Abstract
A sound theoretical ground is required for sustainability related concepts reconciliation and operationalization. The current study investigates the opportunities to conceive a homogenous sustainability model derived from theoretical ecology, using as a prototype the “organization” concept from the Chemical Organizations Theory (COT). A sustainability problematization and a literature examination try to capture and link some useful perspectives and sustainability connected concepts. Some of the most influential methods and tools are reviewed, in particular among those relating to the triple bottom line framework and to the ecological footprint family, together with concepts close to the core sustainability definition, like resilience and circularity. Theoretical ecology provides candidate goal functions based on self-organization gradients, such as fitness functions and thermodynamic orientors. The COT formalism provides a higher abstraction level and the algorithms for patterns identification in a reactions network. The sustainability problematization reveals the motifs of a possible model of “total ecosystem”, which subordinates the anthropic cultural (social–economic) system to the thermodynamic, chemical, biological, and cultural determinisms regulating biological and cultural species of an ecological network.
Highlights
Sustainability is a fuzzy concept depending on the community goals, spatial–temporal scale, biophysical internal configuration and external conditions variability, cultural regulation, network connectivity and nestedness variability, and proximate and ultimate causal drivers of change
The authors insist on the role of the social interactions formalism in verifying the economic models: Self-organizing and scale-free network models based on preferential attachment do not explain the co-evolutionary social–economic mechanisms, leaving a theoretical gap solved by network models of “symbiotic reverse flows” and “socially nested production structures”
The unused energy flows are redirected between components via circulatory, constructal flow structures which bifurcate from the spanning cycles linking the sub-systems at the different ecosystem scales and levels of organization, in accordance with the principle of maximum empower [11], which states that self-organizing systems maximize the energy flux throughout the network and are compatible with their environment
Summary
Sustainability is a fuzzy concept depending on the community goals (values), spatial–temporal scale, biophysical internal configuration and external conditions variability, cultural regulation (social–economic behaviors, policies, and standards of rationality), network connectivity and nestedness variability, and proximate and ultimate causal drivers of change. From an ecological perspective, the agent types are species maximizing their fitness, and the sustainability criteria could be defined as fitness currencies Such a model misses the holistic dimension of the sustainability orchestration (related to the emergence in complex adaptive systems) by considering only a “flat” representation of atomistic exchanges of flows, maximizing the individual goals of the sub-systems. Waring et al [14] explain that most of the systems analytical frameworks build on models of anthropic–environmental systems as CAS, such as coupled human and natural systems (CHANs) and SESs, including concepts like resilience and vulnerability in order to characterize the internal causal structure (determining the system states) and the adaptive capacity to alternative system states Current multilevel frameworks such as polycentric approach, panarchy, and multilevel governance do not contain general mechanisms of causation across levels of organization, or guidance for designing policy in multilevel contexts.
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