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The prisoners' dilemma is a game-theoretical construct about trust. It can be seen as a simple version of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, which is often used in the sustainability context as a metaphor for the tension between responsibility for common resources and the perceived self-benefit to individual organizations, regions or nations who neglect such responsibility in the short term. However, other game theory and developments in sustainability science imply that the prisoners' dilemma mind-set is delusive and misleading for both business and policy making. It helps obscure an even more important aspect of proactive leadership for sustainability: the potential self-benefit of understanding the dynamics of major system change better than one's ‘competitors’ . The UN 1972, 1992, and 2012 summits on sustainability, as well as the many summits on climate change, have been valuable milestones for influencing societal leadership at all levels. However, due to the prisoners' dilemma mind-set, they have also indirectly helped reinforce the idea that sustainability only pays off if the costs of achieving it are shared by all. That, in turn, has encouraged decision makers to believe that ’our organization's, region's or nation's sustainability activity must rely on policy making changing the rules of the game for everybody’. This focus on policy making as the only or main facilitator of sustainability efforts delays the needed transition of global society. By considering game theory such as tit-for-tat and modern systems science for sustainability, this paper illuminates major shortcomings of the prisoners' dilemma in the context of sustainability, and attempts to provide a more fruitful mind-set that can be motivated both theoretically and empirically. It is argued that a large part of the self-benefit of proactivity for sustainability is direct , i.e. independent of other actors' actions for the common good. In addition, it is argued that the self-benefit to businesses can be further increased through voluntary collaboration with other businesses to promote the common good, as well as through collaboration between proactive businesses and policy makers. Currently, none of this is intelligently and operationally part of mainstream leadership and public discourse on sustainability. The clarifications provided in this paper can lead to a much needed shift in mind-set among many leaders, not least political leaders, many of which seem to be trapped in simplistic prisoners' dilemma thinking and who act accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electric vehicles seem to offer a great potential for sustainable transport development. The Swedish pioneer project GreenCharge Southeast is designed as a cooperative action research approach that aims to explore a roadmap for a fossil-free transport system by 2030 with a focus on electric vehicles. It is the following combination of objectives that puts demand on a new process model adapted for cross-sector and cross-disciplinary cooperation: (i) a fossil-free transport system in Sweden by 2030 and, to avoid sub-optimizations in the transport sector, (ii) assuring that solutions that support (i) also serve other aspects of sustainability in the transport sector and, to avoid that sustainable solutions in the transport sector block sustainable solutions in other sectors, (iii) assuring cohesive creativity across sectors and groups of experts and stakeholders. The new process model was applied in an action-research mode for the exploration of electric vehicles within a fully sustainable transport system to test the functionality of the model in support of its development. To deliver on the above combination of objectives, a framework was needed with principles for sustainability that are universal for any sector as boundary conditions for redesign, and with guidelines for how any organization or sector can create economically feasible step-by-step transition plans. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) is designed to serve such purposes and therefore is embedded into the new process model. The exploration of this new model also helped to identify four interdependent planning perspectives (‘Resource base’, ‘Spatial’, ‘Technical’ and ‘Governance’) that should be represented by the respective experts and stakeholders using the model. In general, the new process model proved helpful by giving diverse stakeholders with various competences and representing various planning perspectives a common, robust, and easy-to-understand goal and a way of working that was adequate for each of their contexts. Furthermore, the evolving process model likely is relevant and useful not only for transport planning and electric vehicles, but for any other societal sector as well and thus for sustainable community planning in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Increasing awareness in business and society regarding socio-ecological impacts related to society's use of materials is a driver of new materials management practices. The aim of this study is to gain insight into what considerations come into focus and what types of solutions are revealed when companies apply a strategic sustainability perspective to materials management. Through literature reviews and semi-structured interviews we found that the companies studied have assessed material choices and related management actions, not only regarding their potential to reduce a selection of current socio-ecological impacts, but also regarding their potential to link to future actions to move towards the full scope of socio-ecological sustainability. Through this approach, these companies have found several ways through which materials with characteristics that are commonly considered problematic can be managed sustainably by making strategic use of some of these “problematic” characteristics and other characteristics of the materials. For example, a material associated with problems at end of life, could be managed in closed loops facilitated by the persistence of the material. Based on the findings, we conclude that by not applying a strategic sustainability perspective to materials management, organizations risk phasing out materials perceived to be unsustainable which, managed differently, could be helpful for sustainable development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: There is a growing need to understand how existing concepts and tools for sustainability relate to each other and to a robust, trans-disciplinary systems perspective for sustainability. As a response, a group of scientists, including some of the authors, have developed a framework based on backcasting from sustainability principles over the last 20 years – the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD), also known as The Natural Step Framework. The intent of this study is to scrutinize the existing framework as regards its social dimension. The study demonstrates dichotomies and lack of robustness and proposes a way forward to make the social dimension of the FSSD more cohesive as well as operational. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Urban sustainable development is today seen as one of the keys towards unlocking the quest for a sustainable world. One feature of urban sustainability is the increased interest in developing sustainable urban districts. For many of these developments, guiding sustainability documents are developed to frame future goals. However, few of these documents specify on which grounds they determine the sustainability of goals and they are largely developed as independent islands of local sustainability. This is unfortunate as cities and their districts are fully dependent on surrounding environments. Failing to include a holistic approach into the local planning increases the risk of sub-optimisation, future lock-ins and missed targets on a higher level. The aim of this study is to analyse whether the environmental and sustainability programme for Stockholm Royal Seaport, a new urban district in Stockholm, Sweden, can guide development of the district towards holistic ecological sustainability. By using the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development a holistic template for an ecologically sustainable planet has been described, important sectors for the built environment have been identified and the environmental and sustainability programme for the district has been analysed. This study showed that the vision and operational goals put forward in the Stockholm Royal Seaport programme complies relatively well with the designed template. However, important deviations in all sectors but land use have been identified. These deviations arise in the translation process between theory and practice. The vision for the district and the implementation phase are not aligned due to too narrow a perspective of a sustainable urban district, lack of robust sustainability principles including use of such to identify key strategic questions. In addition to the lack of an all-embracing conceptual framework, there is also a lack of structures for cooperation between stakeholders and conflicts between local and regional agendas. Use of a unifying framework can describe desirable future scenarios where the local level does not contribute to violation of the universal sustainability principles and identify step-wise routes towards such scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]