Introduction

This chapter develops a theory of sustainable leadership that hinges upon the purposes toward which leadership is applied. Through synthesizing insights from the literatures of a wide range of fields, it argues that sustainable leadership must foster the long-term health, integrity, and resiliency of human communities and nature. Sustainable leadership, comprised of fitting responses to converging socio-ecological crises, is counter-hegemonic, inclusive, place-centered, and learned. Sustainable leadership serves integrative and normative roles in creating/restoring the health of the human/natural world. It is, therefore, highly relevant to the health and survival of both nature and society.¹

The Crisis of Leadership in the Modern World

Modern Western consciousness abstracts humans from nature, denying that humans can exist only within nature (Spretnak, 1997). This conceptual human/nature divide is not only a division into two, it is a tiered dualism: humans on top, nature acting in all supporting roles (as tool, as resource, as setting) (Shepard, 1995). The subjugated “other,” first conceptualized as nature itself, is born with this divide. And there have been many “others” as systems of hierarchy have proliferated to encompass gender, races, non-Western cultures, and more. Cultural systems of hierarchy in Western societies and the projection of a hierarchical worldview upon nature itself surely are among the keystone concepts upholding the house of cards that is the unsustainable, globalized, industrial world (Evans, 2012, p. 55).

Given the formative role of hierarchy in shaping unsustainable and destructive modern patterns of “development,” the concept of leadership itself is often confounded with hierarchy. Given this history, the idea of leadership for sustainability raises suspicion: can modern societies employ leadership in service to sustainability? Or are Western concepts and practices of leadership themselves so infused with notions of hierarchy that they remain irreconcilable with (re)creating² sustainable societies? These are crucial questions for sustainability educators and practitioners today, since central to the effort of (re)constructing sustainable societies is the need to dismantle many of the organizing concepts and values of the modern world, concepts and values that feed and are fed by the widespread domination and exploitation of people and of nature by the powerful few – the “leaders” of the globalized capitalist world.

Can we develop leadership today that is not inherently corrupt and manipulative? Can we organize people effectively within systems of leadership and participation in order to (re)cast societies into forms that nurture and justly serve people and nature simultaneously? What might such systems of leadership and participation look like? And on what values and practices would they be based? These are the questions underlying this exploration in search of a leadership for sustainability. At the heart of this exploration is the idea that sustainability cannot be achieved in the absence of social justice because social injustice derives from the same mindset – the same narrowly instrumental orientation to the world and others – that fuels environmental destruction. To pursue sustainability through manipulative and exploitive means would mean creating new systems of domination that would feed the creation of new, unsustainable systems. Can we (re)create leadership that is itself sustainable?

This essay explores this question through developing several claims:

Through developing these claims, this chapter highlights the purposes sustainable leadership must serve and, thereby, constructs a concept of sustainable leadership. This concept is further clarified by illuminating formative characteristics of leadership for sustainability that distinguish it from command and control leadership.³

In short, this essay conceptualizes sustainable leadership as a form of community praxis in which one coalesces and directs the energies of a group toward ends that enhance the long-term health, integrity, and resilience of the community and natural systems of which it is a part. Sustainable leadership is also a form of power with, not power over, others. Through its praxis, sustainable leadership nurtures the leadership potential of collaborators in the recognition that the leadership of any one individual or group is, and should be, a temporary service to others. Sustainable leadership welcomes new leaders and creates space for their leadership potential to grow. In a world-system replete with entrenched systems of hierarchy and characterized by competition, sustainable leadership is a contradiction. To realize sustainable leadership would entail deep social change that can only happen through a long-term process of cultural change.

Through developing a concept of leadership for sustainability, this essay can inform the character, purposes, and practices of activists, educators, and others whose work continually redefines and teaches leadership in our changing world.

Sustainable Leadership Is Centrally Defined by the Purposes It Serves

Leadership discourse and training that focus on techniques alone portray leadership as a tool that can be used to further any human endeavor – whether or not the given activity is just or sustainable. This essay demonstrates that leadership within systems of modern capitalist hierarchy is unequally rewarding to some while oppressive and exploitative to others and nature. Leadership in this context is not leadership at all, but opportunism that creates extreme imbalances among societies and between humans and nature.

