Phase 1
By researching inner sustainability and its association with social-ecological sustainability, I aim to inform personal, culture, and systems transformation toward integral sustainability.
In line with sufficiency scholarship, longstanding Indigenous knowledge and wisdom traditions, I hypothesise that "psychological sufficiency" (such as a sense of contentment) and self-regulation (such as feeling secure) reflect social-ecological sufficiency and the collective regulation of natural resources. If this is the case, inner sustainability may support our capacity to live within social-ecological limits.
Timeline
Phase 2
How does inner sustainability arise?
Phase 3
Can inner sustainability be intentionally cultivated?
Phase 4
Are inner and outer sustainability associated?
Phase 5
How can societies move toward integral sustainability?
We are here
We are here
Phase 1
What is inner sustainability?
Phase 2
How does inner sustainability arise?
Phase 3
Can inner sustainability be intentionally cultivated?
Phase 4
Are inner and outer sustainability associated?
Phase 5
How can societies move toward integral sustainability?
Phase 1
How are inner dimensions of social-ecological sustainability conceptualised in the academic literature? Furthermore, how do individuals understand and experience inner sustainability first-hand? To find out, this phase consists of a systematic review, exploratory survey, and longitudinal case studies.
Phase 2
Ethnographic observations alongside qualitative interviews investigate how inner sustainability (or its opposite) is lived, enacted and shaped in context. Like this, we explore the inner processes, everyday practices and outer conditions that support, sustain, or undermine inner sustainability.
Do you know of social-ecologically sustainable communities that might want to participate? If so, please leave me a hint.
Phase 3
By this phase, we have an understanding of 1) what inner sustainability can be, including valid measurements, and 2) how it can develop. Now it's time to put that to the test! Together with previous study participants, we will identify and co-create one or more relevant interventions. Do they lead to reliable increases in inner sustainability?
Phase 4
Is an integral approach to sustainability warranted? Once we've found a pathway to inner sustainability (understanding that it might not be a one-size-fits-all), the moment of truth has come: Does inner sustainability actually translate to outer sustainability? This quantitative study investigates the relationship between inner and outer sustainability dimensions.
Phase 5
The ultimate goal of my research is real-world impact. Therefore, phase 5 is about converting insights into cultural, institutional, and systems-level transformation - so that more people can experience and sustain inner sustainability. This includes turning findings into policy recommendations and potential other pathways for creating conditions that support integral sustainability transformations.
Ethical considerations
How do you avoid imposing your own understanding of inner sustainability on participants?
I do not assume that inner sustainability has one universal or objectively correct form. Participants are treated as the primary experts on their own lived experience, while my role is to facilitate careful reflection rather than uncover a hidden truth about them. I am particularly interested in how understandings of inner sustainability vary across cultural, social and ecological contexts, rather than imposing a predetermined definition.
How do you account for your own values, assumptions and positionality as a researcher?
I am personally committed to social-ecological sustainability and interested in the potential of inner sustainability, in part due to my personal experience with inner unsustainability. While my proximity to the topic can provide experiential sensitivity, I acknowledge that it can also lead to over-identification and blind spots. Hence, I do not pretend to approach the topic from a value-free or entirely unbiased position. Instead, I aim to make my assumptions and normative commitments explicit and subject them to continual reflexive scrutiny. Values may influence which questions I consider worth asking, but they should not determine the answers.
Practically, this means documenting methodological and analytical decisions, maintaining a research protocol, remaining open to disconfirming evidence, and deliberately engaging with perspectives that challenge my own. Transparency and traceability are therefore part of how I try to mitigate confirmation bias and strengthen research integrity.
Additionally, responsibility means being transparent about uncertainty, limitations and the boundaries of what the research can claim, regardless of my personal convictions.
Does focusing on inner sustainability risk placing responsibility for sustainability on individuals?
Yes - if inner sustainability were treated in isolation. My research explicitly tries to avoid reducing sustainability problems to individual psychology or personal responsibility. As such, I recognise that people’s possibilities for living sustainably are shaped by social, cultural, institutional, economic and ecological conditions that can enable or constrain inner sustainability.
Finally, inner change is not proposed as a substitute for political, technological or structural transformation. Instead, I investigate how inner processes and wider systems shape one another and whether sustainability transformation may need to proceed both from the inside out and from the outside in.
Could your research on inner sustainability have unintended consequences?
Yes. Research on people’s values, motivations and inner lives could, for example, be used to individualize responsibility for sustainability, justify behavioural manipulation, or promote particular ideas of what a “sustainable person” should be and do. It could also encourage interventions that instrumentalise inner sustainability to prioritise environmental outcomes, while overlooking autonomy, agency, wellbeing or cultural differences. For this reason, I hold that inner sustainability is valuable in its own right - not merely as a tool for producing desirable behaviour - and that there is likely no one-size-fits-all.
How do you address power, vulnerability and the risk of extractive research?
Researching beliefs, identities, values and lived experiences gives me as a researcher access to potentially vulnerable parts of people’s lives. I therefore treat informed consent as an ongoing aspect of the research relationship rather than a one-off procedural requirement. Alongside continuously reflecting on trust and power dynamics, participants thus remain knowledgeable agents rather than merely sources of data.
I also consider whose knowledge is being sought, whose voices are represented and who benefits from the research. This shapes where and how I conduct fieldwork as well as how the data is presented.
If sustainability is normative, who decides what desirable change should look like?
Sustainability inevitably involves judgments about desirable futures, which makes questions of power and politics unavoidable. My research is committed to ecological sustainability, social justice and human flourishing, but it is not intended to prescribe one political ideology, universal model of inner sustainability or impose a ready-made blueprint for transformation.
Instead, I treat understandings of sustainability as culturally situated and potentially contested. The aim is to broaden the conceptual and empirical basis available for public reasoning, so that different communities can deliberate about and develop pathways appropriate to their own circumstances.
How does your research contribute to transformation?
Research does not create transformation simply by being published. Its impact depends on translation: educators, practitioners, policymakers, civil-society organizations and communities need to interpret and adapt findings to their own contexts.
I therefore aim to "socialise" the research through multiple pathways - from academic recommendations and policymaking to education, practice and public communication (like this website). This allows change to potentially travel both top-down, through institutions and systems, and bottom-up, through individuals and cultures. In practice, I expect these pathways to interact rather than occur separately.
What are your thoughts on affecting participants in the research process?
Reflecting repeatedly on one’s values, experiences or sense of inner sustainability may generate new insight or even personal change, even though the interviews are not intended as therapeutic interventions. I therefore treat ethical responsibility as ongoing throughout the research process, including attention to effects that may emerge through participation itself. My qualitative studies take this into account by including planned debriefing or follow-up sessions.
How do you avoid appropriating or misrepresenting Indigenous and other marginalized knowledge?
Although concepts such as inner and integral sustainability are nascent within Western academic scholarship, many of the ideas they draw upon are far from new and have long been articulated within Indigenous and other knowledge traditions. I therefore try to remain attentive to whose knowledge is recognized, whose is marginalized, and how ideas and concepts are attributed. To avoid reproducing colonial hierarchies of knowledge, I resist assimilating other knowledge traditions into my own conceptual vocabulary where doing so would distort their meanings.
By only engaging in fieldwork where 1) meaningful relationships, 2) cultural and linguistic competence, 3) appropriate collaboration, and 4) reciprocal benefit can be established, I also avoid treating (Indigenous) communities as convenient sources of “alternative” knowledge or sites for extractive knowledge production. Rather than considering myself an originator of ideas, I thus view my research as a potential amplifier of voices and knowledge that have often been marginalised or suppressed.