Author: Hari
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Spiritual Ecology, Climate Justice & Systems Change with Abhayraj Naik
How is the climate crisis a crisis of “perception”, and what role does spirituality play in addressing this? How can we live prefiguratively in the climate future we might want, right now? Why, and how, should climate action be decentralized for effective systems change? How can we transcend boundaries and choose our work in the…
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exploring systems thinking & sustainability
“There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.” Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance In a 2012 paper, Prof. John Sterman of MIT raises the intriguing question: Is the sustainability movement itself sustainable? Do current approaches to sustainability make any real difference to the long-term sustainability of human…
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How I became a ‘sustainability problem-solver’ – Part 3/3
[This article was originally published at The Interview Portal, where you can find more “offbeat, unusual, unconventional and interesting” career interviews! Oriented towards students from 8th grade to graduate, I’ve tried to ‘unpack’ my journey in way that might be useful to any young person considering a career in sustainability!] Jump to Part 1 or…
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How I became a ‘sustainability problem-solver’ – Part 2/3
[This article was originally published at The Interview Portal, where you can find more “offbeat, unusual, unconventional and interesting” career interviews! Oriented towards students from 8th grade to graduate, I’ve tried to ‘unpack’ my journey in way that might be useful to any young person considering a career in sustainability! Jump to Part 1 or…
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How I became a ‘sustainability problem-solver’ – Part 1/3
[This article was originally published at The Interview Portal, where you can find more “offbeat, unusual, unconventional and interesting” career interviews! Oriented towards students from 8th grade to graduate, I’ve tried to ‘unpack’ my journey in way that might be useful to any young person considering a career in sustainability!] Jump to Part 2 or…
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Reparative Water Governance with Neha Mungekar
Neha Mungekar (LinkedIn →) is a sustainability researcher at IHE Delft working on water systems governance and their transitions to sustainability. We discuss transition management as a way to frame complex sustainability problems, but also its limits when it is applied too technocratically or without context. We also talk about her critique of importing transition…
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Circular Packaging Systems with Anjali Patil
Anjali Patil is a climate entrepreneur working on reducing packaging waste in the FMCG sector. Anjali shares her journey in sustainability, emphasizing the importance of innovation and explaining how circularity has to go beyond recycling and composting. We discuss her company’s approach to dematerializing plastic packaging through a refillable dispenser that is a ‘circular packaging…
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Governing Sustainability Transitions
In the previous article in this series on sustainability and systems change, we looked at the “drivers” of transition to sustainability, according to recent research. In this article, we will look at the question: how can we “govern” the transition to sustainability? In particular, we will look at an approach called “Transition Management” which, like…
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the drivers of transition
What might it “look like” to “achieve sustainability”? It seems to me that this desirable process wouldn’t occur as a “monolithic”, simultaneous, homogenous, all-encompassing global or societal movement, but rather as the converging transitions of many, many different individual systems and sub-systems. These could be, for example, a city’s mobility system, a region’s water system,…
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evolutionary aspects of the multi-level perspective
In the last few articles, we examined the need for a “systems science” in order to “achieve sustainability”. We further examined one specific scientific “theory”, the Multi-level Perspective on Socio-technical Transitions (MLP), that has gained prominence over the years as an approach to understand systems change. In this article, we will take a closer look…