Research

Worldwide, researchers and practitioners of sustainability governance (strategies for implementing sustainability) are increasingly realizing the need for a deeper comprehension of the interconnections among cultural, political, and socio-economic factors that drive societal change. As the limits of mitigation and adaptation strategies to global environmental change become increasingly apparent, this recognition is crucial for transforming the world's unsustainable socio-ecological systems towards resilient, regenerative, and fairer modes of socioeconomic organization.

Hosted at The King’s University (Edmonton, AB), Dr. Beling’s Canada Research Chair in Transition to Sustainability Lab (CRC T2S) is aimed at developing a multidimensional and multi-scale sustainability governance theory towards a socio-ecological transition to sustainability, based on the analysis of empirical experiences (ex post) and the modeling of theoretical preconditions for societal change (ex ante), organically integrating theories of action with theories of social order/change. The dimensions of analysis include discourses/imaginations, institutions /structures, actors and practices, and focuses on the interfaces between culture-politics, elites-social base, and the material and symbolic worlds.

The CRC T2S pilot project focuses on the agent-dimension of socio-ecological transformations, addressing the underexplored topic of religion and churches as sustainability transition agents. Together with his team of graduate and undergraduate research assistants, Dr. Beling is looking at two ground-breaking empirical case studies of churches as sustainability transition agents in the Amazon - the most significant biome for the planetary future - and in Canada, where the churches provide a platform for articulation and mobilization, service provision, policy advocacy, cultural-practical innovation and individual orientation,linking the local and the global dimensions of change.

On the theoretical side, Dr. Beling is exploring the interface between politics and cultural change, the latter being conceptualized as largely the product of governance interventions by diverse private and public actors, which, in turn, create or constrain the political conditions of possibility for far-reaching societal transformations. These dialectical dynamics are captured in conceptual innovations such as circular politics and para-governance. This line of work also involves synthesizing and identifying priority research gaps in social change theory.