The Sustainability Action Platform: a knowledge management mechanism for advancing global sustainability transitions?
Creators: name: Bream-Macintosh, Ollie
name: Burnett, Amy
name: Feldman, Ira
name: Lamphere, Jenna
name: Reuter, Thomas
name: Vital, Emmanuelle
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021

description: Abstract of Conference Presentation Despite the importance of global accords such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the most productive solutions to the climate crisis are often occurring at the local level. The SDGs seek to capture the multi-dimensional aspects of sustainable development with associated global indicators. Reporting of progress towards these goals is still mainly at a national scale, despite efforts to ‘localise’ reporting. Governments can develop their own indicators to track progress, while localised SDG indicators still lag behind. In the UK, for instance, monitoring and reporting of SDGs into local systems has been low and robust indicators that decouple a range of sustainability outputs into different frameworks is urgently required. There are also many social and spatial implications of sustainability transitions at different scales and contexts that should be debated and embedded into integrated sustainability data management systems. Thus, how data management systems are aligned to different sustainability value pathways requires greater attention in the transition governance of SDG frameworks. Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic presents new opportunities to advance sustainability scholarship, innovation, collaboration, and action to promote a green recovery. In an effort to share local knowledge and best practices, online sustainability knowledge-action platforms of various types have proliferated. The opportunities and shortfalls of current assessment processes can reveal what is still required to have a truly holistic framework for cultivating and measuring sustainable outcomes and how these might contribute to emerging sustainable development approaches (e.g. degrowth or regenerative economies). We identified nearly 200 potential online sustainability knowledge-action platforms (which we define as digital tools that seek to manage and organize (local) knowledge and activities to advance a sustainability agenda) and, to-date, conducted a review of 42 of them. This interdisciplinary paper analyses the structure and functionality of existing sustainability platforms through a systematic coding process. The coding is based on a review of the key issues highlighted in three bodies of literature: i) localization of the SDGs, ii) digital platforms and iii) multi-level governance of sustainability transitions. Our analysis indicates that numerous online collaborative tools, while offering an array of resources, struggle to provide context-sensitivity and higher-level analysis of the trade-offs and synergies between different sustainability actions. Context sensitivity and systemic thinking are essential, however, to align local priorities with international priorities like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG localization adds another layer of complexity where multi-level governance, actor priorities and institutional logics may generate tensions as well as opportunities for intra- and cross-sectoral alignment. We offer a series of recommendations for accelerating local sustainability innovation with sustainability-focused online tools. We discuss various policy measures and approaches to facilitating data-driven innovation and how these might address issues relating to data ownership and accessibility, data interoperability and integration (particularly between the Global South and North), incentives relating to data collection, sharing of data, and engagement in data governance. We argue that, while showcasing and exemplifying local actions, an integrative platform that leverages existing content from multiple extant platforms and provides additional functionality could better assist local leaders to accelerate local to global actions across multi-level and complex system change requirements. We posit the need for an integrative open-source and dynamic global online data management tool that would enable the monitoring of progress and facilitate peer exchange of ideas and experience among local government, community and business stakeholders. In this session, we present a potential model to do this, which we have termed the 'Sustainability Action Platform' (SAP). The SAP could complement existing knowledge management information systems being developed as an open-source and dynamic global online data management tool that provides a much-needed mechanism for the global exchange of local sustainability innovations. As an integrative system, the SAP could facilitate alignment between local strategies and the SDGs. For instance, a systemic change approach to promote a resilient local economy by integrating incentives to quantify and share sustainable actions. An comprehensive digital platform could generate a wealth of data on sustainability actions around the world, valuable for scientific analyses and improved empirically-based system change models. The SAP’s combination of scholarship and praxis is innovative, advancing both scientific understanding and local decision-making in climate governance, notably in deepening insights into sustainability transition pathways. For instance, demonstrating municipal level changes and changes in clusters of knowledge, practices and networks on the SDGs and other related domains Through the application of cutting-edge digital technology, such as blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and visual analytics, the SAP approach could collate and synthesize user-generated content by theme and region. Additionally, it could enable reporting and benchmarking of progress against existing SDG frameworks, while also enabling local-level customization of indicators, sustainability initiatives and supporting cultural learning that reinforces sustainability benefits. The SAP could include measures to monitor and analyse areas that prevent the promotion of sustainable benefits or might contribute to negative outcomes that thwart sustainability benefits. Additionally, utilising blockchain and AI to leverage existing knowledge and resources and effectively integrate the plethora of sustainability tools that are currently haphazardly dispersed across the internet. The presenters will use the session to outline the benefits of this proposed model and by, crowdsourcing participant insights, will explore its opportunities and potential limitations as a mechanism for sustainable transformation at different scales. These include issues relating to data management, inclusive partnerships with the Global South, leveraging existing knowledge platforms, and its potential to be rolled out at the community level, e.g. via an app. In particular, we invite a critique on the SAP as to how data-driven innovation can become appropriately embedded in national and local knowledge management systems. Additionally, what mechanisms would be required for a global platform to be effectively regulated while at the same time being a user-driven approach. For instance, whether there are enough incentives for actors to carry out shared and symbiotic sustainable behaviour, or what further incentives are needed to change the behaviour of these actors at a local level.