Sustainable qualities: Powerful drivers of social change

Looking attentively at the complexity of contemporary society, we can detect a variety of creative communities involved in sustainable social innovation. Behind each of these initiatives stands a group of people who have been able to imagine, develop and manage something new, beyond the standard ways of thinking and doing. They have succeeded in challenging the apparent hegemony of mainstream ideas about how problems need to be solved by providing valuable alternatives. A primary common feature of such creative communities is that most of them have sprung from collaboratively confronting the problems of everyday life. Facing up to these, they have conceived new models of thought and action where everybody wins – individuals, society and the environment. A second common feature is that they produce and are, in turn, driven by new notions of qualities: new qualities of their physical and social environments. We can refer to these as sustainable qualities: qualities that require more sustainable behaviours in order to enjoy their benefits.