Local understandings and global challenges: exploring sense of place in sustainability transitions

Abstract

The sustainability transitions literature acknowledges the importance of place for building a more sustainable world. Although some researchers have studied place analytically and made contributions toward developing sustainable communities across the globe, and others have directly discussed the structural aspects of places, the sustainable transitions literature has not fully reconciled place specifics with their implications for sustainability. This research explores how members from the small community of Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada, link their sense of place to their understanding of sustainability and considers the implications of this for sustainability transitions. Through an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this work develops three propositions regarding sustainability as it relates to sense(s) of place. First, we found that within the Campobello community, sustainability was linked directly to individuals’ senses of place, place identities, and place attachments. Second, we found that there were slight variations in islanders’ concepts of sustainability related to these place-related constructs. Third, we found that although this community’s sustainability conversations were dominated by place-specific rather than global sustainability discourse, this was not always the case. As a result, the importance of more deeply exploring the normative nature of sustainability transitions is intensified. Understanding how place specifics connect with views of sustainability in a small island community allows us to deeply explore the role of place in sustainability transitions.