Sustainability leadership and the protection of the common good

Abstract

In the context of concerns about the end of a safe operating space for humanity, there are calls for societies to evolve to preserve the socio-ecological systems that underpin our long-term well-being and to protect and preserve those elements of the common good that are critical to a sustainable future. However, it is also important to recognise that broad agreement about the existence and importance of addressing global common good problems, such as climate change, can obscure profound differences of opinion in how such problems ought to be understood and addressed – differences that can be revealed in surprising and striking ways when the real work of sustainability leadership begins.

In this chapter, we invite the reader to view the concept and challenges of sustainability through the lens of the common good and to use this vital but ‘essentially contested concept’ to better appreciate the challenges and controversies that can beset the work of leadership for sustainability. We argue that such a lens provides us with a way to make sense of the complexity of sustainability and constructively engage with the underlying paradoxes that can undermine the collective action needed to address unsustainability.

The common good lens also highlights the importance of an approach to leadership for sustainability that has the wisdom and capability to harness this complexity. Critically, acknowledging that there is no single, determinate common good and accepting that the common good is naturally riven with paradoxes invites us to understand the paradoxes of the common good as sites of learning about the perspectives that must be recognised and woven together to achieve sustainability.