20 - Young Scientists Summer Program Lecture - 25 June 2008

Jill Jäger

Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment

Listen [MP3 37:21]

Lecture Summary

As a response to the pressing governance and management challenges of sustainable development, the MATISSE ("Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment") project, funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme, aimed at achieving a step-wise advance in the science and application of Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA) of EU policies.

The project addressed the use of sustainability assessment in the European context, but the innovative methods, tools and insights it developed are relevant generally to questions concerning the role that sustainability assessment might play in supporting sustainability-oriented governance and in the analysis of potential sustainability "transitions." The approach taken to learning within the project may also hold wider implications for other projects in the emerging field of science in support of sustainable development.

ISA is intended as a pro-active, strategic and potentially transformative process to give an explicit sustainability orientation to policy making and other undertakings concerned with the development of social-ecological systems. Such undertakings would be expressly intended to address persistent complex problems of unsustainable development and to take up opportunities for more sustainable development.

The objectives of an ISA are to develop a shared interpretation among stakeholders of the dimensions of sustainability for a particular socia-ecological system (scoping), transform these into a shared vision on a sustainable future (envisioning), and explore various solution directions for a transition towards sustainability through a range of innovative experiments (experimenting), as a basis for learning about key relationships and ways of reframing problems and solutions (learning/evaluating).

The presentation describes the ISA process developed in the MATISSE project and shows how ISA was tested in case studies.

More information on the project can be found at www.matisse-project.net.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Jäger received her B.Sc. degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia (UK) in 1971 and was awarded her Ph.D. in geography (climatology) by the University of Colorado (USA) in 1974.

She has worked as a consultant on energy, environment, and climate for numerous national and international organizations and has an extensive publication record. In September 1994 she joined IIASA as Deputy Director for Programs, where she was responsible for the implementation and coordination of the research program. From October 1996 to May 1998 she was Deputy Director of IIASA. From April 1999 to October 2002, Dr. Jäger was Executive Director of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP: www.ihdp.org). From December 2004 to May 2008, she was a senior researcher at the Sustainable Europe Research Institute (www.seri.at) in Vienna, Austria.

In 2001, Jill Jäger was one of the co-editors of two volumes on “Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks,” which presented the results of a multi-year, international endeavor to understand social learning processes in the area of global environmental change (www.ksg.harvard.edu/sl). She co-authored, among others, chapters on issue framing, evaluation, and linking knowledge to action. This work, together with a subsequent project on global environmental assessment processes (www.ksg.harvard.edu/gea), led to her participation in the international Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability (http://sustainabilityscience.org).

From 2005 to March 2008, she was a member of the Core Group of the EU-funded MATISSE (Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment) project (www.matisse-project.net), in which she also led the work package on stakeholder engagement and dissemination.

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Last updated: 03 Apr 2009