Arnim Wiek

University of Freiburg | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg · Institute for Economics

The emerging academic field focused on sustainability has been engaged in a rich and converging debate to define what key competencies are considered critical for graduating students to possess. For more than a decade, sustainability courses have been developed and taught in higher education, yet comprehensive academic programs in sustainability, o...

Despite improvements, international food supply in general and coffee supply in particular continue to cause significant greenhouse gas emissions, economic inequities, and negative impacts on human well-being. There is agreement that dominant economic paradigms need to change to comply with the sustainability principles of environmental integrity,...

Local grain economies are being developed in North America and Europe as alternatives to the global grain economy and its negative externalities. Little is known, however, about their size, structure, and sustainability, in particular as they evolve. This study offers such insights from a case study of the local grain economy in Arizona. The study...

Zusammenfassung In immer mehr Kommunen haben Politik wie Verwaltung die Bedeutung der lokalen Ernährungswirtschaft erkannt und begonnen, diese durch Planung, Wirtschaftsförderung, Kooperation, sowie Bildung und Information nachhaltig zu entwickeln. Allerdings beschränken sich die meisten solcher Versuche auf punktuelle Anwendungen kommunaler Instru...

Zusammenfassung Auf kommunaler Ebene gibt es einen ordnungspolitischen Rahmen, der eine gewisse Steuerung der nachhaltigen Entwicklung von Ernährungssystemen erlaubt. So verfügen Kommunen über regulierende, ökonomische, kooperative und informative Instrumente, um die nachhaltige Entwicklung der lokalen Ernährungswirtschaft und damit ein zentrales E...

Zusammenfassung Kommunalpolitik und -verwaltung wenden sich vermehrt der nachhaltigen Gestaltung des lokalen Ernährungssystems und der lokalen Ernährungswirtschaft zu. In diesem Kapitel geht es darum, die geschichtliche Entwicklung dahinter zu skizzieren und zusammenfassend die Frage zu beantworten, welche Spielräume und Instrumente dafür gegenwärt...

Purpose This study aims to explore barriers and pathways to a whole-institution governance of sustainability within the working structures of universities. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on multi-year interviews and hierarchical structure analysis of ten universities in Canada, the USA, Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Brazil, the...

Ernährung muss zu einem zentralen Bestandteil kommunaler Strategien und Aktivitäten auf dem Weg zu nachhaltigen und klimaangepassten Städten und Gemeinden werden. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt hierbei der lokalen/regionalen Ernährungswirtschaft, welche die treibende Kraft des kommunalen Ernährungssystem ist. Viele Kommunen stellen sich die Frage, welch...

Strengthening the sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem (SEE), particularly its support functions for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), is increasingly seen as an important means of accelerating the transformation to a sustainable economy. Little is known, however, about how to strengthen SEEs. In this article, we evaluate a series of 16 pr...

Conventional food systems continue to jeopardize the health and well-being of people and the environment, with a number of related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) still far from being reached. Food Policy Councils (FPCs)—since several decades in North America, and more recently in Europe—have begun to facilitate sustainable food system governa...

To advance holistic corporate sustainability in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) requires employees to fully engage in sustainability efforts, which, in return, means to develop employees' action competence for sustainability. Little empirical evidence, however, exists on how to do this considering well‐known constraints SMEs face (time, e...

Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency,...

The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, and the unprecedented social and economic costs it has inflicted, provide an important opportunity to scrutinize the interplay between the resilience of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the resilience of the communities they are embedded in. In this article, we articulate the specific ways that SMEs pla...

Sustainable food forests offer multiple benefits to urban sustainability challenges. Research to date mostly describes structure and services of individual food forests but provides little evidence and guidance for implementation. This study analyzes and evaluates an ongoing, multiyear, transdisciplinary project developing a sustainable urban food...

Scholars and educators largely agree on a framework that integrates a small set of key competencies in sustainability as learning objectives for courses and programs in higher education. However, the current practice of using these key competencies often falls short due to insufficient competence coverage and integration, competence operationalizat...

