Augmenting sustainability of ecovillages- A review of concepts and practices of ecovillage in local and regional contexts

Abstract

Different interpretations of sustainability result in the sustainability gap between action implementation

and policy-making. Among many local-level initiatives, the ecovillage concerns human actions and forwards sustainability. The research seeks a better understanding of the ecovillage's sustainability to mitigate the sustainability gap. The research was three-folded. The first part presented literature review of the ecovillage and developed three themes- resource management, community organisation and knowledge sharing, based on the collaboration between EVs and mainstream society. The second part presented Social System Theory as a supplement to the qualitative research process and reflect on the ecovillage's sustainability concerning its relationship with mainstream society. The third part comprises multiple case studies: Schloss Tempelhof, Hurdal Ecovillage, Bandipur Bazar and Jhong. They were analysed by reflecting on the narratives, EV themes, cultural value, and regional cooperation. The comparative analysis of cases illustrated different forms of sustainability in EV themes. Despite the collaboration with mainstream society, each case presented a unique process of collaboration. In Schloss Tempelhof and Jhong, actions were translated as parts of policies. In Hurdal EV, actions were transformed as per policies. In Bandipur Bazar, actions were transited into policies. They illustrated the difference in collaboration with mainstream society according to their ability to maintain local values and extents of their regional cooperation. The research concludes that actions serve two purposes- problem-solving and maintaining the societal values, and a criterion for the mitigation of the sustainability gap. Ecovillages remain intact through values and store the knowledge of means-selection in social norms, transferable across space and time. Furthermore, the mitigation of the sustainability gap requires understanding actions as the link between values and policies, and their interpretations through concrete entities. The research also interpretes the planning process as a causality of a selection of means, and goal settings based on local values and mainstream policies. Finally, from the practitioner's perspective, the research reveals some unexplored aspects of EV's sustainability.