Sustainable Societies More Information

The Sustainable Societies group aims to promote theoretical and methodological innovation in the transdisciplinary understanding of global trends in socio-environmental change, studying their geographically and historically situated manifestations, their transversal interconnections and their implications for development and socio-environmental change. This understanding is pursued by analysing the impact and legacies, over time, of various epistemologies, forms of collective action, development interventions, forms of engagement with public institutions in political and institutional innovation, and strategies for promoting synergies between humans, nature and technologies.

The group adopts methodological approaches that favour a deep and contextualised understanding of long-term multidimensional phenomena, as well as participatory approaches to knowledge production. This includes cosmologies, epistemologies, spiritualities/traditions of wisdom, non-conventional pedagogies, action-research methodologies and other participatory and engaged approaches to knowledge production and dissemination, as well as cultural positions that provide post-human, post-patriarchal and decolonial counterpoints to modernity by re-signifying relations with the non-rational dimensions of human existence, as well as with the non-human dimensions of nature.

This group presents innovative strategies for the formation of new groups of academics and professionals, with the aim of influencing the dynamism of civil society, environmental sustainability, entrepreneurship and political innovation at an international level. In addition to fundamental and applied research and dissemination, this happens through contributions to policy briefs, working papers, databases and other research tools, among other forms of engagement with civil society, political actors and business players. 

 Keywords: Socio-environmental change; Sustainability; Development; Livelihoods