Food forests are multistrata ecosystems that pro­vide healthy food, livelihood opportunities, as well as social-cultural and environmental services. With these features, food forests address several prob­lems industrial food systems cause. While the overall number of food forests is continuously increasing worldwide, the rate of uptake is still low...

Advancing transformations towards sustainability calls for change agents equipped with a new set of competencies. Such sustainability competencies have been articulated with multiplicity and ambiguity, which is counterproductive to joint and accelerated progress. A unified framework of sustainability learning objectives would provide guidance to st...

Purpose This research aims to investigate the role of project-based-learning within graduate sustainability curricula through the lens of key competence development. Project-based learning has become a widely recommended pedagogy for sustainability education. It is hypothesized that through collaboration, student autonomy and real-world application...

Project-based sustainability courses require and facilitate diverse interactions among students, instructors, stakeholders, and mentors. Most project-based courses take an instrumental approach to these interactions, so that they support the overall project deliverables. However, as courses primarily intend to build students’ key competencies in su...

B Corp certification is considered a viable instrument to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in adopting sustainable practices. However, there is a lack of evidence to what extent this instrument can anchor sustainability at the core of SMEs. This study investigates the B Corp certification process of a SME, a craft brewery in southe...

Industrialized food systems use unsustainable practices leading to climate change, natural resource depletion, economic disparities across the value chain, and detrimental impacts on public health. In contrast, alternative food solutions such as food forests have the potential to provide healthy food, sufficient livelihoods, environmental services,...

Creating connections between consumers and producers (relational proximity) seems a promising approach to foster sustainable consumption behaviour in international food supply. In this intervention study, we tested three experiential marketing interventions to connect consumers to producers of an international community-supported agriculture (CSA)...

The sustainability challenges the world faces today call for concerted and immediate action. Complementing problem-oriented, descriptive-analytical research with solution-oriented research could strengthen sustainability science’s contribution to address these challenges. We introduce different types of solution-oriented sustainability research to...

Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends, in part, on the sustainability competencies of professionals in various fields, and thus, on the implementation of sustainability curricula in higher education. While many universities now offer sustainability curricula, and many more aspire to, there is a lack of evidence on what suppor...

Purpose For professional sustainability work, graduates need to be able to work in teams and collaborate with stakeholders; in other words, they need to have developed interpersonal competence. There is growing evidence that project-based sustainability courses facilitate interpersonal competence development. However, research so far has focused on...

While there is growing agreement on the competencies sustainability professionals should possess as well as the pedagogies to develop them, the practice of assessing students' sustainability competencies is still in its infancy. Despite growing interest among researchers, there has not yet been a systematic review of how students' sustainability co...

Many detrimental effects on the environment, economy, and society are associated with the structure and practices of food systems around the world. While there is increasing agreement on the need for substantive change in food systems towards sustainability, divergent perspectives exist on what the appropriate points of intervention and strategies...

Semi-immersive visualization facilities support research, planning, and decision-making at the science-society-policy interface. Decision theaters, visualization studios, and similar installations—here referred to as Decision-Visualization Environments (DVEs)—facilitate human-computer-content interactions to explore climate change impacts, resource...

Conventional water management systems seem increasingly unable to resolve the challenges of over-allocation, climate change, and urban growth facing cities such as those in the Colorado River Basin. Transformational urban water solutions matching the scale and urgency of the challenges are needed. An experimental water-independent house in Tucson,...

Abstract Amplifying the impact of sustainability initiatives to foster transformations in urban and rural contexts, has received increasing attention in resilience, social innovation, and sustainability transitions research. We review the literature on amplification frameworks and propose an integrative typology of eight processes, which aim to inc...

Employee-owned businesses, benefit corporations, and other efforts in sustainability entrepreneurship are responding to prevalent challenges such as climate change, economic inequalities, and unethical business behavior. Universities, however, often fall short in sufficiently equipping students with competencies in sustainability entrepreneurship....

