Literature Review
Environmental sustainability has become an issue of global prominence across many groups who have started working for developing plans regarding the use and the preservation of natural resources in all the possible ways (Tilman and Clark 2014). Majority of the studies that are found today has an inclination of being grounded in the biological and physical sciences and technology driven, but fresh and novel approaches to sustainability is also examining the role played by human relationships like a critical factor in achieving the objectives for environmental sustainability (Akhtar et al. 2017). This report would be focusing on community dynamics as a kind of mediator that has the potential of encouraging or discouraging responsible decision-making related to the environment. Community gets assessed as a central point for the establishment of a commitment towards environmental sustainability, and thus community dynamics is playing a major role in decision-making. Based on the idea of community being a focus, a short literature analysis would be conducted on the role played by community in driving environmental sustainability and sustainability decision-making.
Environmental sustainability has turned into a nexus for different disciplines that are looking for examining issues related to poverty, resource allocation, social justice and globalization. These issues are most of the time linked with the ideas of human relationships and societal development that is dependent on the reasonable utilization of an environment designed for sharing by many. In a global context, sustainability is important at the time of trying to reconcile the procedure of production and consumption among groups of people having complex and competing values (Wallace 2017). Rather, the idea of sustainability is exploring the association among environmental quality, economic development, and social equity (). This combination offers the chance for many of the disciplines to be developing innovative theoretical frameworks for researching and problem solving inside communities. Some very specific works from the domains of natural sciences, social entrepreneurship, international business, social justice, and social work activism have brought in perceptive observations related to the dynamics of environmental sustainability and the effect it has on economic development, public policy formation, and individual decision-making. Some of the new aims for environmental sustainability concentrate on the creation of alternative approaches towards sustainability and viewing possible customers of social innovations as a method of transforming communities with the help of environmental sustainability (Too and Bajracharya 2015). Many research on innovation and sustainability have suggested that community dynamics are key to the creation of the transformation required for encouraging personal accountability for environmental issues (Schaltegger and Wagner 2017).
Those who are examining environmental sustainability, just and reasonable allocation of the natural resources are critical for them (Tietenberg and Lewis 2016). As many of the cultures are at present sharing large community spaces, the relationships existing inside those communities influence the ways in which the natural resources get utilized and preserved. Those who are having more capital in terms of social, economic and cultural, possess the greatest capability of making formal decisions related to the environment. All the inhabitants, on the other hand, influence the environment and actually under-represented groups inside each community have a serious influence on the proper utilization of resources. Irrespective of the influence of the problems on the environment, people from poor rural or urban communities most of the time face difficult living conditions that are out their control and can be aggravated by toxic environments which are damaging to the present and future health (Epstein and Buhovac 2014).
Environmental Sustainability
The disempowerment of indigent communities makes the poor both socially and environmentally vulnerable. Instances of this kind of disempowerment can count in profit-maximizing behavior which results in the seeking of cheap labor both locally and globally, and for the facility locations in which pollution laws are comparatively lax. Harvest of natural resources minus even a little bit of consideration for the long-term requirements of local communities and coming generations builds additional disadvantages for the under-represented groups. In a similar manner, tax laws and policies that generate economic disincentives that are discouraging environmentally sustaining actions by corporations and individuals is adding to the concern for vulnerable populations (Seidel et al. 2014).
Decisions regarding the environment might be carried out with consideration towards the multiple and often conflicting ways that are used by individuals for conserving resources. For instance, it might be found that the people of the Aboriginal communities follow a very different model for their environmental uses in comparison to those from the larger and overdeveloped cultures. This distinction has been made while examining the difference in the method of the Native Americans in seeing their responsibility towards the environment in opposition to the dominant North American view of accountability. Instead of essentializing this Native American view, the concern for environmental decisions well-versed by the requirements of the whole community and for the requirements of the coming generations has been articulated (Waas et al. 2014). This viewpoint is highlighting the social nature of environmental sustainability. In the development of transitional approaches for sustainable development the defining, respecting and celebrating of diverse cultural and community models as significant to sustainability has been made prominent. Decisions related to the environment and sustainability are most of the time made in a vacuum with the dominating cultural models stopping the decision makers from respecting, seeing and engaging the different models for answers.
