The need for rethinking the approaches that best guarantee environmental, social, institutional, and economic sustainability has been acknowledged and documented by researchers, social scientists, and government agencies throughout the world. Recognition, however, is the easy part. What remains to be understood is the means by which social, economic, and environmental sustainability can be best achieved.
What do people mean when they speak of “Sustainability”?
However, it is not feasible to translate the Bruntland definition of sustainability into actions, and much less to accomplish a “sustainable development,” without a conceptual knowledge and understanding of human organizations and their underlying behaviours.
What is Ideal-Seeking Behaviour?
Most definitions of “sustainability” seem to share at least two things in common:
They are all obviously anthropocentric.
They all speak of an ideal process or state.
Based on these two observations and on the seminal work of Ackoff and Emery (1972), the only operational definition of sustainability to this day is the following:
Sustainability is a Socio-Ecological Process Driven by Ideal-Seeking Behaviour.
This behaviour is characterized by the desire and the ability (i.e., opportunity & resources) to:
Progress towards a common ideal by choosing a new goal when one is achieved (or the effort to achieve it has failed), and
Sacrifice a goal for the sake of the ideal.
IDEAL: An unattainable state or process (in a given point in time/space) but endlessly approachable.
Only ideals serve as appropriate guidelines within a context of uncertainty and complexity because only ideals are time-free, hence, intrinsically pro-active-adaptive in themselves.
The four universal ideals are:
1) Homonomy
2) Nurturance
3) Humanity
4) Beauty
(Emery, 1993).
Ideal-seeking behaviour is what builds Tropophilia into any process or organization allowing it to thrive within Black Swan Domains.
REF: <https://medium.com/@JCWandemberg/tropophilia-beyond-resilience-antifrag…;
Dr. JC Wandemberg