Purpose Advanced skills in communication, teamwork and stakeholder engagement are widely recognized as important success factors for advancing sustainability. While project-based learning formats claim to advance such skills, there is little empirical evidence that demonstrates how interpersonal competence is being developed. This study aims to des...

International food supply is often associated with negative externalities including injustices across the economic value chain favoring trade over production and processing, significant transport‐related greenhouse gas emissions, and poor working conditions in the regions where food is being produced or processed. Relevant proxies for this situatio...

The Educating Future Change Agents project, a joint research initiative of Leuphana University, Germany and Arizona State University, USA, is seeking to generate generalizable insights about how university students can best develop key competencies in sustainability. Purposeful case overlap, a shared empirical framework, and methodological innovati...

Cities in regions around the world, such as the Colorado River Basin, face severe water challenges and need solutions that deliver significant progress towards sustainable urban water systems. Real-world experiments help stakeholders learn about solutions and select the most promising for scaling and transfer, but the sustainability experiments lit...

Cities worldwide are rising to the challenge of sustainable development, calling for large-scale and fast-paced transformations towards sustainability. Urban sustainability challenges are now being reframed as a lack of capacity of individuals and organizations to carry out such socio-technical transformations. This article expands on transformativ...

Various institutions and organizations offer semi-immersive decision-visualization environments to support research, planning, and decision-making at the science-society-policy interface. Decision theaters, visualization studios, and similar facilities-in this study summarized as Decision-Visualization Environments (DVEs)-facilitate human-computer-...

The urgency of climate change and other sustainability challenges makes transferring and scaling solutions between cities a necessity. However, solutions are deeply contextual. To accelerate solution efforts, there is a need to understand how context shapes the development of solutions. Universities are well positioned to work with cities on transf...

The most critical question for climate research is no longer about the problem, but about how to facilitate the transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate-induced change. Addressing this question, however, will require massive upscaling of research that can rapidly enhance learning about transformations. Ten essentials for guidi...

The next generation will be better prepared to cope with the daunting sustainability challenges if education for sustainable development is being taught and learned across educational sectors. K-12 school education will play a pivotal role in this process, most prominently, the teachers serving at these schools. While pre-service teachers’ educatio...

Technological innovation in general, and nanotechnology development in particular, happens often disconnected from people and places where these technologies eventually play out. Over the last decade, a diversity of approaches have been proposed and developed to engage people in the innovation process of nanotechnology much earlier than in their co...

Transdisciplinary research between diverse academic and societal actors is a core practice in sustainability science. However, it often seems to fail in delivering new scientific insights while also significantly contributing to sustainability transformations. It is also often experienced as a burden instead of adding value, which leads to fatigue...

While federal action on climate change and renewable energy development has lagged in the United States, cities are undertaking ambitious sustainability initiatives. Motivation often flows from a resilience mindset - how cities can prepare for and be resilient to future shocks. The conflation of sustainability and resilience jeopardizes the success...

Public participation is a common element in state-of-the-art urban development projects. Tailoring the public participation process to the local context is a popular strategy for ensuring sufficient turnout and meaningful engagement, but this strategy faces several challenges. Through a review of case studies of public participation in urban develo...

We continue to understand little about how to best design and operate transnational collaborations between universities to advance research and education for sustainability. This article explores general practices in transnational research and teaching that can provide information and inspiration for the sustainability field. The article follows a...

Successful careers in sustainability are determined by positive real-world change towards sustainability. This success depends heavily on professional skills in effective and compassionate communication, collaborative teamwork, or impactful stakeholder engagement, among others. These professional skills extend beyond content knowledge and methodica...

Public funding agencies largely support aca- demic research as an effort to stimulate future product commercialization and foster broader societal benefits. Yet, translating research nurtured in academic settings into such outcomes is complex and demands functional interactions between government, academic, and indus- try, i.e., Btriple helix,^ org...

