An Integral Approach to the Modeling of Information Support for Local Sustainable Development—Experiences of a Serbian Enabling Leadership Experiment

Abstract

Collaborative strategic decision making has to be widely informed, communicated and knowledge-based in order to innovate transformations toward local and global sustainability. It is unimaginable that this process could be effective without computer-aided information support, but the research indicates the utilization constraints within human capacities to recognize their usability and usefulness. These constraints seem to be even more challenging within the intensively transitional social contexts, such as Serbia. We argue that understanding the relationships between sustainability, governance, and planning in a specific social context has profound importance to gain usefulness of information support and to ensure its increasing utilization. Identifying the practical path of information support modeling requires an operational framework that encompasses innovative and socially valid initiatives. Therefore, an integral theory framework was chosen to comprehend all social influences on the information support of successful utilization. This article presents the integral framework of the information support’s conceptual setting, which was used to build up community-based collaborative action research (CBCAR) as a transformative social learning process that enables information support utilization, and it was tested in six municipalities of Serbia. The implementation of pilot territorial information support (TIS) initiatives resulted in continuous and proactive local community efforts in information support development and usage.