An international team of professors, including Senior Sustainability Scientist George Basile, made up the editorial team of a recently published “Special Volume” of the Journal of Cleaner Production – the world´s leading journal in the area of sustainable development, according to Google Scholar.

The timely knowledge captured in this SV helps leaders to learn how to define social and ecological sustainability, to get a deeper understanding of the leadership case for sustainability proactivity, and to operationalize sustainability in a systematic and strategic way across diverse disciplines and sectors.

“We invited the whole scientific community to contribute and received a great response," says Managing Guest Editor Göran Broman. "After selection based on the theme and after thorough peer-review, we ended up with thirty-five published papers.”

The SV begins with a paper describing the need for answers to the question: how do we effectively bring all the pieces from the sustainability science arena together for systematic and strategic change?  Other papers explore the self-benefit of proactivity from an organizational, regional or national point of view; the development of a unifying methodology for strategic sustainable development; and hands-on examples of its use.

Additional papers move from the broad systems perspective and focus on social sustainability, community planning, education, leadership psychology and behavior. Finally, comes papers on various specific methods, tools and knowledge useful to support systematic and strategic work with sustainability.

“Proactive and effective leadership is critical to sustainability transitions," says Basile. "Articles in the SV explore the application of science-based sustainability principles to support sustainability leadership in systemic and strategic ways. The SV explores the general approach, as well as applications in areas from business-model innovation to resource use to education.”

According to Donald Huisingh, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus and Founder of the Journal of Cleaner Production, this is "the most outstanding SV we have ever published in the JCL...Its contents will have far-reaching impacts in many ways!”