abstract: Sustainability visioning (i.e. the construction of sustainable future states) is considered an important component of sustainability research, for instance, in transformational sustainability science or in planning for urban sustainability. Visioning frees sustainability research from the dominant focus on analyzing problem constellations and opens it towards positive contributions to social innovation and transformation. Calls are repeatedly made for visions that can guide us towards sustainable futures. Scattered across a broad range of fields (i.e. business, non-government organization, land-use management, natural resource management, sustainability science, urban and regional planning) are an abundance of visioning studies. However, among the few evaluative studies in the literature there are apparent deficits in both the research and practice of visioning that curtails our expectations and prospects of realizing process-based and product-derived outcomes. These deficits suggests that calls instead should focus on the development of applied and theoretical understanding of crafting sustainability visions, enhancing the rigor and robustness of visioning methodology, and on integrating practice, research, and education for collaborative sustainability visioning. From an analysis of prominent visioning and sustainability visioning studies in the literature, this dissertation articulates what is sustainability visioning and synthesizes a conceptual framework for criteria-based design and evaluation of sustainability visioning studies. While current visioning methodologies comply with some of these guidelines, none adhere to all of them. From this research, a novel sustainability visioning methodology is designed to address this gap to craft visions that are shared, systemic, principles-based, action-oriented, relevant, and creative (i.e. SPARC visioning methodology) and evaluated across all quality criteria. Empirical studies were conducted to test and apply the conceptual and methodological frameworks -- with an emphasis on enhancing the rigor and robustness in real world visioning processes for urban planning and teaching sustainability competencies. In-depth descriptions of the collaborative visioning studies demonstrate tangible outcomes for: (a) implementing the above sustainability visioning methodology, including evaluative procedures; (b) adopting meaningful interactive engagement procedures; (c) integrating advanced analytical modeling, sustainability appraisal, and creativity enhancing procedures; and (d) developing perspective and methodological capacity for long-range sustainability planning. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Sustainability 2013

The mainstream ecosystem has proven unsustainable in terms of livelihood, environmental stewardship, cultural heritage, and social equality. To alleviate these problems, a range of top-down strategies has been deployed, but they are often ineffective in addressing the specific needs and aspirations of diverse contexts. On the other hand, bottom-up initiatives started by communities also face organisational and resource limitations that prevent them from becoming resilient. Within this context, service design for social innovation has become a well-established human-centred, strategic and systemic approach to tackling such challenges. However, designers have put much emphasis on the use of fixed toolkits that result in one-size-fits-all outputs. Instead, this thesis argues for a more situated and embedded approach to service design. With this in mind, the aim of the research was to explore new roles, purposes and methods the service designer can adopt to activate communities to transition towards a more sustainable future. For this purpose, participatory case studies were undertaken with two textile artisan communities (in Nottingham, UK, and Cape Town, South Africa), chosen as relevant cases of design, production and consumption. As a result of both cases, the designer activated the artisans, previously working in an isolated and precarious condition, to become a community and outline a situated service proposition that embeds a shared vision for a sustainable future. Building on emerging anthropological approaches to service design, the thesis contributes an original methodological framework, which equips the service designer with cultural sensibility when entering communities, aiding in making sense of sustainable futures, facilitating the co-design of situated services and activating local legacies. In this, the investigation evidenced the diverse roles - cultural insider, storyteller, sensemaker, facilitator, and activist - the service designer can play throughout a social innovation process. Furthermore, the thesis emphasised that the mastery of the designer lies in the skill of tailoring his/her approach to specific contexts in order to craft situated services that are meaningful to the communities using them.

Engaging with collective imaginaries to co-create positive stories about the future is suggested as a powerful tool for increasing the social-ecological resilience needed to cope with uncertainty and change. Indeed, as archaeological evidence shows, stories and storytelling about humankind and the rest of nature are as old as modern humanity. The geographical distribution of this evidence reveals that various forms of storytelling have been practiced by probably all communities across scales. Although oral traditions in nonliterate societies codify particular forms of place-based knowledge, cultural traditions and cultural values, folktales and traditional practices of storytelling have been largely overlooked in sustainability scientific endeavours.  Using a case-based approach, I employed multiple sources of empirical evidence to examine the traditional storytelling practices in connection to the cultural values of the AmaZulu in KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. By combining qualitative content analysis, interviews with locals and conceptual modelling, my results endorse that telling folktales has been a cross-generational technique for accumulating local knowledge, as well as a vehicle for vertical and horizontal transmission of cultural values. Findings also suggested that within the last generation, various interacting drivers have caused the discontinuation of this practice. In so doing, these drivers have also altered the cultural value space, triggering a disconnection with the natural world, and partially explaining the growing sustainability challenges within KwaZulu Natal. Nevertheless, findings also implied that with the studied community, the values underpinning prosocial and sustainable behaviours are still present but took different forms: the disconnection with nature triggered the loss of eudaimonic aspects, rendering these cultural values either held or moral values. I hypothesise that converting values from held to relational over revitalising and innovating the practice of storytelling, may foster a reconnection of people and nature and lead a pathway towards more just and sustainable futures.

