EmergentSust
EmergentSust, or emergentsust, is a term used in sustainability science to describe sustainability outcomes that arise as emergent properties of interactions within complex adaptive systems. It emphasizes that sustainable states are not solely the product of centralized directives but emerge from dynamic relationships among actors, institutions, ecologies, and technologies across scales.
The concept rests on ideas of emergence, bottom-up processes, network effects, adaptive learning, and cross-scale feedbacks.
Applications of emergentsust appear in urban planning, environmental policy, corporate sustainability, conservation, and community governance. In
Methods used to study emergentsust include agent-based models, system dynamics, participatory modeling, scenario planning, and evaluation
Challenges include conceptual fuzziness, measurement difficulties, and the risk of overattributing sustainability to chance rather than
See also: sustainability, resilience, complex systems, emergence, adaptive governance, co-management.