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The increasing trend towards sustainable development has seen a shift from ‘end of pipe solutions’ to the ongoing threat of pollution. Policy makers have come to accept the need for some form of inbuilt environmental standards to be included in any overall planning strategy. These shifts come in the wake of the Brundtland Report and the Rio World Summit. They have also shaped environmental policy. A central feature of this new thinking is the theory of ‘Ecological Modernisation’ (EM). Underpinning this debate are the theorists Janicke, Weale and Hajer, who have each contributed to the conceptualisation of EM as a feature of modern society. It can be argued that EM theory reflects a critical new positioning of the environmental debate, moving away from the periphery of social, cultural and political channels and becoming an important aspect of policy planning in these areas.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer reflections on conventional theories concerning causes and determinants of diseases. It also intends to examine both theoretical and empirical bases for adopting an Integrated Social-Ecological Systems (ISES) lens as a tool for understanding complexities related to drivers, determinants and causes of diseases.

We assessed the theoretical underpinnings of a range of historical and contemporary lenses for viewing infectious disease drivers and the implications of their use when used to explain both personal (i.e. individual) and population health. We examined these issues within the empirical context of the City of Dhaka (Bangladesh) by adopting an ISES lens. Within this study an emphasis has been placed on illustrating how feedback loops and non-linearity functions in systems have a direct bearing upon various aspects of infectious disease occurrences.

A brief triumph over microbes during the last century stemmed in part from our improved understanding of disease causation which was built using disciplinary-specific, monocausal approaches to the study of disease emergence. Subsequently, empirical inquiries into the multi-factorial aetiology and the ‘web of causation’ of disease emergence have extended frameworks beyond simplistic, individualistic descriptions of disease causation. Nonetheless, much work is yet to be done to understand the roles of complex, intertwined, multi-level, social-ecological factors in affecting disease occurrence. We argue, a transdisciplinary-oriented, ISES lens is needed to explain the complexities of disease occurrence at various and interacting levels. More theoretical and empirical formulations, with evidence derived from various parts of the world, is also required to further the debate.

Our study advances the theoretical as well as empirical basis for considering an integrated human-nature systems approach to explaining disease occurrence at all levels so that factors at the individual, household/neighbourhood, local, regional and global levels are not treated in isolation.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the degree to which organizational ecology (OE) had a long-term impact on the way scholars study organizational foundings. Dubbed the “rates” approach by Aldrich and Weidenmayer (1993), OE argued that organizational foundings depend on intra- and inter-population processes such as organizational density, prior foundings, and prior disbandings. It de-emphasized the personal characteristics of founders and entrepreneurs – the “traits” approach. The analyses reveal that OE had limited impact, especially after the mid-2000s. OE’s limited appeal is partially explained by its lack of influence on scholars outside its orbit of influence and/or those publishing in non-sociology journals. In contrast to OE’s slight long-term impact, the authors argue that another perspective that was attuned to environmental conditions – new institutional theory (NIT) – has had greater success in influencing scholars studying foundings. The authors speculate that OE’s impact was ultimately limited because it was embedded in a relatively exclusive scholarly community, compared to NIT’s more inclusive scope.

The “first generation” (Lammers, 1978, p. 486) of comparative analysis of organizations in sociology (e.g., Blau, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1959) focused on the “nuts and bolts” of organizational structure as the key criterion with which to derive organizational typologies (Perrow, 1967; Pugh, Hickson, & Hinings, 1969). This initial cohort of analysts saw the intrinsic features – or “organizational attributes” (Blau, 1965, p. 326) – constitutive of the “technical core” of the organization, such as features related to the organization of the production process (Perrow, 1967) or the structure of allocation of discretion and authority (e.g., Etzioni, 1961), as the royal road to the development of a cogent approach to comparative analysis of organizations.

The inherit complexity of an educational system further complicates the challenge of introducing technology-based educational initiatives into a school environment. Once introduced, the initiative has the potential to become self-sustaining or to cease once the term is over. Such uncertainty makes the use of expensive information technology (IT) in schools “risky business,” which requires school leaders go above and beyond their current routine to extend the system's capacity to sustain the innovation. A discretionary behavior of school leaders and teachers is one of key factors that contribute to or prevent the sustainability of an innovation. A lack of understanding of what encourages an individual's discretionary behavior and how discretion is fostered in school practices contribute to the challenge of innovation's sustainability. If the individuals’ discretion is required to sustain a technology-based educational program within a school, do their actions dwell outside or inside of the school environment? More importantly, how does a discretionary chain of command operate and can it be aligned? In this chapter we use an “ecological model” approach to describe the influential factors, which affect project's sustainability by transforming effective discretionary approaches of school leaders and teachers from policy to practice. We draw our description of the model on the results of the empirical study of Hong Kong schools involved in the design and strategic IT implementation of the e-Leadership Enhancement Project (eLEP).

The goal of this chapter is to cultivate interest in the societal dynamic of ability expectations and ableism, a dynamic first thematized by the disabled people rights movement but which is also broadly applicable to the study of the relationship between humans, animals, and environments. Another aim of this chapter is to think about disabled people within ecosystem approaches to health through the ableism framework and to show that insights gained from disability studies are applicable to a broader study of health within contexts of environmental degradation. Building from this approach, the reader is invited to consider the utility of the conceptual framework of eco-ability “expectations” and eco-ableism as a way to understand health within coupled social-ecological systems.

This chapter uses an ability expectation and ableism lens and a disability studies and ability studies approach to analyze the relationship between humans, animals, and environments.

Certain ability expectations and ableism are responsible for (a) the invisibility of disabled people in ecological health discourses; (b) the standoff between anthropocentric and biocentric/ecocentric approaches to health; and (c) the application of scientific and technological advancements to address problems arising out of current relationships between humans, animals, and environments.

The reader is introduced to the concepts of ableism and eco-ableism, which have not yet been used in EcoHealth discourses and flags the need for further engagement with disability issues within the field.

This chapter offers a new sustainability-oriented paradigm for cultural and heritage tourism studies: an integrated approach to heritage tourism and heritage conservation based on resilience. Its extensive literature review examines resilience in a range of disciplinary areas, including heritage conservation and tourism studies. An important aim is to “make visible” often neglected parameters in the interactions among social, cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions of heritage conservation and tourism. Within the broader concept of resilience, “cultural resilience” was identified as a crucial bridge between conservation and tourism. The study argues that resilience in general and its cultural forms in particular offer a potentially valuable framework vital for an integrated approach between the two in the common pursuit to manage change and uncertainty in cultural and heritage destinations. The chapter concludes with directions for further development of sustainability-oriented paradigm studies.

This chapter uses the concept of real-world experiments to describe ecological activity that occurs in the wider human community. The case discussed is an ecological restoration project at Montrose Point, a peninsula in Lake Michigan on the North Side of Chicago. In the restoration of Montrose Point, the scientific importance of ecological science is not juxtaposed with the seemingly irrational ideas of the human community, but the human community becomes a part of scientific work. Like experiments in the laboratory, real-world experiments often bring surprises. However, if ecological restoration is recognized to be inherently uncertain, surprises become opportunities to learn rather than failures. The chapter concludes with a discussion how a real-world experimental strategy can help to handle surprises via alternate phases of corroboration by recursive practice.

This chapter will examine ideological debates currently taking place in academics. Anthropologists – and all academic workers – are at a crossroads. They must determine what it means to “green the academy” in an era of permanent war, “green capitalism,” and the neoliberal university (Sullivan, 2010). As Victor Wallis makes clear, “no serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalist crisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework.”