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Innovations in Decision-Making and Accounting for Sustainability

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2021) | Viewed by 3395

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Birmingham Business School, Lloyds Banking Group Centre for Responsible Business, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Interests: sustainable accounting; environmental and social policy; climate change; SDGs; sustainable transformation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The unsustainability of our socio-economic-ecological systems bears testament to the inadequacy of institutional decision-making and accountability. Whether intentional or unintentional, the consequences of these practices are catastrophic. Although consensus is broad that change is needed, what these changes are remains underdeveloped.

This Special Issue seeks innovative contributions from any discipline with the potential to transform decision-making and accountability in sustainability arenas and institutions. Given the challenges associated with sustainable transformation, there is no preconceived notion of what constitutes a relevant institution or arena for inclusion in this Special Issue.

The challenges these contributions could address include: restorative interventions, complex dynamic relationships, appropriate time scales, appropriate entities, sustainable governance and regulations, planetary boundaries, inter-connectivity, integrating data from different sources, power and conflicts, values and valuation, critical threshold management, multi-dimensionality, inclusivity, eco-justice, and social inequalities.

Contributions are encouraged that push or blur disciplinary boundaries, integrate different forms of knowledge, demonstrate innovative use and representation of evidence, explore the potential of technical innovations, or challenge the problematic status quo. However, authors are expected to explore the impacts of their submissions on contemporary sustainability governance policy and practice, including but not restricted to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Prof. Ian Thomson
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • decision-making
  • accounting and accountability
  • SDGs
  • governance
  • innovation
  • sustainable transformation
  • resilience

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

11 pages, 208 KiB  
Article
Positional Analysis: A Multidimensional and Democracy-Oriented Approach to Decision-Making and Sustainability
by Peter Söderbaum
Sustainability 2020, 12(14), 5555; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145555 - 10 Jul 2020
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2921
Abstract
Essential principles of democracy are threatened in many parts of the world. In mainstream economics textbooks, reference to democracy is marginal or non-existent. At issue is if economics as a discipline can contribute to strengthen democracy in policy-making and decision situations more generally. [...] Read more.
Essential principles of democracy are threatened in many parts of the world. In mainstream economics textbooks, reference to democracy is marginal or non-existent. At issue is if economics as a discipline can contribute to strengthen democracy in policy-making and decision situations more generally. In this essay, it is proposed that democracy becomes part of the definition of economics. While mainstream neoclassical cost–benefit analysis (CBA) is criticized as being technocratic, positional analysis (PA) connected with institutional ecological economics is advocated and presented with its essential elements. While a specific ideological orientation with emphasis on markets is built into CBA, PA represents an attempt to identify more than one ideological orientation or narrative as relevant among actors related to an issue. This is part of an attempt to carry out a many-sided analysis. If we wish to make the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) part of analysis, then multidimensional thinking is needed. PA is an attempt to avoid the “monetary reductionism” of CBA in favor of an analysis where monetary and non-monetary impacts (of different kinds) are separated and where, particularly on the non-monetary side, issues of inertia and irreversibility of impacts are observed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Innovations in Decision-Making and Accounting for Sustainability)
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