1.4 Sustainability transition requires a diversity of actors and visionaries

There is no single way to exhaustively describe and explain a complex system. This is easy to see when looking at an individual human being: some functions and sensations are essentially primarily physiological, others psychological and others social, although they are intertwined in many ways. If we were to try to explain all human life and its experiences and actions from only one scientific point of view, be it medicine or psychology or social sciences, the explanations would sooner or later begin to fall flat and sound far-fetched.

In the same – although much more complex – way, human communities, societies, networks of cooperation between societies, and the processes involved in them can be described from many different perspectives. No single way of describing them is likely to provide all the explanations, and different perspectives have different strengths and weaknesses. We will explore these in the second part of the course, which looks at different ways of answering the question: what needs to change in the sustainability transition, and why and how?

Different ways of describing and framing problems and solutions are often a rich source of inspiration, as long as there is a sufficiently shared understanding of certain objectives. However, a strongly shared understanding bears the risk of reproducing structures of inequality and discrimination if insufficient attention is paid to the diversity of different forms of knowledge and cultures. We will learn more about these aspects in the third part of the course. This is a

encouraging message for action: not only a certain kind of talent is needed for a sustainability transition, but a wide range of actors with different skills. In this respect, a sustainability transition can be compared to a large construction project. The Finnish research unit BIOS has described the necessary change as an ecological reconstruction of society (link). In a large construction project, only the architect and the chief builder see the big picture, but in different ways: one focuses on the structures, whose sustainability is paramount, and the other on the functions (processes) that the building must serve. On the construction site, there are a number of specialists in their respective fields, whose perspective on the project is more limited but equally important, and none of the generalists who have the big picture necessarily have the same command of building services engineering, surfacing, or landscaping as the specialists in these areas. Understanding and action are needed at many different levels, which we will learn more about in section 4 of the course.

The sustainability transition has been compared to the post-World War II reconstruction, when, among other things, new homes had to be built for hundreds of thousands of evacuees. Construction had to be cheap, resource-efficient, and fast. It required a range of local construction skills as well as top-level planning and coordination. The Association of Finnish Architects' Reconstruction Office was, among others, in charge of the latter. The picture from 1940 shows the construction of a type of house known as – when translated directly from Finnish – a “front-line soldier house”, which was a typical solution to the housing challenge. Picture: Jonund (public domain / Wikimedia Commons).