Processes of sustainability transformation across systems scales: leveraging systemic change in the textile sector

作者：Julia Leventon, Maike Buhr, Lisa Kessler, Jorge Gustavo Rodríguez Aboytes, Felix Beyers · 发表于：Sustainability Science · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1007/s11625-023-01436-8 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Environmental Sustainability in Business、Sustainable Supply Chain Management、Sustainable Building Design and Assessment

Abstract Sustainability research emphasizes the importance of intervening with both individual and organizational behaviours as well as the systems that shape them to create sustainability transformations. However, to date there is a lack of studies that bridge the divide between small case-based interventions and global systems at broader scales, and the complex interactions across scales and processes. This paper works with a leverage points framework to consider systems transformation. It focuses on four individual sustainability interventions in the textile sector and explores how they are embedded within a complex set of nested systems, and how these connected systems shape the transformative potential of the interventions. By using an onion metaphor for systems with several onion layers representing the current textile sector and its multiple connected and nested systems, we integrate and reflect across four in-depth case studies, conducted over a period of 3 years, using a range of empirical research approaches. The findings show that the studied interventions all target multiple deep leverage points within their target systems of production and consumption. All are limited in fulfilling their transformative potential by a range of barriers that we trace back to the economic and policy and regulation systems that they are embedded within. The economic system enforces a paradigm of consumption-based growth, and the policy and regulation system fails to either support ch...