Multi-stakeholder collaboration among industry, government, the public, and researchers is widely acknowledged as a critical success factor for resolving sustainability problems. Proponents argue that pooling capacities and resources is necessary to cope with such wicked problems. Despite good intentions and attempts to follow best practices, the r...

Governance of technological innovation remains challenged by the dilemma of control. Two divergent responses seek to meet this challenge. The first regulates negative impacts once evidence is gathered. The second precludes dissemination of technologies until enough is known about outcomes. Recognizing limitations of each response, scholars are incr...

Purpose This paper aims to present an experience-based learning framework that provides a bottom-up, student-centered entrance point for the development of systems thinking, normative and collaborative competencies in sustainability. Design/methodology/approach The framework combines mental mapping with exploratory walking. It interweaves mappin...

A promising approach for addressing sustainability problems is to recognize the unique conditions of a particular place, such as problem features and solution capabilities, and adopt and adapt solutions developed at other places around the world. Therefore, research and teaching in international networks becomes critical, as it allows for accelerat...

Despite repeated calls for novel forms of innovation and governance, including responsible innovation, anticipatory governance, and sustainability-oriented governance, nanotechnology continues to be mainly innovated following conventional schemes – with persistent shortcomings and negative impacts. Shifting these schemes towards sustainable and res...

Sustainability science can roughly be differentiated into two distinct research streams – a “descriptive-analytical” and a “transformational” one. While the former is primarily concerned with describing and analyzing sustainability problems, the latter aims at developing evidence-supported solution options to solve these problems. This chapter pres...

There is a need for specific knowledge of what people can do to mitigate harmful water conflicts. This need is evident in the rural dry tropics of Central America where people face climate change impacts, inefficient water management, and social tension. To address this need, we investigated why some local water conflicts escalated to violence and...

Universities hold a crucial responsibility and role to contribute to sustainable development, also in their education task. The concept of competencies for sustainable development and the idea of using real-world sustainability issues in education are promising approaches to transform sustainability programmes at universities into student-centred l...

Moving consumption toward sustainable patterns has been a key goal of sustainability science since the 1990s. However, a large knowledge gap remains between identified consumption problems that restrict social and ecological development and progress toward solutions. Unfortunately, “sustainable consumption” is generally discussed in a rational cont...

Over the past four decades, approaches to persistent and complex sustainability challenges have relied on solutions developed through scientific problem analysis and subsequent decision-making. Recently, this assumption has been exposed to various criticisms pointing out flaws and a lack of success. Art occupies a different intellectual, creative,...

This textbook provides a comprehensive compilation of conceptual perspectives, methodological approaches and empirical insights of inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability science. Written by an international team of authors from leading sustainability institutions, the textbook covers key perspectives and topics of the scientific discourse on s...

Local and regional organizations are designing and implementing interventions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions through various programs and projects. These efforts have been less effective than anticipated, and emissions have continued to rise. Because awareness, intent, planning, and actions are all present, yet results not being achieved, the...

Many new forms of water governance are emerging in response to economic and social needs and wants, as well as water-related problems such as scarcity, injustice, and conflict. However, there is little evidence on how sustainable these governance regimes are, which would be critical for making progress toward sustainable and just water governance....

In public planning processes for sustainable urban development, planners and experts often face the challenge of engaging a public that is not familiar with sustainability principles or does not subscribe to sustainability values. Although there are calls to build the public's sustainability literacy through social learning, such efforts require su...

Transitions towards sustainability are urgently needed to address the interconnected challenges of economic development, ecological integrity, and social justice from the local to the global level. Around the world, collaborative science-society initiatives have emerged that develop, test, and implement experiments in support of sustainability tran...

Initiatives pursuing sustainability transitions of small-scale communities offer rich learning opportunities on: to what extent they are making progress toward sustainability; what success depends on; and how success can be replicated in other communities. Yet, there is little empirical research addressing these questions. This article presents a c...

The future of the American West depends on sustainable water resource governance. A variety of uncertainties associated with limited freshwater supplies, population growth, land use change, drought, and climate change impacts present substantial challenges. To inform decision making, managers are adopting new techniques such as scenario planning to...

