Building institutional capacity for sustainability science

Abstract

Promoters of sustainability science within the research and policy-making community face the critical challenge of establishing this new field of research as a recognized scientific practice. In spite of the growth of the sustainability science community, the challenge remains a particularly dif-ficult one as sustainability science leads to two main transformations of conventional science practice: first, the adoption of the methodological tools and epistemology of interdisciplinary analysis of socio-ecological systems and, second, the adoption of a participatory transdisciplinary research practice to overcome the dichotomy between science and society in governing the transition towards sustainability. 5.1 OVERCOMING DISCIPLINARY INERTIA IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUSTAINABILITY SCIENCE As sustainability problems are complex, scholars are confronted with the crucial task of integrating knowledge and information from various aca-demic disciplines, including natural sciences, engineering, social sciences and humanities. However, the current trend is that the academic landscape consists of separate clusters of individual disciplines (Kajikawa et al., 2007). Few studies have analysed the actual practice of interdisciplinar-ity in sustainability science. One way to analyse such practice is to look at bibliometric data and to analyse the existing interdisciplinary practice based on a simple metric of the " tripartite " model of sustainability, which envisions sustainability as the combination of equitable economic growth, social well-being, and a thriving natural resource basis (Schoolman et al., 2012). As we have shown in this book, this tripartite model needs to be further refined, in particular in relation to the way the role of economic growth is envisioned in the model. Nevertheless, for the purpose of assess-ing the current situation of published interdisciplinary research on sustain-ability, this model provides a good starting point. On 30 April 2012, Ethan Schoolman and his team published a bib-liometric analysis of the articles containing the word " sustainability " in Tom Dedeurwaerdere -9781783474554 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 01/08/2016 06:02:46AM via Queensland University