To Örebro University

Social sustainability has become a widely known term, not least in the area of housing and urban development. While the literature has improved our understanding of the various meanings and interpretations of the concept, there is still a need for studies that explore processes of organising for social sustainability as processes of translation that can take into consideration several dimensions of translation, i.e. shifts in meaning, as well as agency and interests. This paper aims to address this issue-complex by exploring how social sustainability is conceived and translated into practice in urban renovation projects. The contribution of our analysis is that we show how resources within organizational theory and research can contribute to a more general understanding of how popular but vague concepts are or are not transformed into action and the implications of this.

This paper contributes to the wider discourse on sustainability and housing by showing how the dynamics of temporality and care plays out in processes of renovation. We explore five empirical cases of renovation of rental housing estates on the outskirts of Gothenburg, Sweden. Our study draws on the analysis of documents, observations, and qualitative interviews with key actors. We consider renovation a caring practice, both in the practical sense of "caring for" and in the emotional and ethical sense of "caring about". We argue that conflicts between stakeholders in renovation processes are better understood through attending to the ways in which notions of care are intertwined with the temporal organization of peoples' lives and organizational processes. We conclude that unawareness or negligence towards the various temporalities involved in renovation processes provide obstacles for collective processes of caring and raising sustainability concerns in renovation processes.

This study explores the ambivalent futures inherent in pension savings. Pension funds aim to create safe economic futures for an ageing population, at the same time as the funds still contain assets in oil and other fossil fuels. The focus in this paper is on how commitments to net-zero emission targets are translated by pension and insurance companies to the public and individual pension savers. The theoretical approach relies on the insights in studies of anticipation that anticipatory practices need to be materialized, for example, in practices, attachments and identities. These insights are brought into the framework of technologies of engagement. The context for the study is the pension system in Sweden, and an analysis is made of what modality of the future is enacted in the tools and practices that are made available for pension savers. A conclusion is that through comforting messages that pension savers neither need to worry about their economic safety, nor that their investments are not contributing to sustainable futures. Together with limited amount of information and insufficient tools for making well-informed investment choices, it is a rather passive pension saver that is assumed and enacted; a pension saver that is committed by default by being embedded in a financial system, but who presumably remains uncommitted to net-zero goals.

STS scholars investigate the future by focusing on how it is being made and how ideas about it are involved in shaping sociotechnical worlds. STS research on futures focuses on the practices of imagining, constructing and constituting possible future worlds. This entry overviews some of the overlapping fields of research addressing futures and future making. It describes the STS approach known as sociology of expectations and illuminates conceptual affinities with sociology of time and history of ideas. Computer modelling is discussed as an example to illustrate how future-making devices materialize worlds imagined in climate science and constituted in risk-related policy.

In this paper, we explore Indigenous peoples' engagement and inclusion in the Green Climate Fund. We rely on the distinction between simple inclusion and a deeper recognition of Indigenous peoples' contributions, described as epistemic belonging. We analyse how organizational interdependencies, i.e. the exchange and valuation of resources between actors, and how the potential conflicts between contributions from different actors may influence to what degree Indigenous peoples can achieve epistemic belonging. To illustrate this we have analysed the struggles and tensions around the establishment of the Indigenous People Policy (IPP) of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), and the practical use of the IPP in funding proposal discussions and decisions. We conclude that Indigenous peoples' contributions are valued as long as they do not challenge other important GCF interests. Conflicts between contributions from different actors lead to a prioritization of recourses provided by accredited entities that help the GCF to develop, implement and manage climate projects. Hence, Indigenous peoples' contributions become subordinated which provides an obstacle to full epistemic belonging.

Sustainable development as a subject area and learning objective increasingly finds its way into the curriculum from pre-school to university level, and education and learning are emphasized as key drivers for sustainable development. At the same time, the sustainable development discourse has since its inception been met with critique, not least that it is a postpolitical discourse, which favours an instrumental view of knowledge and a simplified view of the relation between knowledge and action. In this article, we focus on the possibilities and challenges of teaching sustainable development in higher education. We argue that it is the formative role of higher education that is particularly important to explore in relation to the possibilities of education for sustainable development. In addition, we suggest that sociology can provide a good basis for both critical thinking and normative action, in ways that reaches beyond instrumental and narrow views of knowledge, human action and change.

This paper explores the river landscapes and concomitant values resulting from tensions between flood management and visions of a River City. The aim is to contribute to an understanding of the management of urban waters as valuation practices. We regard valuation practices as co-constitutive of current and future river landscapes. Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, is located next to the sea, and the Göta River, Sweden’s largest water system, runs through it. Our empirical focus is on how this city approaches increasing risks of flooding. We explore three approaches that have been formulated in relation to flood management: defend, retreat and attack. We ask how these approaches are applied in the management of Göta River flooding and in the city’s vision of a future Gothenburg that embraces the river as a genuinely positive aspect of urban life. We present the case as a journey that takes us upstream from the river’s sea inlet port and through Gothenburg. During our kilometre by kilometre journey, the river’s appearance shifts. The varied river landscape mirrors the diversity in how its waters are valuated, both historically and in present times. The perception of urban waters is shaped by practices of valuation. These valuations are generative. They connect the value of water to other entities, actors, plans, activities and buildings, and they are thus key to the river landscapes that will eventually be realised. By way of conclusion, we identify a number of governance challenges that are particularly relevant to urban rivers.