Abstract
Social sustainability has for long been either neglected or downplayed in scientific literature and policy making and it remains an unsettled concept. The present paper critically examines several explanations for the unequal development of the social component of sustainability and suggests that social learning can serve as an insightful anchor for conceptualizing and operationalizing social sustainability. Collaborative governance is used to showcase this approach, specifically, a targeted review of multi-stakeholder schemes in natural resource management, wildlife conservation, and protected area governance. These schemes can exemplify a wide array of commonalities between the fields of social sustainability and social learning and reveal a fruitful cross-fertilization of the two concepts. The paper wishes to make two contributions. First, a specific dialectic between stakeholder collaboration and conflict under power asymmetries will be illustrated, which is characteristic in the operation of many multi-stakeholder governance schemes. Second, the need for scaffolding social learning in such schemes will be demonstrated so that a process-oriented account of social sustainability is attained. The way out offered by the present paper is that the dynamics between collaboration and conflict, properly managed by means of a toolkit with social learning templates for multi-stakeholder environmental governance schemes, may serve as a precondition for innovations sought.
Highlights
Social sustainability has for long been underdeveloped in scientific literature and policy making [1,2,3] and it remains an unsettled concept [4,5,6]
The main objective of the present paper is to present and justify a version of social sustainability that relies on social learning
The present paper introduces a version of social sustainability that largely overlaps with social learning under the core precondition of institutionalizing stakeholder interaction
Summary
Social sustainability has for long been underdeveloped in scientific literature and policy making [1,2,3] and it remains an unsettled concept [4,5,6]. Theoretical and methodological elaborations of the social component of sustainability have been lagging behind those of its environmental and economic counterparts [7]. The neglect or downplay of social sustainability may be attributed to a prevailing content-based, technocratic approach to sustainable development, which prioritizes the reconciliation of environmental and economic concerns. In contrast to technocratic solutions of that kind, which may be considered as readily transferrable from one context to another, the concept of social sustainability is much more context-specific [5]. The contextspecificity and shifts of values and priorities challenge the content-based perspective mentioned above for all dimensions of sustainability and for the social dimension
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