Individual decisions for acting in the environment are swayed by the community surrounding it. Individual reasons for taking any action mix with the actions of other people for producing a community or cultural response, dominating the patterns of usage and consumption. In the domain of environmental responses, individuals are clued-up by the social, cultural, economic and political impacts prominent in their own community (Schaltegger, Burritt and Petersen 2017). The dual relation between the community and the individual turns the environmental concerns complicated and hard to interpret as the individuals require mediating between what is in their own best interest and what would be good for the community. The theory of human agency assists in the explanation of the complex interaction between individual activity, impact, change, communities and environmental sustainability (Pesch 2015). The capability of acting is impacted by the relationships and social nature of people. As a result, change is associated with the capability inside individuals for looking deeper under the surface facts to the social, political and cultural issues that are affecting the environment and mediating their capability o9f using this information. The animateur is a change agent whose own beliefs, experiences and assumptions are key to their inspiration to act. Thus, an analysis of the environmental sustainability has to count in analysis of the way individuals might act, the way communities might be responding and the interchange between the two.
Solution to the critical environmental issues via the work of the communities gives rise to new and novel forms of knowledge and delivery systems with the help of intertwining and circular procedures. Success is completely based on the re-envisionment issues and probabilities, approaches towards communications, usage of technology and the development of procedures and systems that has the capability of facilitating positive results. Innovation is extremely important for environmental sustainability. Procedure and products are both engaged. Innovation is not just a complete investment in technology laden procedures and creations, but even employs the use of grassroots innovative procedures that offer a connection with the social issues that boast of having an effect on environmental activities (Smith and Stirling 2017). These types of innovations can count in new ventures that have been created by social entrepreneurs, cooperation among for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and traditional procedure put to use by the governmental agencies for solving issues that are related to environmental sustainability.
Conclusion
In conclusion it can be said that this report has successfully focused on community dynamics as a kind of mediator that has the potential of encouraging or discouraging responsible decision-making related to the environment. Community gets assessed as a central point for the establishment of a commitment towards environmental sustainability, and thus community dynamics is playing a major role in decision-making. Based on the idea of community being a focus, a short literature analysis was conducted on the role played by community in driving environmental sustainability and sustainability decision-making.
References
Akhtar, P., Khan, Z., Frynas, J.G., Tse, Y.K. and Rao?Nicholson, R., 2017. Essential micro?foundations for contemporary business operations: Top management tangible competencies, relationship?based business networks and environmental sustainability. British Journal of Management.
Epstein, M.J. and Buhovac, A.R., 2014. Making sustainability work: Best practices in managing and measuring corporate social, environmental, and economic impacts. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Pesch, U., 2015. Tracing discursive space: Agency and change in sustainability transitions. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 90, pp.379-388.
Schaltegger, S. and Wagner, M. eds., 2017. Managing the business case for sustainability: The integration of social, environmental and economic performance. Routledge.
Schaltegger, S., Burritt, R. and Petersen, H., 2017. An introduction to corporate environmental management: Striving for sustainability. Routledge.
Seidel, S., Chandra, L., Reuter, N., Stieger, D. and Gau, M., 2014, May. Green e-community: Sensemaking in Environmental Sustainability Transformations. In International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems (pp. 438-442). Springer, Cham.
Smith, A. and Stirling, A., 2017. Innovation, sustainability and democracy: an analysis of grassroots contributions. Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics, 6(1), pp.64-97.
Tietenberg, T.H. and Lewis, L., 2016. Environmental and natural resource economics. Routledge.
Tilman, D. and Clark, M., 2014. Global diets link environmental sustainability and human health. Nature, 515(7528), pp.518-522.
Too, L. and Bajracharya, B., 2015. Sustainable campus: engaging the community in sustainability. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 16(1), pp.57-71.
Waas, T., Hugé, J., Block, T., Wright, T., Benitez-Capistros, F. and Verbruggen, A., 2014. Sustainability assessment and indicators: Tools in a decision-making strategy for sustainable development. Sustainability, 6(9), pp.5512-5534.
Wallace, D., 2017. Sustainable industrialization. Routledge.
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