector, where models were developed as a means of making previously external costs more central to organizational decision-making. Later work has included exploration of a range of decision-making situations in private and public sector organizations in both the United Kingdom and New Zealand. This has involved more explicit attention to plural values and issues of participation, dialogue and democracy.

Increasingly, legislative requirements are being placed on councils and businesses to incorporate sustainability into their activities. However, it is inherently difficult to assess the sustainability of activities and there are few tools to do this. It is therefore difficult to understand if an individual project contributes to broad sustainability objectives or if it incorporates understanding of sustainability into organisations' activities. The Sustainability Assessment Model (SAM) is a tool for engaging people within organisations in sustainable development thinking and to evaluate the sustainability of projects (Baxter et al. 2002; Bebbington and Frame 2003). This article provides an overview of the SAM and presents a preliminary assessment of how it was used to assess organic waste processing options for a local council in New Zealand.

‘Market transformation’ of the significant urban development industry towards more sustainable practices is not moving at great pace. Design and assessment systems that may promote uptake of more sustainable urban design and development are reviewed briefly followed by a comparison between building and neighbourhood scales. For the latter there is a dearth of design and assessment tools for the residential built environment and of indicators to monitor progress towards sustainable development. Local authorities increasingly require an integrated approach to data collection and inclusion of infrastructure service providers in design, assessment and monitoring of urban development and associated environmental effects. By examining attempts to increase uptake of more sustainable residential development, the potential for tools and indicators at the neighbourhood scale to reduce environmental impact of the built environment is highlighted. It is recommended that built environment initiatives need to ...

As corporate social Responsibility (CSR) increases in large corporate organisations, a genuine approach to sustainable development is often best achieved through the supply chain. This is directly applicable to North–South supply-chain interactions (private-sector organisations, NGOs, and donors). CSR has adopted techniques from their ‘development’ usage, yet a reverse flow is not observed back to the ‘development’ sector. This is unfortunate. Private-sector organisations and NGOs (especially the larger ones) are well placed to take advantage of the increase in CSR relating to developing countries. More importantly, donors of all types would have increased influence if they took up CSR principles. Opportunity costs are not high and the advocacy potential is huge. This paper reviews CSR techniques and argues for donors to accept the challenge of incorporating them into their operations to influence more efficiently the process they seek to change.

This paper presents as case studies some New Zealand local government sustainable development initiatives in cleaner production and civic building design. From a series of structured interviews with key players, it describes key motivators and demotivators and puts these in the context of behaviour change theory. These enable a set of actions for local government to be developed that, if applied, could result in an advancement of the sustainable development agenda. However, other critical factors are given that are external to these actions and on which their overall success is dependent. In reviewing these factors as a group we conclude that far greater understanding of the partnership formation process and its dynamic in engendering successful sustainable development decision-making processes is crucial to move beyond the rhetoric of partnerships and enter the more complex and difficult world of truly participatory approaches.

Development has many more dimensions than those associated with Gross Domestic Product, and that development should be understood as a process that seeks to maximise happiness rather than economic ...

The Big Clean Up (BCU) started in 2001 as Auckland Regional Council's (ARC) sustainability social marketing project and arose from catalysts for change that occurred within ARC in the late 1990s—leadership, training, partnerships and values. The BCU features strong marketing images and messages that have increased awareness and participation in the region according to extensive stakeholder surveys. It is intended to engage individuals and households in sustainable living—especially among the public middle ground—not those already committed to a green lifestyle. Membership of BCU after one year is about 44,000—almost one in ten households. Although ARC has considered the BCU successful, questions arise about the level of resilience of the campaigns without ongoing investment in expensive multimedia advertising and other initiatives. The paper concludes with a discussion on the impact of the underlying pedagogy in the light of social marketing and behaviour change theory.

Donors face many issues when trying to support development goals in large regions such as Latin America. In their attempts to channel assistance to appropriate end‐users, they also have to provide coherence with national strategy, balance supply and demand of technical resources, and ensure accountability to their taxpayers. Resolution of these issues requires considerable focus and a clear understanding of all relevant factors. This is particularly so for, but not exclusive to, small donors. This paper provides agencies with a model to assess regional involvement and create a decision‐making framework for future investments. It places the quality of aid above the quantity of donation.

With New Zealand's recent ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (December 2002) we ask whether it might be possible to design a programme that reduces corporate New Zealand's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while also benefitting New Zealand's biodiversity in the many cases where emissions cannot be entirely eliminated. This article describes progress since 2001 in formulating and implementing a trial of such an integrated solution. We provide a description of the framework applied to date for integrating efforts by businesses and communities in both emissions reduction and biodiversity restoration, incorporating lessons that may help us refine our model.