Research & Projects
"BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE IN SUSTAINABILTY SCIENCE: LINKING HIGH-PERFORMANCE MODELING AND TRANSITION EXPERIMENTS TO FOSTER TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY"
Sustainability challenges, such as climate change, water scarcity, contamination, and land degradation, jeopardize the long-term viability and integrity of societies around the world While the theoretical and empirical understanding of these challenges continues to grow, solutions are far less developed and adopted. In response, sustainability science has put forward a research agenda that focuses on evidence-based solutions with the goal of scalability and transferability. Yet, there is still a significant gap between understanding complex challenges and contributing to context specific solutions. From a complex systems perspective this is a challenge of adequate coarse- and fine-graining of models so that they capture all relevant dimensions at different scales. More
“Complexity or Control – Paradigms for Sustainable Development” (CCP)
is a joint project of Leuphana and ASU funded by the State of Lower Saxony in collaboration with the Volkswagen Foundation. The project focuses on the foundations for a science of sustainable development from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines approaches from digital and computational history/history of science, media studies, transdisciplinary methods development, complexity theory and sustainability science to provide answers to the question: What are the fundamental conceptual, theoretical, methodological, epistemological and social/cultural dimensions for a science of sustainable development, one that takes all the complexities of the problem into account? More
“Educating future change agents – Higher education as a motor of the sustainability transformation”
addresses the question, how competence acquisition can best be fostered on two levels – for novel teaching and learning approaches in individual sustainability courses as well as for entire sustainability curricula. To date little empirical research has been conducted on sustainability curricula and courses as to provide robust evidence specifically on how students can best be educated to acquire such competencies that would qualify them for becoming impactful change agents. To contribute to this line of research, the project adopts a multi-methodological approach, combining in depth qualitative case studies with a quantitative sample study to generate both detailed as well as generalizable insights. More