In order to understand command and control leadership as the dominant mode of social organization today, it is important to understand the context within which that form of leadership has emerged and thrived.⁴ The purposes leadership has served in the world-system have defined its character. Reinventing leadership would mean repurposing it and, consequently, changing societies in deep and important ways.

A Brief History of Opportunistic Leadership in Globalized Political Economy

Systems of inequity in globalized political economy derive from an enforced program through which the winners of old remain the winners indefinitely and continue to manufacture the rules of the game in order to ensure their economic and political advantage (Achbar & Simpson, 2005; Barlow & Clarke, 2002; Black, 2001; Evans, 2012, Chs 3–4; International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 2003; Manley, 1987; Marcuse, 1964; Norberg-Hodge et al., 2002; Scheer, 2002). The world-system is not sustainable, but predatory and opportunistic.

Examples of opportunistic leadership abound in modern capitalist societies. Centuries of European colonization laid the foundations for modern capitalist opportunism to spread globally, creating persistent economic and political inequities between former imperialist colonizer nations and former colonies whose lands and peoples were the objects of conquest. Inequity was built into the colonial system by the leaders of empire: the colonial system created an intentional hierarchy in which colonies served their rulers in multiple ways. Colonies were never intended by their conquerors to be allowed to develop diverse, healthy economies in which wealth was distributed widely. Such a formula would, after all, create colonies that could eventually challenge their rulers. Instead, colonies served as the extraction grounds for empire, producing or otherwise delivering up raw materials for empires while employing conquered peoples in the processes of extraction through systems of slavery and low-wage labor (Miller, 1999).

This colonial system was perhaps the most significant factor in creating the uneven “development” of the modern capitalist world today that Wallerstein (1974, 1976, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) explicates in his world-system theory of core, semi-periphery, and periphery nations and regions within globalized political economy. Once the former colonies were free to compete on their own in a rapidly globalizing marketplace, they found themselves hopelessly behind their former rulers who had become the modern industrialized nations of the world. Because they served for so long as resource extraction grounds and sources of cheap labor for empire, former colonies had not developed strong modern infrastructures, accessible and modern education systems, diversified manufacturing sectors capable of producing a wide variety of finished goods, or resilient traditions of democracy. The value of at least some aspects of these developments within a context of sustainability is questionable, but their importance to effective participation in a globalized, industrial economy is clear (Evans, 2012, Chs 3–4; Miller, 1999; Wallerstein, 1974, 1976, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008).

Although colonialism as a command and control system of direct territorial rule by dominant national powers is waning, the unequal power relationships between the industrialized and the developing worlds persist through imperialism. Imperialism manifests itself as a form of economic, cultural, and political domination similar in its effects to colonialism but without direct administration of foreign territories by nation states (Evans, 2012, Chs 3–4; Miller, 1999). Under this more recent hegemonic order, the industrialized powers of the world, acting through a system of international free trade agreements, continue to extract raw materials from afar and take advantage of cheap labor (Evans, 2012, Ch. 4). Free trade within such a system benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor because it drives down the prices of commodities to match the lowest prices globally. For those individuals, companies, and nations who sell raw materials and agricultural products and who tend to operate on a very thin margin of profit, opening local markets to global competition can be devastating. While many products can be produced in many places, there are some environments that are better than others for doing so, and it is generally in these locations that production can be accomplished most cheaply. When other producers in less advantageous locales must compete with advantaged producers, they often cannot make ends meet. In this circumstance, diversity (and, therefore, resilience) is lost in the local economy. Small producers lose their economic security while the big players in the global economy – who can produce virtually anywhere they like at low cost by locating where environmental, labor, and other costs are low – use their advantage to dominate global markets (Douthwaite, 2004; Norberg-Hodge et al., 2002).

International finance and debt serve as additional tools for opportunistic leaders to create dependency (Evans, 2012, Ch. 4; Miller, 1999, pp. 85–86; Stiglitz, 2002). Developing nations, in their attempts to create the infrastructure that would allow them to compete in the global economy, have assumed extremely heavy debt loads, borrowing from sources such as the World Bank and regional development banks. And, due to their historically generated, lopsided development, they have not been able to compete effectively with the industrialized world. For these nations, the playing field is impossibly tilted in favor of industrialized powers. Meanwhile, the United States, the world’s foremost debtor nation, continues as the world economic leader due to its historical position of dominance and the economic and political systems that were constructed to reinforce that dominance (Evans, 2012, pp. 132–135).⁵

In the interest of justice and sustainability, it matters a great deal where we are being led and for what purposes. The global economic system described here functions as if there are no limits (physical or ethical) to exploiting both people and nature to fuel the engines of economic growth and secure profits for economic leaders. Wealth has also become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (Piketty, 2014). Leadership for “success” in such a system is not sustainable leadership; it is simply domination.

