Leisure and sustainability

Notions of sustainability have been prevalent in the academic literature for more than three decades. This special issue of Leisure/Loisir gives voice to a group of leisure scholars who have engaged in the sustainability conversation from their varied perspectives, problematizing a number of concepts including those related to society, the economy, politics and the environment. They have considered how these concepts inform one another, and how leisure may contribute to or detract from efforts to ensure social and environmental sustainability.

One highly cited definition of sustainability is found in the Brundtland Report, formally titled Our Common Future, a document compiled by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). It focuses on sustainable development and is defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (p. 41). This definition raises the issues of the needs of the world’s most poor and vulnerable populations and that social and technological expansion must contend with not only current, but also future environmental carrying capacity.

The years 2005–2014 were declared by the United Nations as the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2005). This initiative recognized the critical role that universities and academic researchers need to play in preparing students for a socially and environmentally sustainable future. It recognizes that traditional teaching methods prioritize linear thinking and discrete disciplinary boundaries that have not resolved the social and environmental problems we face today (Buszard & Kolb, 2011). Universities are challenged to prepare all graduates, regardless of what their field of study is, to understand the complex issues that arise from local and global sustainability challenges. As well, the UN challenged universities to promote the creation of programs and approaches that will generate new knowledge to address those complexities and to help society to meet the goal of sustainability. Climate change, food security, population growth, forced migration and economic uncertainty are just a few of the issues that require new ways of thinking, new leadership models and new ideas.

Since the publication of the Brundtland Report and during the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development, academic programs across the world have endeavoured to prepare graduating students for roles they will need to perform to ensure social and environmental sustainability in their leisure and work, in their communities and at home. One such effort by Wiek, Withycombe, and Redman (2011) resulted in a reference framework for academic program development. This framework illustrates five key competencies believed to be essential for students to engage in sustainability problem-solving. Their list includes: (1) systems thinking, which is the ability to analyze complex systems on a local and global level and across social, environmental, economic, political and other domains; (2) anticipatory competence, which pertains to future-oriented knowledge such as an understanding of uncertainty, unintended harm and intergenerational equity; (3) normative competence, pertaining to the ability to collectively understand sustainability values, principles, goals and targets; (4) strategic competence, involving the ability to design and implement interventions and approaches for problem-solving; and (5) interpersonal competence, which pertains to the ability to communicate, lead, deliberate and negotiate sustainability research and problem-solving with diverse stakeholders.

This framework and others like it inform academic program developers about essential concepts for sustainability education. Our effort here is to enhance the existing conversation with contributions from researchers who study leisure and sustainability. We offer a variety of perspectives from several Canadian authors.

This Special Issue begins with two papers that provide new approaches for critiquing relationships between leisure and sustainability. Jennifer Sumner and Heather Mair situate leisure within the broader political economic context of neoliberal globalization, using the concept of the civil commons to critique and discuss the connection between leisure and sustainable living. Using a content analysis of selected leisure literature, Nicole Vaugeois, Peter Parker and Yufan Yang identify the ways in which leisure scholars explore issues of sustainability. They compare leisure journals with tourism literature and suggest how leisure scholars could be making stronger contributions to advance sustainability at the personal, community and societal levels moving forward.

Several papers are then presented in which contributors discuss and analyze aspects of environmental sustainability. Drawing from the theory of specific financialization tactics (e.g. conservation banking, cap and trade schemes, and carbon markets), Sean Ryan and Maxwell Harrison examine how these approaches are impacting parks and protected areas in Canada. They include a discussion of the future sustainability of our parks and protected areas should they become further entwined in financialization. Nicole Vaugeois, Joanne Schroeder and Michelle Harnett highlight the origins of the Integrated Community Sustainability Planning (ICSP) movement in Canada and then provide an analysis of a study of 10 ICSPs across Canada illustrating how leisure has been incorporated into the plans. In their study of impacts experienced by communities located near Pacific Rim National Park, Canada, Pete Parker, Rick Rollins and colleagues report on the perceptions of communities concerning the park’s contributions to sustainability. They report distinct differences between the five communities included in the study and suggest more attention must be given to the needs and aspirations of nearby communities, especially First Nations communities.

Social sustainability is addressed in the last set of papers. Kelly McClinchey’s paper builds on a framework of emotional and sensuous geographies and applies the concept of sense of place to demonstrate how ethnic festival experiences are important components of the everyday leisure experience of migrants. In this paper, she explores multicultural festivals as a form of urban multiethnic leisure and their role in contributing to sense of place and social sustainability. Karen Gallant and Susan Tirone explore a local municipal sustainability strategy implemented in a small Atlantic Canadian community. They document informal efforts of local citizens combined with the work of immigrant recruitment agencies to develop a holistic approach to well-being by supporting immigrants’ needs for social opportunities, housing, transportation, language acquisition, leisure and other facets of immigrants’ lives. Using a mixed methods approach, Sarena Randall Gill and Wayne Warrington explore how zoos and aquariums incorporate conservation education to influence human actions and reduce human impacts on the environment. Their study focuses on institutions with internal sustainability initiatives and the potential opportunities and barriers to engaging visitors in sustainability initiatives. A project aimed at ‘greening’ Niagara’s schoolyards is the focus of Mary Breunig’s study. She explored students’ and professor experiences with co-designing and installing outdoor classrooms and promoting sustainability through schoolyard pedagogy. Her study focuses on sustainability, social and environmental justice, leisure and community action.

The UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development has closed and although it proved to be the catalyst for many initiatives that informed and educated us about the dangers of an unsustainable world, we continue to face challenges of social divisiveness, economic disparities and environmental degradation. We hope this Special Issue will spark many conversations and actions to position leisure as an important factor for envisioning and creating sustainable societies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.