Social, Cultural, and Ecological Resilience for Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

The sustainability discourse was at the formal political UN level framed in connection with the Rio Conference in 1992. This event was prepared by a politically assigned group, led by the Norwegian Prime Minister Ms. Brundtland, which developed the now well-known steering document. Sustainability was seen to be an expression of connected social, economic, and ecological dimensions in an attempt to grasp the environmentally oriented grand challenges at the global level. These topics have also been viewed through a systems lens since at least the 1970s. Here, ecological/environmental characteristics have been at the core of the concern, within an economic and social context.

Much has happened since the UN Rio Conference almost three decades ago. In recent times, sustainability concerns have been consolidated in various policy domains and at high political levels, e.g., in terms of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and also codified by the Paris agreement on climate change.

Simultaneously, there have been further developments in the scholarly realm, not least through the formation of a “resilience” perspective of scientific enquiry with a strong relationship to sustainability. The importance of the connections between different academic domains has started to be more strongly recognized, e.g., with regard to “social–ecological-system” method approaches.

In this Special Issue, we highlight the social and cultural aspects within the sustainability and resilience frames of thought. We are well aware that the cognitive, normative, and operational issues have in various forms been treated before. However, here we stress the need for further and deeper engagement concerning the social and in particular cultural dimensions in systemic elaborations about resilience and in a wider context of sustainability.

Thus, we invite reflections on how these issues have been met, and in a contemporary sense what is at stake and the creation of new visions. This relates to many domains of scholarship and decision making at multiple levels, from global to local. We encourage contributions starting from a human dimensions angle, but investigating how these considerations might matter for setting the larger scene of a joint and hopefully shared understanding of what is at stake for humanity and this planet.

Indeed, one of the key interests of this Special Issue is to illuminate the social and cultural conditions and contexts involved in resilience and transformation processes—including those in a post-coronavirus world. In a wider sense, this concerns how to orient ourselves as society—but also as individuals—within the Anthropocene. This includes what constitutes the local and sub-regional prerequisites for sustainability with all its environmental connotations—also for the knowledge and action domains of indigenous peoples and local communities.

Special Issue Timetable

Prof.(em.) Dr. Uno Svedin
Dr. Maria Tengö
Dr. Vanessa Masterson
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• social–ecological
• culture
• SES
• systems
• sustainability
• resilience
• SDG
• UN Paris agreement
• human dimensions
• human–nature relations
• Anthropocene