An exploration of the history of global inequity, capitalist concentration of market control, and profits reaped by imperial interests reveals that the purposes served by leadership 1) inform all meaningful discussion of the character of leadership and 2) create a foundation for developing a concept of sustainable leadership. Our discussion here breaks sharply with leadership literature and training that seeks to be apolitical. Seemingly apolitical leadership training and literature is, in fact, very political precisely because it does not overtly question the purposes of leadership and, thereby, tends to reinforce the notion that beneficial models of leadership can be practiced in any context. Such a conception of leadership tends not to question hierarchy in that the boss and the leader are conflated, as though it does not matter whether one follows a leader by choice or must submit to follow a “leader” solely in order to keep earning a living. In the context of such overt hierarchies, any technique or practice of leadership, however profound or worthy, can be used for manipulation and control of the followers as well as for ecologically destructive ends. Effective leadership techniques practiced in ultimate service to destructive systems may even mask social contradictions and harsh divisions and thereby delay radical action for social justice.

To reveal the ideological basis of much leadership training and literature, though, is not to say that work in areas such as industrial democracy has no merit. Because most people now live and survive through an unjust and unsustainable capitalist system, we are walking contradictions, supporting ourselves and our families in the short term while participating in the long-term undoing of the natural world as well as the continued breakdown of social justice and coherent, collaborative communities. But we cannot simply extract ourselves from historical realities, and our choices in how we live are in fact limited. This is the struggle of leadership: how can one, several, or many lead toward a just and sustainable future in these times of converging socio-ecological crises created and upheld by pervasive exploitive leadership?

Sustainable Leadership as a Continuum

Three important constituents of the purpose of leadership can help us define a continuum of leadership character: degree of centralization of authority, level of abstraction, and scale of operation. The continuum of leadership ranges from exploitive to sustainable leadership. Within this continuum, those forms of leadership that are less abstract tend to be more sustainable (Evans, 2012, Ch. 5; Kemmis, 1990), while the distancing afforded to practitioners of highly abstract forms of leadership tends to encourage exploitation in the form of collective violence. Collective violence can be defined as large-scale damage inflicted on people and the environment by large numbers of people (Summers & Markusen, 2003, p. 215). People are less likely to inflict harm in service to personal gain on those people and places with whom/which they share meaningful and intimate relationships – especially when they intend to stay put in place and community (Abrams, 2008; Shuman, 1998/2000). Similarly, scale of activity also matters: the larger the scale of operations, the greater the opportunities for abstraction. Scale, in turn, relates to an additional important factor in characterizing the purposes and practices of leadership along a continuum ranging from exploitive to sustainable: degree of centralization of control. Potential for hierarchical domination and exploitation increases with centralization of control, and this same centralization of decision making and concentration of profits are perhaps the most useful tools to those who would use leadership to exploit.

The leadership continuum, as a whole, holds at one extreme the leadership of exploitation that uses everything and everyone necessary to perpetuate the leader’s privileged status. This form of leadership is essentially manipulative and instrumental. At the other end of the continuum is sustainable leadership. Pittman (2007) defines “living sustainability” as “the long-term equilibrium of health and integrity maintained dynamically within any individual system (organism, organization, ecosystem, community, etc.) through a diversity of relationships with other systems” (n.p.). This concept of sustainability is flexible in that what is sustainable in any instance is deeply influenced by the socio-ecological context within which action or change takes place (Evans, 2012, p. 17). What may be sustainable in one context may not be in another.

In sustainable leadership, choices and actions foster the long-term health and integrity of the system. Because the integrity of oppressive or socio-ecologically damaging or deleterious systems is not a goal of sustainability, health must be the primary defining quality of sustainable leadership, with integrity as an essential supporting factor. In pursuing health and integrity, leaders must also focus on resiliency with regard to the socio-ecological system in question. Resiliency is the ability of a system to bounce back from damage or disturbance while maintaining is essential functions. I offer the rationale for these claims in the following section.

