Operationalising sustainability science for a sustainability directive? Reflecting on three pilot projects

The implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) will challenge traditional single discipline or single issue approaches to research, requiring instead new forms such as 'sustainability science'. Sustainability science requires the integration of multiple perspectives to resolve p...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Geographical journal 2007-12, Vol.173 (4), p.343-357
Main Authors: BLACKSTOCK, K L, CARTER, C E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Case studies
Changes
Development
Drought
Ecological sustainability
Economic research
Environmental economics
Environmental management
Environmental policy
evaluation
Geography
Ideology
Institutional change
institutions
Integrated approach
Interdisciplinary research
Project evaluation
R&D
Research & development
Research papers
River basins
Rural development
Scotland
Sustainability
Sustainability science
Sustainable agriculture
Sustainable management
Sustainable water management
United Kingdom
Water Framework Directive
Water management
Water quality
Water resources
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) will challenge traditional single discipline or single issue approaches to research, requiring instead new forms such as 'sustainability science'. Sustainability science requires the integration of multiple perspectives to resolve place-based problems. This paper will illustrate some of the challenges and emergent understandings that were observed during three research projects that could be characterised as attempting to practice sustainability science. The first two projects focused on designing and developing an integrated assessment approach to analyse possible programmes of measures for the WFD. The third project is an evaluation of a European project that piloted specific measures that might be implemented under WFD. The findings highlight the institutional changes required to deliver sustainability science. To summarise, both the 'rules-in-use' and the 'play-of-the-game', to use the language of the institutional analysis and development framework, will have to change to provide sufficient incentives to make the transition from traditional science to sustainability science.
ISSN:0016-7398
1475-4959
DOI:10.1111/j.1475-4959.2007.00258.x