Our current times are marked by the unprecedented challenges of environmental and social crisis. Transformative changes need to take place and in this study, we explore the role of Gotlandic citizens engaged in sustainability in creating a sustainable future. We follow a recent scholarship focusing on the power of imagination in the context of shaping sustainable futures. Through the theory lens of spaces, we map Gotlandic citizens’ individual experiences of context where they engage with sustainability in different forms of rational and imaginative reflection, alone or together. We conduct qualitative interviews to investigate existing spaces combined with action research where we create a new space of shared imagination in the form of a workshop. An in-depth understanding is gained of the reactions and emotions that our study participants express towards all of these spaces. Going beyond the (k)now, both in the meaning of going beyond traditional forms of knowledge but also in the sense of going into an uncertain future, allowed us to investigate the role of arts-based imagination in the context of an island community. Our findings suggest that spaces for practicing imagination are lacking, but are highly valued when experienced. They provide an alert hopefulness and a gentle way for ordinary citizens to engage with the complex topic of sustainable futures. Another key result of our study is that communities are important spaces where collective visions can grow.

Land ist eine begrenzte Ressource, und die steigende Nachfrage nach Lebensmitteln, Futtermitteln und Holz treibt den Wettbewerb zwischen verschiedenen Landnutzungsarten voran. Landnutzungsmodelle, die Landnutzungsmuster optimieren und negative Kompromisse zwischen verschiedenen Landnutzungen minimieren, können bei der Bewertung solcher Landkonkurrenzdynamiken helfen. Angesichts des langen Planungshorizonts der Forstwirtschaft ist die Modellierung der Dynamik des Forstsektors in einem einzigen Modell eine Herausforderung. Diese Dissertation zeigt, dass zwischen Land- und Forstwirtschaft auf feinen räumlichen Skalen (halbe Grad Gitterauflösung) ein Wettbewerb um Land besteht, und die Berücksichtigung eines dynamischen Forstsektors in einem rekursiven dynamischen Modell wie MAgPIE verbessert die Bewertung der Landnutzung und der damit verbundenen Emissionen. Die Speicherung von Kohlenstoff in seit langem bestehenden Infrastrukturen wie städtischen Gebäuden könnte eine zusätzliche Option zur Abschwächung des Klimawandels sein und gleichzeitig Hotspots der biologischen Vielfalt und Grenzwälder vor der Umwandlung in andere Landnutzungsformen schützen, zusätzlich zu den bereits gut verstandenen und quantifizierten landbasierten Abschwächungsoptionen. Auf diese Weise wird nicht nur Kohlenstoff über lange Zeiträume in den Holzstädten der Zukunft gespeichert, sondern es wird auch dazu beigetragen, Emissionen aus der Produktion von Zement und Stahl für den Bau von Infrastrukturen in der Zukunft zu vermeiden. Auf der COP26 wurde eine Erklärung zum Ende der Entwaldung bis 2030 abgegeben. Eine mögliche Politik zur Umsetzung dieser Erklärung vor Ort wäre das Verbot der Ausdehnung landwirtschaftlicher Flächen auf bewaldete Flächen. Dies würde bedeuten, dass nicht bewaldete Flächen in einem noch nie dagewesenen Ausmaß in landwirtschaftliche Flächen umgewandelt würden. / Land is a limited resource and the increasing demand for food, feed and timber drives competition between different land use types. Land-use models, which optimize land-use patterns and minimize negative trade-offs across land uses, can assist in assessing such land competition dynamics. Given the long planning horizon of forest management and competition for land with agriculture, modeling forestry sector dynamics in a single model is challenging. The Inclusion of a dynamic forest sector in the Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment (MAgPIE) helps in answering the overarching research question: What is the role of forestry in future land use? This dissertation shows that competition for land exists between agriculture and forestry on fine spatial scales (half degree grid resolution), and the consideration of a dynamic forestry sector in a recursive dynamic model like MAgPIE improves the assessment of land-use and its associated emissions. Understanding how production of roundwood influences the competition for land would help in quantifying how wood can be produced for timber cities of the future. Storing carbon in long-standing infrastructure like urban buildings could be an additional mitigation option, whilst protecting biodiversity hotspots and frontier forests from being converted to other land uses, on top of already well understood and quantified land-based mitigation options. This way, not only carbon is stored over long time spans in timber cities of the future, it also helps in avoiding emissions from production of cement and steel for construction of infrastructure in the future. Additionally, A declaration to end deforestation by 2030 was made at COP26. A potential policy implementing this declaration on the ground would be to prohibit the expansion of agricultural land into forested land. This would mean that non-forested land will be converted at unprecedented levels into agricultural land.