Introduction
The concept of sustainable development was first introduced in the United Nations’ “Brundtland” Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future (1987), reported as the ability to achieve economic growth meeting the present generation’s needs without compromising the future generations’ capacity to fulfill their own needs. This concept is based on principals of effective resource management aligned with social organization, with the purpose to mitigate the negative effects of human activities on the biosphere. Social engagement plays an important role in pursuing this goal, once some of the key motivators towards environmental preservation are mediated mainly by the extent of human connection with nature, built through communication, knowledge, and behavior (Thomsen 2015). Those are important components of Social-Ecological Systems (SES), which refer to the relationship of humans and the environment within a scope where social and...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Berkes F, Folke C (1998) Linking social and ecological systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Brundtland G, Khalid M, Agnelli S et al (1987) Our common future. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Collier MJ (2015) Novel ecosystems and social-ecological resilience. Landsc Ecol 30:1363–1369
Folke C, Hahn T, Olsson P et al (2005) Adaptative governance of social-ecological systems. Annu Rev Environ Resour 30:441–473
Heurtebise J-Y (2017) Sustainability and ecological civilization in the age of Anthropocene: an epistemological analysis of the psychosocial and “culturalist” interpretations of global environmental risks. Sustain 9(8):1331. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9081331
Hill R, Grant C, George M et al (2012) A typology of indigenous engagement in Australian environmental management: implications for knowledge integration and social-ecological. Syst Sustain Ecol Soc 17(1):23. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-04587-170123
Hobbs RJ, Higgs E, Harris JA (2009) Novel ecosystems: implications for conservation and restoration. Trends Ecol Evol 24(11):599–605
Leal Filho W, Manolas E, Pace P (2015) The future we want: key issues on sustainable development in higher education after Rio and the UN decade of education for sustainable development. Int J Sustain High Edu 16(1):112–129
Lindahl KB, Baker S, Rist L et al (2016) Theorising pathways to sustainability. Int J Sustain Dev World Ecol 23(5):399–411
Masterson VA, Stedman RC, Enqvist J et al (2017) The contribution of sense of place to social-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda. Ecol Soc 22(1):49
Ostrom E (2009) A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social ecological systems. Science 325:419–422
Ratner BD (2004) “Sustainability” as a dialogue of values: challenges to the sociology of development. Sociol Inq 74(1):50–69
Soron D (2010) Sustainability, self-identity and the sociology of consumption. Sustain Dev 18:172–181
Thomsen DC (2015) Seeing is questioning: prompting sustainability discourses through an evocative visual agenda. Ecol Soc 20(4):9
van der Leeuw SE (2014) Sustainability, culture and personal responsibility. Sustain Sci 9:115–117
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Barreto Torres, L.D., Asmus, G.F., da Cal Seixas, S.R. (2019). Social Engagement Aspects of Sustainability. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11352-0_31
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11352-0_31
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-11351-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-11352-0
eBook Packages: EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education