ABSTRACT
Sustainability challenges Recent decades have shown that science is limited in prediction, planning and pinpoint governance. This becomes very obvious in the light of sustainability. Humans have gained considerable knowledge about the world and cause-effect relations but are not able or willing to transfer it into common practice and action. This limitation is not only caused by existing structures but influenced by past or systemic factors and has several reasons: the complexity and manifold understanding of sustainability or a sustainable development (Barth, 2015); the ongoing separation of logic and intuition (Rosselet, 2013), the focus on mental explanations and solutions rather on emotional or unconscious ones (see also Scharmer and Kaufer, 2013); a lack of understanding of systemic patterns and hidden agendas; organisational or institutional inertia or simply not enough money, and so on. Nevertheless, conventional scientific approaches and practices appear to be limited as they often do not really and comprehensively explain reality, ongoing behaviour, strategic decisions or the resilience of a system. Resilience includes not only (a) the extent of change or transformation while preserving the system structure and performance but also (b) the extent of the self-organisation of a system without regulating intervention (internal or external) and especially (c) the extent of learning and adaptability, the willingness to experiment and to implement new solutions (Walker and Carpenter, 2002). Flexible learning processes are essential for survival and vital for systems when facing new challenges. However, resilience is not necessarily a desirable state, as even system configurations can be highly resilient, a characteristic that is harmful to the common good (e.g. path dependence; Raven, 2007). Comparable problems emerge in the context of sustainability.
