Emerging Theories and Methods in Sustainability Research (THEMES): Marie Curie Summer Schools
Valborg Kvakkestad
A series of four Marie Curie Summer Schools in Emerging Theories and Methods in Sustainability Research were organised by leading universities across Europe. The courses were financed by the Conferences and Training Courses Action under the Community’s Sixth Framework Programme. The topics for the summer schools were: Analysing Complexity (Barcelona 2006), Institutional Analysis of Sustainability Problems (Bratislava 2007), Methods and tools for environmental appraisal and policy formulation (Lisbon 2008), Integrated analysis of complex adaptive systems (Brighton 2009). Perspectives from ecological economics form an important basis for the series. The Norwegian University of Life Sciences by Arild Vatn coordinated the series.
Sustainability and sustainable development have become core concepts when defining desired long run states for our societies. In line with the emphasis on sustainability within the UN, the EU has adopted sustainable development as a core objective through the Strategy for Sustainable Development agreed in Gothenburg and the recent action to review and improve this strategy.
Sustainable development is about developing practices that are compatible with environmental constraints and responds adequately to social and economic needs. The research community has become engaged in the issues producing new or adjusted models facilitating better understanding. These are models that help clarify what sustainability means and what it demands of policy.
While several universities thus have integrated sustainability issues in their teaching and research programs, the field is still young and heterogeneous. We observe a need for further development of teaching programs and of research – confer also the resent decision made by the United Nations Eco-nomic Commission for Europe on Education for Sustainable Development (UNECE 2005). We seem to lack good common forums for supporting its development. We would especially emphasize the need to set up systems to disseminate knowledge about the various frontiers to young researchers so that they can better integrate it into their future research and teaching. This series of events is an attempt to fill some of this specific gap by offering training courses on emerging theory and methods in sustainability research involving leading institutes/universities in Europe as hosts.
It is our contention that such an education needs to put emphasis on inter-disciplinarity, involvement of civil society, participatory learning and holistic approaches. There is today an imbalance in the sense that high quality inter-disciplinary training is lagging behind the development in the specialized sciences. Interdisciplinarity demands specific competences in integrating across disparate fields of knowledge. It demands developing and linking theory and methods, which are able to span both a wide variety of disciplines/perspectives and a wide variety of empirical fields. The THEMES series of events intends to take on such a task.
