Using learning processes to promote change for sustainable development

Abstract

Sustainable development is widely recognized as a major change challenge, though its urgency is not as widely appreciated. This article begins by reviewing the challenge and showing how it is not currently being taken up. Drawing on the wider literature, it identifies some of the key contextual issues that need to be addressed in change programmes for sustainability. It then develops a simple model of three conditions, ‘awareness’, ‘agency’ (the identification of meaningful ways of responding) and ‘association’ with other people, whose development is shown to be crucial in addressing these issues and hence to promoting change for sustainable development. It also identifies a vital process (‘action and reflection’) for doing this. The article concludes with a case example, using this model to review a change initiative in the corporate sector.