Abstract

“Sustainability” is not a question of whether to refer to the SDGs, but rather of fundamental ideas about coexistence between humans and the environment. This research will take as its entry point the terms that are used to describe “sustainability” and analyze how they relate to people’s perceptions and actions in the life world*. Furthermore, we will explore whether there is knowledge that enables us to coexist with an environment which we do not know in a society with different cultures and ways of thinking.

*Life world: The world in which we exist in an intuitive, everyday way through physical practice, before it is ideologically structured by science. This term was proposed by Edmund Husserl.

Why do this study?

With the SDGs agreed upon by the UN General Assembly in 2015, the word “sustainability” has become familiar to the general public. People sprinkle this word on their statements in writing and speech, but the connotations they attach to it are diverse. However, there is a lack of essential discussion about values, norms, and systems to balance conflicting interests which would hinder the achievement of a sustainable world. As the basis for such discussion, this study examines people’s beliefs, their positionalities, problems they recognize, and actions they consider necessary.

Results

What we want to do

A questionnaire will be developed to investigate the relationship between people’s sustainability values, perceived problems, behaviors and culture, following the framework shown in Figure 2. By accumulating analysis of individual responses embedded in the culture and context, we will examine commonalities and differences across societies. We mean to reconstruct the notion of “sustainability” deductively. We hope to present new approaches and ideas from the humanities and social sciences to sustainability studies, which tend to be dominated by physics, chemistry, and engineering.

*Life world: The world in which we exist in an intuitive, everyday way through physical practice, before it is ideologically structured by science. This term was proposed by Edmund Husserl.

Member

Research schedule