Replacing Sustainable Development: Potential Frameworks for International Cooperation in an Era of Increasing Crises and Disasters

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic of the paper is interesting as well as the potential academic contribution of the work. However the Author should improve their research according to the following indications.

1. Abstract is too long and should be rewritten according to the standards.

2. In the introduction section, it should be explained how the article has been structured by presenting the different sections.

3. A methodology section is missing and should be inserted.

4. Future research directions should be expanded.

5. The following study could be considered: https://doi.org/10.3390/su13041717

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful feedback, which I have managed to address and improve the manuscript accordingly.

1. Abstract is too long and should be rewritten according to the standards.

I have reduced the abstract length. The guidance for authors is that as a review article, the format for an abstract of a research article does not need to be followed (i.e. it doesn’t need subheadings). The guidance is also not strict on abstract length.

2. In the introduction section, it should be explained how the article has been structured by presenting the different sections.

I have revised paragraphs on page 2 and 3 to provide this. In addition, with the new methodology section (below), the structure is further clarified.

3. A methodology section is missing and should be inserted.

Thank you for pointing this out. It was a weakness not to provide more detail of the transdisciplinary approach to literature review and how I did it. I have included this now in a new section at the start.

4. Future research directions should be expanded.

I have added some paragraphs on future research, before the conclusion.

5. The following study could be considered: https://doi.org/10.3390/su13041717

Thank you for encouraging me again to look at that special issue. My revised draft now references it. My interpretation is that it illustrates the way the SD and SDG frameworks are being used to frame people’s leadership on either environmental or social levels at local levels in organisations, whether or not those people believe in or benefit from the economic ideologies embedded in SD and SDGs. I regard it as an example of how many local organisational initiatives can be regarded as something of interest and use, without them being added to a discourse of SD. Therefore, the special issue itself could be regarded as an artefact of ideological work being done i.e. using local efforts to maintain a particular worldview at a national and international level that serves incumbent power.  

Reviewer 2 Report

This article is very valuable and has the potential to be highly cited in many projects and articles. A lot of information that may be needed while writing a project and article is available in this publication. So thank you to the authors for the article.

 

Author Response

Thank you for ranking the article so highly in all categories. That was encouraging. Two of the 4 reviewers asked for some changes, and your positivity helped me as I revised the paper according to their suggestions.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Professor Jem Bendell, congratulations on your activity. I think article is more suitable as a book chapter because it is very discursive. You should clarify innovativeness, scientific contribution and especially an explanation of article selection methodology. 

Author Response

Thank you for the positivity about the research. Given that the this is anonymous peer review, I will choose to remain anonymous. Perhaps it is unfortunate that there aren’t more scholars doing this kind of critique so it seems obvious to a reviewer it might be one particular academic. However, that is also an indicator of innovativeness of this paper :-)

You raise an important issue of what is a review article, for a journal and what is something more relevant to a book. I have included more of an explanation of the way I did the literature review, with references to methodology texts for transdisciplinary literature reviews.

I believe the literature review is often reduced as an intellectual exercise through the over-use of keyword searches of academic journal databases. Previously we used our intellectual judgement to decide which references in a bibliography of one text to then read. That involved an iterative sense-making during the review process. That is not less rigorous, but can be more intelligent i.e. the scholar is not a mere abstract-processing machine. This is particularly the case for literature reviews in transdisciplinary work. Therefore, I have included a new section explaining all of this. Because I do not think that we should relegate review articles like this one only to book chapters. Instead, book chapters can provide much more discursive exploration and personal sharing of experiences than a journal format allows. That is why I chose to write this piece for a journal. 

I paste in the new section I put in on transdisciplinary research:

2. Transdisciplinary literature review

Pezzoli demonstrated a quarter of a century ago that there are so many disciplines that relate to sustainable development that a transdisciplinary approach to reviewing relevant scholarship is advantageous [10]. However, the field is so broad, because it addresses many aspects of society and the environment, that a transdisciplinary review requires a purposeful approach from the researcher. Although any process of literature review includes the steps of literature identification, salience assessment and meaningful synthesis, this should not be reduced a procedure that downplays the judgement of the researcher that is based on their experience in related fields and their personal commitment to the subject matter. Valuing the researcher in the literature review process is recognised in methodological texts on transdisciplinary literature reviews. Therefore, transdisciplinary literature reviews differ significantly from many literature reviews found in academic journals in recent times. That is because, they are “(a) inquiry-based rather than discipline-based; (b) integrating rather than eliminating the inquirer from the inquiry; (c) meta-paradigmatic rather than intra-paradigmatic; and (d) applying systems and complex thought rather than reductive/disjunctive thinking.” [11]. This is important for a review to “shed light on the way that a certain way of thinking and framing inquiry can obscure aspects of existence, how these frames are informed by deeper assumptions that shape the inquiry and consequently determine what is relevant and what is not relevant…” (ibid).

