Workshop “Toward the establishment of BRIDGES: Action to promote sustainability science"

UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformation (MOST) Programme is organizing the 2nd Workshop “Toward the establishment of BRIDGES: Action to promote sustainability science”.

The event will take place on 11-12 June 2019, at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, in room VIII, with the participation of UNESCO experts and experts from partner institutions.
Since December 2017, exploratory discussions have taken place between UNESCO, the International Council for Philosophy & Human Sciences (CIPSH), and various institutional and organizational partners internationally active in the sustainability domain concerning a proposal to establish a global coalition on sustainability science.

This initiative builds upon the refined sustainability science paradigm inaugurated in 2017 with the launch of UNESCO’s Guidelines for Sustainability Science in Research and Education which the coalition will be directly working to implement by providing concrete case studies, replicable model curricula and transdisciplinary and territories-based best-practices, as well as co-production models for adaptation, application and, where possible, scaling in different contexts.

The Coalition is to be launched in 2019 following three establishment workshops this year, hosted in Mação, Portugal (March), at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France (June) and in Sigtuna, Sweden (September).

This initiation phase is designed to define the nature and parameters of the proposed coalition, including whether an alternative name or mechanism might be preferable to achieve the substantive objective of promoting and operationalizing sustainability science.

It will formalize terms of reference, an operational protocol, a governance structure and an activity plan, clearly identifying short, medium and long-term ambitions. This second two-day workshop in Paris will more specifically produce a first draft outline of the terms of reference and protocol.