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Tuesday 29 May 2018

International conference on sustainability research and transformation, Leverage Points 2019

Professor Jens Newig from the Faculty of Sustainability and the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany is organizing the Leverage Points 2019 International conference on sustainability research and transformation, for February 6th-8th, 2019. Jens Newing´s work is available here.

For this conference Newig is inspired by the work of Donella Meadows’ “Leverage Points: Places to intervene in a system, and the conference will explore the deep leverage points that can lead to sustainability transformations.

The question of departure being: how do we transform ourselves, our science, our institutions, our interventions and our societies for a better future? One main conference theme will be on Re-structuring institutions for sustainability transformation.

"Institutional arrangements are deeply rooted structures that shape the rules of a system and, thus, have the power to advance systems change. Social structures, embedded in formal institutions (rules, regulations, and policies) enable, constrain, and guide human action, and thus shape sustainability transformations."

Whithin this theme, the potentials of systemic, institutional change as a leverage point for sustainability transformation will be explored, acknoledging that existing research often lacks a systems-oriented view, and pays only scare attention to processes of institutional failure and decline, and even less to potentially productive functions of such phenomena. This was actually the focus of the work I published on the regulaton of telecommunication [in Spanish] and further work that remains unpublished:
Telecomunicaciones y Política en Estados Unidos y España (1875-2002): Construyendo mercados.  Madrid: CIS/Siglo XXI, ISBN 84-7476-336-3. [Link for download]

Contributions are seek addressing this this gap and that (1) employ a perspective that goes beyond single institutions but take a complex-systems oriented lens; and (2) that pay close attention to phenomena of failure and decline of institutions and the extent to which these can serve as leverage points for sustainability.

This includes, but may not be limited to, issues and topics, such as:
- The role of institutions for sustainability transformations from various theoretical perspectives;
- Crises as triggers for adaptation towards sustainability
- Deliberate dismantling of unsustainable institutions
- The active management of declining institutions
- The identification and unlocking of path-dependency and system traps
- Analysis of institutional coherence, redundancies, and lacunae
- Perspectives on the interplay and integration between different institutions
- Democratic implications of transformation processes
 - Methodological challenges in analyzing and understanding institutional change. 

The conference is premised on three principles: 1) The importance of searching for places where interventions can lead to transformative change; 2) Open inquiry, exchange and co-learning across multiple theoretical, methodological and empirical research approaches; and 3) The need for reflection on modes of research and processes in sustainability research.

Abstracts with a maximum of 300 words should be submitted by 30 June 2018 via the conference website: http://leveragepoints2019.leuphana.de/call-for-abstracts/.
For more information please visit: http://leveragepoints2019.leuphana.de
If you have any specific enquiries about abstract submission please contact: Leveragepoints2019@leuphana.de



More info on my publication on leverage points and the role of institutions in socio political systems historically and from a comparative perspective follows...

Telecomunicaciones y Política en Estados Unidos y España (1875-2002): Construyendo mercados.  Madrid: CIS/Siglo XXI, ISBN 84-7476-336-3. (Colección monografías n. 191) (353 páginas). Este libro recibió el premio al mejor libro de la Asociación Española de Ciencia Política y de la Administración en Ciencia Política en 2003. Este libro, con más de 4500 lecturas en linea está acccesible en: https://www.slideshare.net/olga.gil/telecomunicaciones-y-poltica-en-estados-unidos-y-espaa-18752002. Esta es la reseña que publica Google sobre el libro, que contabiliza 13 citas en Google Scholar:
“Este libro muestra los cambio que se producen en el mercado de las telecomunicaciones en Estados Unidos y España entre 1875 y 2002. Para hacerlo introduce un marco teórico que en primer lugar posibilita el estudio de los efectos de cambios institucionales y de políticas en sectores económicos regulados y, en segundo lugar, permite realizar comparaciones de países con diversos grados de desarrollo político, económico e institucional.”

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