The distinction I draw between exploitive leadership and sustainable leadership is one that hinges on the purposes to which leadership is applied. If we are to lead toward sustainability, we must ultimately concern ourselves with the effects of our leadership on the health and integrity of other people and nature. When acting within a model of exploitive leadership, one’s central aim is to remain in a position of (perceived) advantage over other people and nature.

Sustainable Leadership Embodies a Fitting Response to the Socio-Ecological Challenges Implicated in the Decisions and Actions Taken

A response is fitting because it supports the health, integrity, and resiliency of human communities and natural world. In exploring sustainable leadership as a fitting response to one’s socio-ecological context, it is helpful to begin with an exploration of nature and societies as complex adaptive systems.

Nature as Context

In nature, ecosystems utilize the potential of their given contexts (incoming sunlight, water, nutrients, and more) as they move from simple states characterized by little differentiation among organisms and functions to complex states characterized by many types of organisms carving out specific niches and sharing tightly knit interdependencies. The Earth as a natural system is comprised of nested subsystems of varying scales, both living and nonliving (for example, individual organisms and animal communities as well as rivers, oceans, and the entire hydrological cycle). Natural systems move through cycles of rising complexity followed by varying levels of disturbance/disintegration. The disturbance/disintegration phase unleashes potential for new configurations of complexity to arise. In natural systems, resiliency is also inversely related to complexity. Very simple systems bounce back from disturbance more easily than do complex systems with tightly coupled interrelationships of organisms inhabiting specific niches (Homer-Dixon, 2006, Ch. 9).

The rising and falling complexity of the nested systems that comprise the Earth’s planetary system has typically not been synchronized, meaning that, as some systems have all or partially unraveled, others at different scales have provided relative stability. Human actions have, however, synchronized the disintegration phase of multiple systems such as ocean fisheries, topsoil, and coastal aquatic systems – perhaps the largest scale and most important of these being the Earth’s climate itself (Homer-Dixon, 2006, Ch. 9).

A Dangerous Synchronicity

We live in a time of converging sustainability crises that include climate change, resource depletion, pervasive pollution, a rapid rate of species extinction, global concentration of wealth and power, massive poverty, and more. The synchronicity of the disintegration phase of so many natural systems that has been brought about by human actions threatens the survival of our species and that of many others. Its creation has coincided with the rise of the Western cultural notion that humans are not embedded in and dependent upon nature, but instead are conquerors and users of nature. This broad cultural construct has swept the globe through colonialism, imperialism, and economic/cultural globalization. Within this cultural and economic context, forms of leadership have emerged that are highly abstract, large scale, and centralized.

This dangerous synchronicity of converging sustainability crises is also driven in many ways by leaders and their influence. The elements of human choice and will as well as social power that form the center of gravity for the convergence of the sustainability crises we face differentiates this convergence markedly from the movement of complex adaptive systems in nonhuman nature. The crisis itself is, therefore, a subject for leadership work – and perhaps the most important subject of all. The sustainability crisis is the crucible for defining leadership within a normative framework: forms of leadership that contribute to the health, integrity, and resiliency of human and natural systems and, by extension, to the potential for human survival and thriving, are the only forms of leadership that can be called sustainable.

Counter-hegemony as Fitting Response

Fitting responses to the converging crises of sustainability must be based in political clarity and counter-hegemony. Developing politically clear insights involves reading the world in deeply critical ways. As the central vehicle for understanding and addressing oppression, Freire (1970/2000) argued the critical importance of political clarity. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970/2000), he advocated educational praxis aimed at helping people develop deep understandings of social power and how that power informs the ideas and actions of people across social strata. I have argued similarly elsewhere (Evans, 2012) the importance of counter-hegemony in the field of sustainability education.

Engaging in counter-hegemony means critiquing and attempting to dismantle hegemonic economic and political powers. The actions of these powers tend to fall at the exploitive end of the leadership continuum, at best ignoring and at worst destroying the long-term health, integrity, and resiliency of socio-ecological systems. Counter-hegemonically informed leadership seeks to dismantle historically created inequities and exploitation while fostering the health, integrity, and resiliency of communities and nature. Doing so involves cultivating people’s critical thinking (Brookfield, 1987, 2000) and related transformative capacities (Mezirow, 2000). Counter-hegemony is a fitting response to globalized political economy and, therefore, an essential aspect of sustainable leadership (Evans, 2012).

