What operational skills are most important to effectively pursue sustainable development goals? How can change agents find and strengthen these skills?
The Capacity Building for Sustainable Development initiative combines insights from research and real-world experience to help implement sustainability.
Perspectives from research
Overview
Sustainability science is moving beyond just explaining how nature and society interact. The focus has shifted to building the skills and strategies needed to change these interactions to support sustainable development goals.
Key Findings
Scholars have focused on capacities in six key areas needed for sustainability:
- Promoting equity
- Measuring progress
- Adapting to shocks and surprises
- Transforming unsustainable development pathways
- Governing cooperatively
- Linking knowledge with action
Each capacity is essential, but they are also interdependent: weakness in any one of them can hinder the overall pursuit of sustainability.
Research on capacity building for sustainability is limited, with some regions and sectors getting much more focus than others. Expanding research to include a broader range of experiences would improve understanding.
Perspectives from practice
Overview
Development practitioners have been building, testing, and improving the skills needed for sustainability. This program aims to identify and organize best practices from their extensive experience. By comparing insights from both scholars and practitioners, we work to strengthen capacity building for sustainable development.
Key findings
- Society has already developed important skills needed for pursuing sustainability.
- We can gain more from this practical experience by organizing and comparing lessons across different places and sectors.
- Even when strong skills are developed for key tasks like measurement or adaptation, they often fall short due to lack of support from other necessary skills. Strategic integration of all relevant skills is uncommon.
- Practitioners could benefit from more consistent use of lessons emerging from scholarly work on capacity building.