Publications
Researchers are starting to publish about the Sustainability Mindset and the Indicator.
The role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in educating future leaders with social impact contributing to the sustainable development goals
Barbara Tomasella, Anne Wylie, Devi Gill
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how higher education institutions (HEIs) educate future leaders with social impact contributing to the sustainable development goals (SDGs). HEIs have an interest in developing leaders with social impact, but there is a lack of knowledge on the best teaching and learning strategies to engage students with social action aimed at the SDGs. This paper fills this gap by addressing the question of how HEIs can shape the sustainability mindsets of future leaders with social impact contributing to the SDGs.
Design/methodology/approach: This research used a mixed method research design, including a quantitative survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews of UK students involved in HEIs experiential learning programmes, focused on social impact and entrepreneurial action, developed in partnership with the organisation Enactus.
Findings: This research highlighted the importance of experiential learning, as it develops the knowledge, values and competency underpinning the sustainability mindset of future leaders contributing to the SDGs, in particular their emotional intelligence.
A supply chain view of sustainability management
Fritz Morgane
Abstract: Given the global sustainability challenges facing humans and nature today, this theoretical paper aims to propose a supply chain view of sustainability management and thereby contribute to elevating the sustainable supply chain management field to the level of theory. This is done by identifying supply chain stakeholders and related sustainability challenges, which reveal the inherent paradoxes and tensions in global consumption and production networks. This perspective supports the urgent need for all supply chain stakeholders to understand sustainability challenges and adopt a sustainability mindset. The focus on reducing supply chain disruptions, improving supply chain resilience, and improving supply chain sustainability performance has neglected and even undermined broader sustainability challenges, such as climate change. Therefore, this paper first provides a discussion on the complementarity between stakeholder theory and sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) from a systems perspective; and, second, develops a novel supply chain theory to enhance sustainability management by identifying supply chain stakeholders and related sustainability challenges. Linking stakeholder theory and SSCM facilitates a holistic understanding of sustainability challenges, making it possible to identify opportunities to improve one’s decisions, actions, and current consumption and production patterns. Instead of perpetuating a firm- or client-centred perspective, the supply chain view places the product/service at the center of the stakeholder identification process. It clearly identifies stakeholders upstream, within the focal firm, downstream, or outside the supply chain (SC), as well as the related sustainability challenges. It encourages all organizations and individuals to practise their systems thinking skills in order to improve their sustainability mindset and enhance their subsequent ability to solve sustainability and ethical challenges. The proposed supply chain view supports managers, policymakers, educators, consultant, consumers, and individuals in identifying stakeholders and understanding sustainability challenges related to production and consumption effectively. This extends existing knowledge on sustainability management from a supply chain perspective and opens new research areas, particularly for ethical decision-making and behavioural sciences
The Sustainability Mindset Indicator - A personal development tool
Isabel Rimanoczy
Beate Klingenberg
This paper addresses the problem of assessing, measuring, and further developing a Sustainability Mindset. This mindset is a way of thinking and being that predisposes individuals to act for the good of planet and people. It is a complex construct, developed via the path of an ecological worldview, a systems perspective, and aspects pertaining to emotional and spiritual intelligence. It is aimed at guiding individuals toward living and promoting a more sustainable life, which is crucial for humanity in the 21st century. As educators have been intentionally developing the Sustainability Mindset, it became important to find ways to assess and measure it.
The Sustainability Mindset Indicator (SMI) was designed to address this problem. This paper describes the method followed to develop the SMI: a) anchored in theories of psychology and pedagogy, objectives of the instrument and constructs of measurement were defined; b) a questionnaire was designed; and c) 320 personalized feedback reports were created. The questionnaire uses Johnson’s (1992) framework of polarities and stages of human development (Kegan, 1994), whereas the reports follow the directions of Positive Psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014) and Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider, Whitney, & Stavros, 2008). Three validation phases were employed to confirm phrasing, improve comprehension and accurateness, and prepare for pilot studies.
The SMI represents an important addition to other scales available in the literature. It focuses on personal development and transformative learning to facilitate mindset change in individuals as well as in educational or coaching settings, and can be used to tailor interventions and assess the impacts thereof.
Twelve Principles to guide a long-overdue paradigm shift
Isabel Rimanoczy
Ana Maria Llamazares
If human behaviors are associated with climate change, it relates to how we consume, entertain, travel, do business, relate to “natural resources”, to ourselves and to each other.
The authors posit that human behaviors are but the visible tip of the iceberg, sustained underwater by a voluminous mass comprised of our values, beliefs, assumptions, the anchors of our identity and shared paradigms. They trace back the history of a shared paradigm that has become dysfunctional and introduce the Sustainability Mindset Principles – a scaffolding to address the complexity of the paradigm.
This paper describes how the dysfunctional paradigm can be brought back into balance by developing neglected aspects of a Western-Northern worldview that has been shaping our behaviors for centuries.
By naming these aspects, the authors propose a language to incite the readers’ imagination of what is possible. Naming creates reality.