Sustainable leadership serves as a vehicle for the expression of counter-hegemonic social values. Sustainable leadership can adapt appropriately to serve sustainable ends for the long term if it remains flexible and inclusive of diverse insights about hegemony and counter-hegemony within the changing contexts of socio-ecological systems. Sustainable leadership maintains an outward focus on the world. It exists as a dynamic, yet normative, interaction with the world rather than as a rigidly fixed set of beliefs. Sustainable leadership is open, flexible, and responsive to the influx of new ideas (and the bearers of these ideas). It represents the potential for realizing a normative leadership that explicitly rejects totalitarian embodiments.

Reciprocity and Mutualism as Fitting Responses

Examples of sustainable indigenous inhabitation of place (Armstrong, 1995; Berkes, 1999; LaDuke, 1999; Martinez, 1997; Nelson, 1983; Salmon, 2000; Sveiby & Skuthorpe, 2006) indicate that for humans to live sustainably, their actions must be guided by an ethic of reciprocity in relationships with other people and nature. An ethic of reciprocity in action translates to healthy interdependence and care for nature and society. This care promotes the human potential for thriving. Sustainable leaders strive to create reciprocal, mutually nurturing, sustaining relationships among people and between humans and nature.

Despite the myth, broadly accepted as common sense in Western culture, that competition brings out the best in people and society, the human tendency for collaboration is more personally fulfilling and appropriate to a wider range of social situations than is the drive for competition (Kohn, 1986). Indeed, the failure of leaders to maintain a focus on helping others and a turn toward egoism and self-aggrandizement typically causes leaders to fall (Keltner, 2016). Social capital in the forms of nurturing reciprocity and collaboration that create strong relational bonds can also contribute significantly to community resiliency to disturbance and breakdown (Adger, 2003; Petzold & Ratter, 2015, p. 40). Nature, despite years of grade school science education focusing on survival of the fittest as the principle vehicle for biological evolution, is now becoming recognized as a network (Borrett et al., 2014) comprised of interacting components that mutually generate a holism that is much more than the sum of its parts (Patten, 2016). Nature, it seems, is more collaborative than competitive in its formative capacities. The recognition of human societies as part of and dependent upon nature is also rapidly emerging within the field of sustainability science (Folke et al., 2016). This recognition points to the need for human collaborative co-evolution with nature rather than domination over and destruction of it.

These insights make a great deal of sense when one considers human indigenous heritage. Although competing tribes and cultures have fought each other for millennia, the day-to-day workings of indigenous societies have been based in collaboration and care manifested in both direct and diffuse forms of social reciprocity and in reciprocal duties associated with nature care. The cutthroat culture of globalized industrial capitalism is a very recent departure within that human tradition (Hall & Klitgaard, 2012, Ch. 2). Being slow and not so physically fierce creatures whose young are highly vulnerable and do not fully mature for many years, humans would not have survived as a species without mutuality. Many indigenous societies have developed various forms of gift cultures wherein sharing the necessities of life within the tribe or community has played a defining role in the survival of the group (Jensen, 2000, p. 212; Polanyi, 1944/1957, p. 46). Indigenous societies have also developed ethical frameworks of reciprocity with nature rather than domination over it. Both reciprocity with nature and the sharing of food and other necessities with others promote the health, integrity, and resiliency of socio-ecological systems – the very purposes served by sustainable leadership. These actions also create deep and lasting relationships among people and between people and nature. Jeannette Armstrong (1995), a member of the Okanagan tribe, notes that, in her culture, it is the ability to form such relationships (the strength of the heart self) that defines the ability to lead: “the strength with which we bond in the widest of circles gives us our criterion for leadership” (p. 321).

Leadership as a fitting response to the converging crises of sustainability is characterized by counter-hegemonic social engagement and the forging of collaborative and mutually beneficial relationships among people and with nature. Sustainable leaders seek mutually beneficial and liberating ends in communities that include both people and nature as members.

