Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Facing interdependent, systemic problems such as resource depletion and climate change, recent civil society organizations’ (CSOs) strategies seem to address only parts of the current challenges the world faces. Different and partly new modes of learning, organization and innovation are emerging on the agenda of several CSOs operating in the field of sustainability. The linkages in between the CSOs self-conceptualizations, their strategies and the environmental problems faced, are however fairly well understood. This research is located at the intersection of alternative paradigms and discourses linked to sustainability, their understanding as well as application by civil society organizations to enable change. Its purpose was to scrutinize civil society organizations’ understandings of sustainable alternatives to the dominant socio-economic system of the 21st century and thus to contribute to a better understanding of the linkages and contradictions among these perceptions embedded in discursive and biophysical realities. This qualitative study was based upon fieldwork with the Smart Civil Society Organizations Initiative. Examined via observant participation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, the key findings suggest that the ways in which problems, actions and strategies were approached within the initiative, depended first of all on the discourses, in which these were defined. Thus, the directions, in which the Smart CSOs Initiative took shape, were strongly bond by the participants’ personal agendas, constrained or enabled by their organizations’ mandates, but depended most of all on their ability to create a common understanding of each other’s perceptions.
Author: Maike Buhr
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2128398514