The State of the Art of Environmental Leadership Scholarship

Session Submission Type: Panel Discussion

Short Description

Earth and her inhabitants face extreme pressure from threats such as climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, wars, and environmental refugees. Scholars are increasingly placing these challenges and their solutions in a leadership context. Session panelists and attendees will jointly reflect on the state of the art of environmental leadership scholarship to examine the challenges and possibilities of leadership aimed at fostering a more sustainable world. Panelists will apply a critical leadership studies perspective to consider themes such as leadership for sustainability, post-heroic climate leadership, changing mindsets, and the eco-leadership paradigm.

Detailed Abstract

The study of leadership took shape over the course of the 20th century, largely in response to the needs of business, the military, education, and social movements. Environmental leadership (Gallagher, 2012), or sustainability leadership (Redekop, 2010; Western, 2010) was not part of the lexicon. Leadership scholars from all frames and vantage points are taking on the task of describing the challenges and opportunities of applying leadership scholarship to address environmental challenges (Bendell, 2015; Burns, et al., 2015; Meijerink & Stiller, 2013). In 2017, as Earth and her inhabitants face extreme pressure from environmental threats such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and the rise in environmental refugees, and an uncertain response from national and global institutions to confront them, scholars are redoubling their efforts to place these challenges in a leadership context. This discussion panel will focus its efforts on catalyzing a vibrant discussion on the state of the art of environmental leadership scholarship in turbulent times.

This panel will provide fresh insights and critical perspectives on the vibrant and growing field of environmental leadership. Participants’ work has built on existing scholarship to examine in critical detail the challenges and possibilities of leadership aimed at fostering a more sustainable world. This panel discussion will reflect on evolving theoretical perspectives and approaches to confront the ways in which the field of leadership may grow and adapt to address the increasingly pressing environmental challenges that we collectively face. Participants will offer innovative approaches to leadership from a post-industrial and ecological vantage point, highlighting the emerging insights of critical leadership studies (Collinson, 2014) and other perspectives, including post-heroic approaches (Crevani, et al., 2007), the interior work of environmental leadership, and the eco-leadership paradigm.

Panelists will offer insights into a critical constructivist paradigm for sustainability leadership, in which such leadership is not offered only as a dominant social context of leadership theory and practice both now and in the future, but actually connects with and transforms the field of leadership studies through critical, developmental, and constructivist lenses. Environmental leadership for sustainability will be explored in the context of four worldview shifts that occur when an individual chooses an environmental sustainability framework from which to lead: from inert to living systems, from separation to connection, from closed to open systems, and from short-term to long-term thinking. The panel will also consider how insights from critical theory can be synthesized to argue that mainstream paradigms in leadership and leadership education are counter to sustainability and should not be incorporated into sustainability efforts unchallenged. Finally, panelists will consider an eco-leadership paradigm, which takes leadership from “the isolated, role-based actions of individuals to the innovative, contextual interactions that occur across an entire social system” (Lichtenstein et al., 2006, p. 2) and provides insight into how ecological approaches to leadership are enacted.

The panel recognizes that an important goal of advancing the understanding and practice of environmental leadership is to protect and promote the natural environment and humanity within its natural ‘home’. That is to say that concepts and understandings of leadership emerged as part of an extractive industrial system. This panel will ask its participants and attendees to re-think what leadership looks like in an ecologically sustainable biological system. The panel plans to incorporate themes such as social justice, peace, equality, and human rights within the discussion. Panelists also hope to reinforce and develop the emerging insight that the biosphere is the ultimate context for all forms of leadership, and that placing leadership into its environmental context transforms and enriches our understanding of ‘leadership’ itself.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Scholarship

Chair

• Deborah R. Gallagher, Duke University

Presenters

• Kathleen E. Allen, Allen and Associates

• Benjamin Redekop, Christopher Newport University

• Rian J. Satterwhite, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

• D. Adam Cletzer, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Eric K. Kaufman, Virginia Tech