Public participation in local decision-making processes has numerous purported benefits. Yet, realizing these benefits requires a citizenry that is able and willing to participate in meaningful ways. High schools are ideal venues for civic education but rarely teach local collective action, citizen engagement, and self-governance, focusing instead...

Sustainability visioning—creating descriptions of sustainable and desirable future states—has become a prominent tool in urban planning to guide how cities are structured, how they function, and how they are governed. In this article, we present the application of a sustainability visioning approach (SPARC) in support of the City of Phoenix's Gener...

Communities in Phoenix are confronted with numerous challenges that adversely affect human health and safety, with disproportionate impacts on low-income communities. While some challenges are being addressed at the city level, new alliances at the neighbourhood level are initiating community development programmes and projects. This article report...

Envisioning how a desirable future might look is a long-standing effort in human evolution and social change. Utopian thought and visions provide direction for actions and behavior; more so, they create identity and community. Accordingly, the discourse on sustainability and sustainable development has recognized that positive visions about our soc...

In zwölf Thesen präzisiert der NaWis Verbund die Forschung zu urbaner Resilienz und Reallaboren.

Driven by concerns over the long-term viability and integrity of their communities people around the world initiate transitions toward sustainability on various levels of society. A particular segment of these initiatives are in small, place-based communities. Each initiative presents learning opportunities to build robust transitions that may cont...

Purpose – The article aims to describe the problem- and project-based learning (PPBL) program and the institutional context at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability (SOS), with the goal of offering experience-based guidance for similar initiatives in sustainability programs around the world. Design/methodology/approach – This case st...

Sustainability science still struggles with transitioning from problem-focused to solution-oriented endeavors that yield positive impacts on mitigating sustainability challenges. This article presents and compares three sustainability science studies on the reconstruction after the 2011 triple-disaster in Japan; limited energy and livelihood option...

The objective of articulating sustainability visions through modeling is to enhance the outcomes and process of visioning in order to successfully move the system toward a desired state. Models emphasize approaches to develop visions that are viable and resilient and are crafted to adhere to sustainability principles. This approach is largely assem...

Sustainability appraisals produce evidence for how well water governance regimes operate and where problems exist. This evidence is particularly relevant for regions that face water scarcity and conflicts. In this study, we present a criteria-based and participatory sustainability appraisal of water governance in a region with such characteristics—...

Sustainability research that strives to develop solution options to complex problems and involves non-academic partners has received increasing public attention. Given this trend, funding organizations, universities, and collaborating partners from business and government seek evidence for the effectiveness of such research. The article introduces...

Over the past few decades, the financial sector has sought to positively contributing to sustainable development through innovative products and services. However, in its business-as-usual the financial sector continues to contribute to military interventions, environmental degradation, growing disparity of incomes, de-coupling of finance and real...

With the building and construction sector contributing significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions, there is great demand for resource- and energy-efficient construction materials. Manufactured nanotechnology products (MNPs) are expected to realize resource and energy efficiency through performance improvements in the strength, lightness and i...

While scholars observe positive trends in sustainability education, sustainability education as a field still finds itself mired between institutional inertia and strong drivers for transitions (Jones et al., 2010). As Van der Leeuw et al. (2012, p. 118) describe: Academic institutions remain so inertial because the professoriate remains in familia...

Working towards sustainable solutions requires involving professionals and stakeholders from all sectors of society into research and teaching. This often presents a challenge to scholars at universities, as they lack capacity and time needed for negotiating different agendas, languages, competencies, and cultures among faculty, students, and stake...

El estudio abordado en este documento forma parte del proyecto titulado: "Hacia el Manejo Sostenible de los Recursos Hídricos en Guanacaste, Costa Rica." El proyecto se inició en el año 2010 a través de un esfuerzo conjunto entre el Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE), en Turrialba, Costa Rica y la Facultad de Sostenibil...