Sustainable development is among the greatest challenges facing humanity. Efforts to realize sustainable development – such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals or the many individual undertakings by governments and donors – seek to secure human and environmental well-being.  As scholars and practitioners seek to understand better how global and local sustainability can be leveraged to realize human well-being, interest in the subject will intensify. Compelling and wide-ranging in terms of definitions, approaches, and outcomes, sustainable development harbors enormous room for knowledge sharing, creative, cross-disciplinary approaches, and thoughtful problem solving.

 

The Sustainability and Development Initiative, based at the University of Michigan, seeks to catalyze work and partnerships around sustainable development, such that it is not about a single discipline or theoretical orientation but is instead a platform which enables conversation across the ways in which that sustainability and development are imagined and realized.