Latest Update: First Roundtable conducted on 15-May-22.
See: https://iittp.ac.in/home-events-list#roundtable
Notification of Abstract Acceptance: All Accept & Reject emails have been processed by 02-Mar-2022.
IIT Tirupati and IIT Hyderabad are pleased to announce an Inter Disciplinary Conference on Sustainability and Crisis.
The conference is guided by the following overarching question: What happens to sustainability during crisis? The conference invites interdisciplinary research that seeks to delve deeper in the various facets of this overarching question.
Crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on economies across the world and severely affected the well-being of marginalized communities (HLPE, 2020; Staddon et al., 2020). Societal measures to contain the pandemic may have been devastating for businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (Sheth 2020). Effects of the crisis will be felt in the long term and recovery may be slow (Constable & Kushner, 2021; Gale, 2021).
For instance:
- A study amongst fishing communities in Bangladesh revealed that 71% of households were unable to meet food requirements during the crisis, 45% felt that their local healthcare centres were not equipped to deal with the crisis, and water access had become difficult in communities where limited availability of tube wells meant that social distancing requirements were not observed (Sunny et al., 2020; Nath et al. 2021).
- Similarly in India, during the last financial year youth unemployment rates may have increased by 10%. 28% of such job losses may be associated with the country’s agriculture sector (Elder and Weidenkaf 2020). Such increase in unemployment may not be limited to the agricultural sector. It is likely to have spread across different livelihoods and demographic groups.
- In Brazil, scholars fear that Covid-19 may decimate indigenous communities (Cupertino et al. 2020).
- In Europe, the pandemic is expected to escalate migration-related complications (as is being currently witnessed at the Polish-Belarus border) threatening peace and stability in the region (Bozorgmeher et al. 2020).
- Consumer spending in China, Western Europe and the United States have dropped by 11 to 26 percent during the pandemic (Mckinsey, 2021).
The effects of such crisis often depend on the nature of actors (Ardelt 1998), households (Moser 1998), organizations (Huang 2008) ,governing entities (Rivolin 2017) society (Castels 1983) or other levels of conceptual aggregation . For instance, consider households: while all households suffer from crisis, marginalized households bear the brunt of suffering (Butler and Adamowski, 2015; Nath et al. 2021). Crisis situations enshrine systemic inequalities resulting in a vicious cycle of increasing vulnerability amongst those who are the most vulnerable (HLPE, 2020; Staddon et al., 2020) as access to resources are severely constrained under such circumstances (Rakib et al., 2019a, Rakib et al., 2019b; Nath et al. 2021). Similarly, how different kinds of organizations respond to crisis often depends on the nature and type of crisis (Parameswar et al., 2020).
Multi-lateral organizations have warned that such crisis may become more common in the future (Constable & Kushner, 2021; Gale, 2021). While such crises may become more frequent, their occurrence and impact are characterized by uncertainty (de Bruijn et al., 2020; Makridakis & Taleb, 2009) for which actors, households, organizations, governments and societies need to prepare. Nonetheless, limited research appears to have been conducted on such crises and their effects (Parameswar et al., 2020). Based on a thorough bibliometric study of black-swan events and such crises, Parameswar et al., (2020) call for more research on events that have ‘high impact’ but ‘low likelihood of occurrence’ such as the Covid-19 crisis.
Limited research also appears to have been conducted on what happens to sustainability concerns during crises. For instance, consider sustainability goals that governments and organizations set for themselves. What happens to such goals during such crisis? During such crisis, do such entities pursue trade-offs amongst social, economic and ecological goals? What drives these trade-offs? Or, do crisis provide them with opportunities to find synergies across such goals? Or, are sustainability concerns sacrificed in order to meet basic survival needs (Nath and Arrawatia, 2021)? Similarly, there is no clarity on what happens to livelihood-related sustainability concerns or migration-related sustainability concerns. Theoretical literature on sustainability is characterized by a wide range of such questions that need the attention of researchers, irrespective of disciplinary background.
This conference seeks to analyze such phenomenon in detail. It is guided by the following overarching question: What happens to sustainability during crisis? The conference invites interdisciplinary research which seek to delve deeper into the various facets of this overarching question.
The conference shall be conducted online.
More details shall be provided later on the website.