Research summary
Worldwide, people who study and practice sustainability governance (strategies for implementing sustainability) are beginning to recognize that in order to transform the world’s unsustainable socio-ecological systems—that is, the system comprising both our social structures and their enabling biophysical conditions—we need a better understanding of the intersecting cultural, political and socio-economic drivers of societal change.
As Canada Research Chair in Transition to Sustainability (CRC T2S), Dr. Adrian E. Beling is exploring both the conditions for a successful sustainability transition ("transition governance") and how governance itself may be transformed by sustainability imperatives ("governance in transition"). He and his research team at the CRC T2S Lab are looking at two groundbreaking experiments of how religion can be an agent of sustainability transition by providing a platform for articulation and mobilization, service provision, policy advocacy, cultural-practical innovation and individual orientation and by linking the local and the global under a common banner of social-ecological sustainability or, in the church’s language, “integral ecology.”