Identifying sustainability communicators in urban regeneration: Integrating individual and relational attributes
Introduction
It is widely recognized today that the discourse on sustainability, whether global or local, is in some uneasy relationship with the practices of managing natural and human resources (Becker et al., 1999). Researchers concerned with the sustainability of urban regeneration have similarly noticed a persistent gap between the rhetoric of sustainable development and its real-life application (Dixon, 2006, Dixon et al., 2013). On the one hand, sustainability exists at the level of policy formulation, in which the rationales and aims of sustainable regeneration are stated in conceptual and policy terms (Nathanail, 2011). On the other hand, the actual regeneration practices and the sustainability outcomes of regeneration processes are under the influence of various contextual “structuring forces” such as economic imperatives, legislation and various government policies (Doak and Karadimitriou, 2007a).
Scholars have pointed out that the power of sustainability “lies in the discourses surrounding it, rather than in any shared substantive […] value it may have” (e.g. Redclift, 2007, p. 71). Other scholars have advanced a metatheoretical understanding of sustainability, in which communication and dialogue are seen as actual conditions of implementing social sustainability (Åhman, 2013).
In this article, we built on Åhman's insight and posit that between the rhetoric of sustainability and the reality of translating sustainability into practice there is a relational social space that connects discourse and practice but displays its own logic (Bodin et al., 2011). This space is inhabited by actor networks that are complex configurations of individuals and organizations that transform “ideas into concrete reality” (Cannone, 2009, p. 239) and “generate meaning which is then embodied into matter” (Doak and Karadimitriou, 2007a, p. 210). Actors do not act in a random fashion, however, but on the basis of practices of communication (Redclift, 2007, p. 73) by which actors seek to accomplish their goals. Goals and actor networks can thus be seen as the two components of the relational space in which sustainability is thought-out and worked-out by social actors.
Our goal is to open up the relational space of communicating sustainability to analytical scrutiny and quantification. This is important because it transforms our understanding of sustainability from being a property of stakeholders to its working as a process of persuasion. In the latter, each stakeholder is not an isolated bearer of a certain sustainability vision or discourse, but a communicator who can potentially convey that vision to others and persuade them to act in light of a certain discourse on sustainability. This approach offers thus an alternative way to promote sustainability in urban regeneration by means of social persuasion. The first step, which is undertaken in this paper, is to identify the stakeholders who can act as the most promising “persuaders” or what are called here sustainability communicators. Subsequent steps are to explore the communication ties, the configurations of sustainability communicators and the behavioural changes produced by communication, but these are the topics of future research.
The specific objective of the paper is to develop a methodological framework to identify and rank sustainability communicators within social networks. Since sustainable regeneration activities are carried out by actors embedded in social networks, we aim to identify those actors who endorse sustainability and are also influential within their regeneration networks. The latter seem to be best placed to communicate and potentially influence other actors to move towards sustainability in regeneration projects. The framework is developed based on social network analysis (SNA) and multi-criteria decision analysis, fuzzy logic in particular, and is illustrated via a case study.
Our study begins with a discussion of sustainability and briefly shows how this concept can be conceptually linked to networks of communication. The third section shows in detail the methodological steps involved in integrating SNA and fuzzy logic. The fourth section illustrates the results obtained with data from a case study of sustainable regeneration in Porto Marghera, Venice, Italy, while the conclusions and possible ways forward are outlined in the final section.
Section snippets
Sustainability: from discourse to communication
It is nowadays a trite observation to remark on the conceptual fuzziness and often oxymoronic nature of the sustainability concept. There are vigorous efforts underway to critique and clarify the ideological undertones of sustainability at global (Redclift, 2007) and local levels (Lorr, 2012). Still, the concept continues to be employed and its users borrow from different sustainability discourses when articulating their development goals. While these discourses continue to be important in
Methods
Based on the preceding considerations, the framework for ranking sustainability communicators is built out of the following three dimensions: sustainability vision, formal network influence and informal network influence, as described in the sections below. Sustainability communicators need to be identified in terms of all three dimensions. The three dimensions are then integrated to develop a sustainability communication score for each actor in the network (see Fig. 2).
In order to collect data
Results and discussion
Applying the aforementioned methodology to the case study in Porto Marghera, we obtain the following two sets of results. First, we get a sustainability communicator score for each actor, that allows us to rank them from the highest to the lowest. Second, by using the visual representation capabilities of NodeXL, we create a network map of the relative positions of the sustainability communicators identified in our case study (see Fig. 6). In what follows, we report on both sets of results and
Conclusions
The article has started out by advocating a less common perspective on sustainability that draws on the notion of communicative practice. If sustainability is conceptualized as a content which is communicated among actors with the aim of persuading them to adopt a specific vision of sustainability, the concept becomes methodologically more manageable and constructive than the dichotomy between discourse and practice. The notion of social network and the scholarly field of SNA provide the tools
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme. The funded research project is entitled: “Nexsus – Network-based Expert-Stakeholder Framework for Sustainable Remediation” (Grant agreement no. 627593). We are also grateful to Prof. Antonio Marcomini, Giulia Gritti, Petra Scanferala and our interview respondents and online survey participants who have shared their views on sustainability and network information with us.
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