Sustainable Leadership Is Integrative and Ultimately Place-Centered

To lead sustainably, we must act from an ecological worldview, in full recognition that everything is connected to every other thing and that what goes around does indeed come around. If we want to live meaningful lives and enjoy the respect of others, we must recognize the meaning inherent in other people and in nature, and we must honor the integrity and the lifeways of others, both human and nonhuman. I believe this living reciprocity is what Armstrong (1995) refers to when she describes the Okanagan experience of bonding with ancestral homelands:

As Okanagans, our most essential responsibility is to learn to bond our whole individual selves and our communal selves to the land. Many of our ceremonies have been constructed for this. We join with the larger self, outward to the land, and rejoice in all that we are. We are this one part of Earth. Without this self we are not human: we yearn; we are incomplete; we are wild, needing to learn our place as land pieces. We cannot find joy because we need place in this sense to nurture and protect our family/community/self. The thing Okanagans fear worst of all is to be removed from the land that is their life and their spirit.

(pp. 323–324)

As suggested by Armstrong, social bonds and bonds between people and nature are most effectively understood and enacted within the context of real places that offer a shared context of community and nature extending over long periods of time. In such communities, actions and ideas – and their benefits and consequences – are most immediately known and visible (Armstrong, 1995; Shuman, 1998/2000, p. 8).

Centering sustainable leadership in place does not, however, mean that we should wall ourselves off from the world or disregard distant or global environmental and social problems. To extract ourselves in such a way from the world as a whole would be unspeakably irresponsible given our current context. Global capitalism has created an unhealthy interdependence – a codependence – from which it will be difficult to extract ourselves and our communities unscathed. In order to name this world and transform it, even by (re)localizing, we must know this world. We must know what we are up against and, to the best of our ability, think through the ramifications of our local actions in a world where everything has indeed been made to affect every other thing within perhaps the most unhealthy system of interdependence possible. Sustainable leadership must address globalization while simultaneously creating place-centered communities. Terry (1993) recognizes this need for a comprehensive approach to leadership. He notes that we must seek to be inclusive of a broad and deep understanding of and intimacy with the world: “Comprehensiveness is the most inclusive quality of meaning. It seeks to add depth of insight, celebrate wisdom, and in its creation of meaning, affirm the joy and tragedy of existence” (p. 227). To move this world toward sustainability, we must engage with it, not recoil from it. This engagement should, in large measure, take the form of place-centered praxis that consciously and simultaneously contributes to socio-ecological sustainability on a global scale (Evans, 2012, Chs 3–5).

Everyone Must Have Access to Serve as a Leader

Totalitarian leadership systems limit access to positions and roles of leadership throughout society. Totalitarian systems attempt to centralize and control ideas generated within a society about the state of the world, both as it is and as it should be. Totalitarian systems are inherently unjust and unsustainable in that they ignore or forego responses that are fitting to the health, integrity, and resiliency of people and nature and, in service to a few, seek to dictate a given reality into existence. The modern capitalist economy as described above is totalitarian. Totalitarian systems both refuse to actively promote the potential for leadership throughout society and also refuse to respond fittingly and justly. In taking these actions, totalitarian systems may sow the seeds of their own destruction: forms of oppression that negate the value of people invariably generate social resistance, and often violent action.

In contrast to totalitarian leadership, sustainable leadership must offer paths to differential authority that are open to everyone in a given society (Barbour, 1993, p. 37). This notion opposes totalitarian tendencies to attach political offices and powers to hereditary lines and to social ranks and categories from which many are totally and indefinitely excluded. Totalitarian leadership embodies and solidifies hierarchies consisting of paths to power that are unassailable and hopelessly remote to the vast majority of people. Kingdoms and dictatorships come to mind, but even nominal democracies and “free” markets can be totalitarian in these respects.

In order to maintain open paths to leadership and to encourage broad political participation and the development of leadership potential throughout society, differential authority should change hands periodically. Although monarchies and dictatorships that are more benevolent than some democracies today may exist and certainly have existed, perpetual concentration of power can be dangerous, particularly within the context of modern capitalism where power most naturally manifests in manipulation and exploitation (Marcuse, 1964). In order for any society to be benevolent in comparison to modern capitalist societies, the people need to exercise meaningful control over key aspects of their own lives. In any comparatively just society, sustainable leadership must be active throughout society on multiple levels.

Such was the case within the kingdom of Ladakh before it was subsumed under Indian government rule, and it remains the case to some extent today although Ladakh has become increasingly entangled with the globalized capitalist world (International Society for Ecology and Culture, 1993; Norberg-Hodge, 1991/1992). In traditional Ladakhi society, leadership that meaningfully shaped the lives of people was developmental, small scale, and local. It also was decidedly not abstract in that the Ladakhi people, in order to prosper in their isolated and demanding environment, exercised an ecological leadership of place that emphasized reciprocal practices of working directly with nature and each other.

