Gwybodaeth Modiwlau

This module concentrates on addressing three main topics:

• How human behaviours give rise to unsustainable activity;
• Current thinking about the requirements for societies to be sustainable;
• How transformation towards more sustainable trajectories can be promoted and maintained.

These main topics will be explored within the framework of systems thinking. It will include discussion of sub-topics such as social-ecological resilience, uncertainty in decision-making; perverse policies; theories of transformation and adaptive governance. It will provide an overarching view of sustainability within which students will be able to hang their own area of specialization. Students will explore this framework from the perspective of their own discipline through the assignment. It therefore has relevance to students from a range of schemes, including Tourism Management, Tourism and Recreation, Countryside Management, Countryside Conservation, Sustainable Rural Development etc.

The work will be based on a conceptual analysis of the reinforcing and negative feedback processes in a social-ecological system that is of direct relevance to the students' background (e.g. tourism, countryside management). The work will require students to analyse underlying feedback processes to explain the likely impacts of a management or policy intervention. This will necessarily require students to demonstrate their understanding of how the human behaviour gave rise to the problems, what is required to ensure resilience of the system in question, and how resilience can be maintained over the long-term.

1) How human behaviours give rise to unsustainable activity:

• The problems of uncertainty arising from the dynamic complexity of social-ecological systems;
• Perverse policies and decision-making;
• Disengagement from ecological feedback

2) Current thinking about the requirements for societies to be sustainable:

• Resilient Ecological systems;
• Resilient Social Systems.

3) How transformation towards more sustainable trajectories can be promoted and maintained:

• Panarchy - the theory of how ecological and social systems collapse and reorganize transformation;
• Promoting transformation;
• Adaptive governance.