Lecture Description:

This session explores how leadership, understood as always distributed, can drive meaningful sustainability transitions through local and regional governance. Introducing an interpretive framework developed around the concepts of myth, metaphor and narrative, the session reveals sustainability as a highly productive fiction – one that enables communities to observe their environment differently and envision and organize long-term futures. 

Through critical analysis of sustainability narratives and a careful dismantling of common leadership myths, it uncovers the functions and roles of leadership within governance systems. This approach illuminates how leadership can foster new modes of observation, understanding, and organization that reconnect communities, governance, and the environment. 

This lecture is based on the recent book “Leadership for Sustainability; Myth, Metaphor and Narrative in Governance” Cambridge University Press.

Speaker Bio: 

Kristof Van Assche

Professor of Governance, planning and development at the University of Alberta, Canada, he specializes in governance evolution and innovation. His research combines systems theories, interpretive policy analysis, and institutional economics. He is a key author of Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT), which views governance as the co-evolution of actors, institutions, power, and knowledge.

Monica Gruezmacher

Assistant lecturer in Environmental Politics and Sustainability at the University of Alberta. She holds a PhD from the Center for Development Studies at the University of Bonn. Her research focuses on human-nature interactions and social changes affecting natural resource management in rural Western Canada and Newfoundland, and Colombian Amazon region.