Is a smarter planet also more sustainable? Co-creating knowledge for sustainability

Sustainability and Sustainable Development are becoming increasingly relevant in the global agenda of governments as well as businesses and civil society. They should be among the top priorities of what we would consider a really smarter planet. The concept of smartness is widely used essentially to refer to digitalized processes and telematic interactions in several fields of social, environmental, and economic human activities. The concept of sustainability is used to define successful human activities, processes and interactions from an integrated social-environmental-economic viewpoint. Although both the concepts imply multi- and inter-disciplinary views that involve economic, social and environmental sciences, the ‘smartness’ and ‘sustainability’ perspectives have different focus: the former is more focused on socio-technical systems (Trist, 1981), hence on human-technology interactions; the latter is more focused on social-ecological systems (Berkes et al., 2003; Ostrom, 2009), hence on human-nature interactions. By reflecting upon human-nature and human-technology interactions i.e. relationships between socio-technical and social-ecological systems, in terms of contribution to sustainability, we wonder: What is the relationship between smartness and sustainability? Is a smarter planet also more sustainable? With the aim of addressing these questions, by adopting a systems-thinking view and co-creation logic, our essay outlines a possible boundary-crossing co-creation framework for Sustainable Development. Our interpretative methodology is built upon the roots of systems thinking (Barnard, 1938; Buckley, 1968; von Bertalanffy 1968; Emery, 1969; Espejo, 1994; Jackson, 2000; Basile and Caputo, 2017; Calabrese et al., 2017; Tronvoll et al., 2017). Systems thinking and, specifically, the Viable Systems Approach (vSa) (Golinelli, 2010; Barile, 2013; Barile et al., 2012) can be adopted as meta-level frameworks that provide general interpretation schemes to support understanding of complex phenomena like sustainability. Accordingly, our aim is to identify research domains that are engaged in knowledge co-creation efforts whose integration could accelerate progress toward sustainability (Di Nauta et al., 2015; Formisano et al., 2015; Caputo, 2017).