Group Coordinator:

• Filomena Maggino, Sapienza University of Rome
   

Board Members

• Corrado Crocetta, Deputy-Coordinator, University of Bari
• Leonardo Salvatore Alaimo, Secretary, Sapienza University of Rome
• Margaret Antonicelli, Sapienza University of Rome
• Pierpaolo D'Urso, Sapienza University of Rome
• Enrico Di Bella, University of Genoa
• Maria Gabriella Grassia, University of Naples "Federico II"
• Emiliano Seri, Sapienza University of Rome

Group Scientific Aims

In recent years, the concept of sustainability has been the object of growing interest from the public and policy makers as a result of an increased awareness of the earth resources exhaustibility and a more and more impelling need to safeguard the natural heritage quality, with the aim to promote more balanced economic and social development patterns than in the past. This concept has been and still is matter of debate. Over time, it has been increasingly manifest that the concept of sustainability remains on a purely theoretical level unless it is associated with a context, a process, an objective.
The recent phenomena and events experienced by the majority of world population highlighted how the frailty and unsustainability showed by a number of countries were closely linked to lack of concern for people’s wellbeing. Failing to focus decision-making on systemic wellbeing led to such a level of frailty that countries experience a real emergency. In other words, a country (or an individual) sustainability is closely related to systemic wellbeing. More specifically, it is a mean to pursue such wellbeing.
Ultimately, sustainability is a paradigm for observing, analysing, predicting and ruling while respecting the complexity of reality.
Accordingly, every approach to sustainability must necessarily be multidisciplinary, so as to combine various fields of reality – environment, economy, social links, health, etc. – and steer them all towards wellbeing. As a result of such close connection with wellbeing, sustainability depends on the values of a society and the individuals within it.
This conclusion entails a new culture of complexity leading to new analytical approaches, (not just governance), able to bring out – through continuous monitoring – areas, groups and sectors of the life of a country where levels of frailty (or lack of wellbeing) are so high to highlight all their unsustainability.
Therefore, conceptually, sustainability defines the future dimension of wellbeing calling for a complex knowledge process putting together different knowledge and disciplines. That said, the sustainability analysis requires data definition, indicators building, a systemic approach to monitoring and the selection and use of analytical methods ensuring a meaningful and necessary translation of reality in numbers language, essential for its understanding. The analysis of this complexity-marked reality calls for a systemic and multidimensional approach.
Goal of the reflections broached within this group is to encourage the discussion and definition of analytical approaches suited to the study of complexity by using appropriate data and suitable methodologies to create and analyse indicators designed to understand and assess imbalances and deficiencies which in time make a system unsustainable.

ICSA 2022