Many indigenous traditions of recognizing the leadership of elders offer examples of leadership that are open to all who attain the proper level of experience as evidenced by age. Sustainable leadership of elders would also remain open and responsive to the voices and concerns of youth.

Leadership Must Be Actively Developed in Everyone in a Sustainable Society

In keeping with the idea that sustainable leadership offers fitting responses to environmental and social crises, and building upon the notion that paths to leadership must be open to all, it follows that leadership should be actively developed in everyone in ultimate service to sustainability. Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership offers a clearly defined ethical and relational foundation for leadership that aids in formulating responses to the world that are both fitting to socio-ecological context and inclusive. According to Greenleaf (1970/1991), a servant leader works to build the leadership capacities of others rather than simply to maintain his/her own position of power. The servant as leader sows the seeds of long term change because s/he shares ownership of the changes s/he leads with others who participate in the change. Greenleaf (1970/1991) contrasts the servant leader with the dominator leader who is “leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions” (p. 7):

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will he benefit, or, at least, will he not be further deprived?

(Greenleaf, 1970/1991, p. 7)

Greenleaf’s emphasis on the public sharing of the fruits of leadership also coincides well with the notion that sustainable social systems do not concentrate power in the hands of the few while causing the vast majority to live in misery.

Terry (1993) offers additional theories on leadership that extend and further clarify Greenleaf’s (1970/1991) concept of the servant leader. According to Terry, leaders must be concerned not only with what decisions are made, but also with how they are made. Decisions must be made in transparent and open ways while they fittingly “acknowledge the significant features of the human condition” (Terry, 1993, p. 108). In taking this approach, leaders treat people with respect and acknowledge that they have a right to engage in decisions that affect their lives and communities. For Greenleaf (1970/1991) and Terry (1993), leaders should engage justly in service to justice.

The faith of sustainable leaders in the power of average people to create meaningful and beneficial change in the world articulates well with Paul Rogat Loeb’s (1999) argument that leadership is learned, step by developmental step, when properly nurtured and supported in community (Ch. 3). For Loeb, leadership is not inborn, but a possibility for all. Fostering the potential for learning sustainable leadership ought, therefore, to be a central focus for sustainable leaders acting within multiple contexts. Philosophies and practices enacted through shared leadership are also more likely to survive and evolve over the long term than are the philosophies and practices of single, dominant leaders. They are therefore more likely to foster the long-term integrity and resiliency aspects of sustainability.

Sustainable Leadership Engages Imperfectly in Processes of Long-Term Cultural Change.

In the current world-system, damage and destruction visited upon people and nature are both integral and pervasive. Large-scale, centralized businesses and organizations practice abstract leadership from afar, and the potential for realizing sustainable leadership may appear to be nearly entirely precluded. Sustainable leaders deciding and acting within unsustainable contexts face the intense challenges of acting within institutional, community, and cultural settings where choices open to them are likely to have mixed results in terms of fostering sustainability. Terry (1993) describes the dilemmas faced by leaders:

Leadership … confronts an abyss of unknown consequences and obligations in any action it does take. The ripple effects of action are so vast and complex that no computer or cost-benefit analysis can totally analyze them. Duties often conflict; ethical choices are usually not made between right and wrong or good and bad but between conflicting rights and goods.

(p. 260)

Given the contexts within which many leaders operate today, those who strive to be sustainable must recognize that they are engaged in a long-term project of cultural change and that their contributions to that change will be imperfect and embody contradictions. Loeb (1999) warns us against attempting to adhere to the “perfect standard,” the notion that, if our ideas and actions are not entirely consistent, we should see ourselves as hypocrites and refrain from acting (pp. 38–39). According to the perfect standard, for example, one should not oppose the building of oil pipelines or fight air pollution if one drives a car. The notion that, in order to move toward sustainability, one must be completely sustainable in one’s own life could leave all or most of us in paralysis or in a state of simply not attending to the implications of our actions. If leaders are to be part of and effective within the current social context, they must be able to live and work in gray areas while continually moving toward sustainability. Their work is unlikely to reach the defining point of sustainability on the leadership continuum. Still, leaders must work inclusively to identify widely set guideposts for decisions and actions. They must also acknowledge their own limited knowledge and trust others with whom they collaborate to bring to the table differing and useful ideas (Abrams, 2008).

