ABSTRACT
Knowledge, innovation and learning have recently become keywords in the wider discussion on sustainable development (SD) in Europe (O’Toole 2004: 45; Voß et al. 2006; Grunwald 2004 and 2007; Newig et al. 2008). The growing significance of knowledge and learning as an issue of sustainability and environmental politics can seamlessly be related to the wider rhetoric of crisis on the current state of postmodern knowledge societies in the 1990s (Willke 2002). But besides very general societal trends the knowledge turn also follows an internal logic of change in the concept of sustainability itself (Grunwald 2004; Lafferty 2004b). In a nutshell this change can be described by the gradual shift from a discussion on limits to growth to a focus on more integrated and dynamic patterns of SD that has also characterized the sustainability strategy of the European Commission since the late 1990s and became visible in the revised Gothenburg Strategy (CEC 2005). Previous strategies of SD were based on the assumption of systemic equilibriums which have to be kept stable by under-running critical threshold values. Newig et al. state that:
It was assumed that sustainability goals can be defined and operationalized and that one could then evaluate options and find the best way in which to put ‘it’ in place.