The four aspects of a transdisciplinary literature review informed this review article in the following ways. First, it is inquiry-based, and seeks to be significant in the real world, rather than just summarise or add to a particular discipline. Therefore, it defines a scholarly question and relevant sub-questions related to societal challenges, rather than one academic discipline. As such, new sub-questions were expected as the review progressed. In this case, the review began with the question of ‘what does recent literature indicate about progress towards the SDGs?’ When that was answered in the negative, so the next question became “how unexpected was this, and are there ideas on why progress is not occurring?” Then the natural question for an engaged scholar interested in positive social change, became “what other options are there for framing work on environment and society than sustainable development"?

Second, it integrates the inquirer, whereby one does not pretend to reduce oneself to a research-machine that merely plugs in keywords to journal databases. Instead, one draws on one’s experience, which is stated and needs to be relevant to the topic being explored with the review. Therefore, the review mobilises one’s past readings over decades in the field of sustainable development. That means the researcher does not suggest that someone else might produce the same results from a literature review. Rather, new ideas emerging from a synthesis of literature is based on one’s particular experience.

Third, the review is meta-paradigmatic, with an emphasis on reconsidering assumptions that frame the subject of ‘sustainable development’ within a discipline and as a framework for policy making. That is especially important for a review that begin with a summary of failure as making a case for deeper reflection. Fourth, the review is systems-oriented, looking for evidence of patterns of influence and trends, as well as new possibilities. Therefore, it includes a creative advancing of explanations at the systemic level, making it a stimulus for scholarly dialogue rather than a claim about the ‘true’ state of scholarship.

With this transdisciplinary approach, the following steps can be identified (though it is not a comprehensive summary). To begin with, recent reports from the United Nations on the aims of the SDGs and current performance were studied and summarised. Given the reported failure to progress on the SDGs, the subject disciplines of development studies and environmental studies were searched for recent critiques of Sustainable Development. This revealed literature identifying basic flaws in the belief in globalising industrial consumer societies, related to energy generation. Your author made an assessment here of what were the most salient critiques. The stark message from this literature reminded your author of critiques of development encountered in the 1990s that became known as the postdevelopment school. Therefore, databases for development studies were searched for the most recent summaries of work within that school of thought. A key message from that literature was the fragility of any ‘development’ that relies on globalised markets and finance. The context of a global pandemic at the time of research naturally led to a brief review of recent data from UN reports on the impact of the pandemic on social and environmental outcomes. As your researcher is motivated by the potential of conceptual frameworks, I do not end the review as only a critique. The alternative frameworks are many, and some not even articulated yet. Therefore, the next part of the review is inherently subjective and intended merely as a contribution to a future conversation. As the nature and future of positive contributions to humanity and the environment is my vocational interest, I drew on my experience of a range of cultures and debates to begin considering those potential alternatives. Therefore, the next part of the review involved database searches to identify the best recent summaries of various ideas that were already known to the researcher.

 

 

Reviewer 4 Report

The review paper entitled “Replacing Sustainable Development: Potential Frameworks for International Cooperation in an Era of Increasing Crises and Disasters” builds the case for replacing Sustainable Development as the dominant .framework for an era of increasing crises and disasters. The author have used recent studies in multiple subject areas, based on the authors’ decades of work in related fields since the Rio Earth Summit 30 years ago to support the paper’s analysis. It was really enjoying to read this paper since the author has done a great job in order to present all the issues raised and support them based on the relevant literature. It is obvious that this is a work of noticeably high quality that will add value in the existing literature concerning sustainable development and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Author Response

Thank you for recognising the importance of this text as a rigorous critical article on this topic. Two of the 4 reviewers asked for some changes, and your positivity helped me as I revised the paper according to their suggestions.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Improved.