The commitment of sustainable leaders to fittingly responsive socio-ecological change must also be deep-rooted and lifelong. The sustainability challenges we face collectively did not emerge within a single human lifetime, and they will not be resolved within the lifetimes of any of us alive today. Sustainable leadership is a lifelong commitment to ideas and processes that fittingly address the socio-ecological crises we face. Sustainable leaders are cultural change-makers, and cultural change takes time and patience. Sustainable leaders have hope that their work will contribute to renewed health, integrity, and resiliency of human societies and nature, and they also have the humility to recognize that there are no guarantees of this desired outcome.

Conclusions

The self-destructiveness of exploitive leadership is currently evidenced by the widespread social inequity and environmental destruction that characterize our world today and foretell disaster for all if modern societies do not radically change course. As a fitting response to converging socio-ecological crises, sustainable leadership is a means of coalescing and directing group action in ways that promote living sustainability (Pittman, 2007). Such leadership represents a normative commitment to health, integrity, and resiliency for individuals, communities, and nature. Power for its own sake is antithetical to sustainable leadership.

Sustainable leadership offers a normative, but inclusive, dynamic, and open (imperfect) framework for long-term cultural transformation in service to a more just and resilient world. It serves the needs of people for material sufficiency, dignity, and meaningful and consequential participation in decisions that affect their lives. It takes people seriously as subjects in the world rather than seeing them as tools to be manipulated and controlled in order to serve the ends of a powerful global elite.

Sustainable leadership is a historically and culturally embedded concept and practice. Rather than being inwardly focused on the values of the leader (that may be informed by the “common sense” of powerful but unsustainable systems) or being focused on personal characteristics or individual leadership style, sustainable leadership focuses outwardly in order to create fitting responses to the twin crises of social justice and environmental destruction. These responses are counter-hegemonic and aimed at creating and nurturing reciprocal and sustaining relationships among people and between humans and nature. Sustainable leadership is also an exercise in cultural change. As such, it requires humility, listening, empathy, and taking others and nature seriously as subjects and community members in their own right. Sustainable leadership can embody the best of human agency. If widely practiced, it can contribute to realizing the best possible outcomes in these dangerous times.

Notes

1    This chapter is an extensive and substantive revision of an article by the same author published in the Journal of Sustainability Education (Evans, 2011; copyright held by the author). Material drawn directly from the earlier article does not appear with quotations in this chapter.

2    I place “re” in parentheses here and in other places throughout this essay in recognition that relatively nonhierarchical, place-based cultures and remnants of these cultures remain in diverse places globally. For members of these cultures, the “re” in phrases such as “re-create sustainable leadership” may not apply. The parenthetical “re” also recognizes that, for some peoples and places, examples never have existed or no longer exist to draw upon for sustainable leadership and living, meaning that sustainable social systems must be created for the first time from scratch.

3    See Wheatley (2007) for a discussion of the failings of command and control leadership. This essay is also inspired, in part, by Wheatley’s call for forms of leadership that are up to the task of reinventing the culture and practices of leadership in order to make it inherently life-enhancing, life-giving, and life-supporting rather than life-destroying.

4    Forms of command and control leadership (slavery, for example) have long existed in human history, but the way most of us experience that form of leadership today is through our interactions with many dominant systems of social organization such as the globalized economy. Because the globalized economy organizes the leadership/followership experience of so many people worldwide in such important ways, understanding command and control systems within that system is particularly important to understanding current conceptions of leadership.

5    An important difference between this current economic imperial system and that of colonialism is that capital is now less anchored in and dependent upon nation states as platforms for capital accumulation and political sources of legitimacy. Presently, capital has become mobile and abstract, and its legitimacy in acting independently of nation state controls is supported and enforced through international free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as well as through the World Trade Organization (WTO). The NAFTA treaty even gives multinational corporations chartered in its three signatory nations (the United States, Mexico, and Canada) the right to sue a signatory nation directly for regulatory and other actions deemed “tantamount to expropriation” (which has been at times interpreted to include government regulatory interference with potential profits) (Moyers, 2002).

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