The COVID-19 pandemic offers an historic precedent to review and challenge the values of social, economic, environmental, and cultural belief systems. The concept of the “New Normal” and the experience of the global pandemic provide points of transition in thinking about our relationship to our planet and to each other. These include the fragility of contemporary economics, dependency on industrialized urban infrastructures, and reliance on top-down governance, vulnerability to climate disasters, dislocation from the natural world, societal inequalities, and the loss of cultural memory. The paper considers the potential role of systems thinking in attempting to manage societies’ responses to the pandemic. To provide the methodological context in which some systems thinking can be applied to alleviate the pandemic, we conduct a focused literature review of systemic frameworks, and using examples from Brazil and England, the paper questions the validity of existing disaster management systems and proposes an integrated critical systems approach. Reflecting on these experiences, questions of systems criticality are further developed and considered in relation to critical recovery from disasters and as integral critical systems (ICS) to interrogate the intention of systems. Finally, the paper reflects upon the value of systems and the values embedded in systems that may or may not promote equitable well-being in recovery from disasters such as COVID-19.
The global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting everyone, but in many different ways, stimulating contrasting reactions and responses: opportunities for some, difficulties for many. A simple survey of how individual workers in urban ecology have been coping with COVID-19 constraints found divergent responses to COVID-19 on people’s activities, both within countries and between continents. Many academics felt frustrated at being unable to do fieldwork, but several saw opportunities to change ways of working and review their engagement with the natural world. Some engaging with social groups found new ways of sharing ideas and developing aspirations without face-to-face contact. Practitioners creating and managing urban greenspaces had to devise ways to work and travel while maintaining social distancing. Many feared severe funding impacts from changed local government priorities. Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified issues, such as environmental injustice, disaster preparation and food security, that have been endemic in most countries across the global south in modern times. However, developing and sustaining the strong community spirit shown in many places will speed economic recovery and make cities more resilient against future geophysical and people-made disasters. Significantly, top-down responses and one-size-fits-all solutions, however good the modelling on which they are based, are unlikely to succeed without the insights that local knowledge and community understanding can bring. We all will have to look at disaster preparation in a more comprehensive, caring and consistent way in future.
Can stakeholder organisations support and put pressure on organisational change at universities to implement sustainable development? In recent years, universities across the world have made progress in both promoting and implementing sustainable development (SD). However, despite the fact that the United Nations message that stakeholder participation is crucial for the implementation of sustainable development (in particular SDG 17: Partnerships for the goals), research on the role of higher education stakeholder networks in the context of organisational change towards sustainable development remains underdeveloped. First, the paper discusses state of the art literature on the role of stakeholder networks for the implementation of sustainable development in higher education. Secondly, using a systemic approach the paper explores some potential steps for addressing the practical and policy challenges required to support the implementation of sustainable development through the role of stakeholder networks. The paper then critiques the present and future prospects of such relationships. This paper will present a systemic perspective of how universities can be more attuned and adapt to continue the promotion of sustainable development goals amongst their community of influence. It will also be useful for practitioners and policy makers working to address sustainable development implementation challenges in higher education.
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This paper argues that heritage is what contemporary culture makes of history and that this may distort our ability to face future realities. Funded by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund, the VIEWPOINT ecological arts project at the confluence of two rivers in Cockermouth, Northwest England, questioned the deployment of art and heritage as a means of community recovery from the 2009 and 2015 flood disasters. As the climate crisis accelerates and the psychosocial emergency increases, this project reassigned a Wordsworth poem and repurposed twelve large rocks to celebrate the potential for communities to live with their rivers in the future and defy their tendency towards nostalgia and memorialization.However, the situation was exacerbated when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation World Heritage awarded cultural heritage status on The Lake District National Park, affixing the environmental management of the area to Beatrix Potter’s romanticized notion of sheep farming; thereby ensuring perpetual landscape deforestation and future flooding.
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