A Sustainability Tour through Bonn
Dr Sandra Gilgan, Head of Unit for the Bonn Research Alliance (BORA) & Co-Lead of the Working Group “Alternative Sustainabilities”, University of Bonn, shares her reflections on the partnership between St Andrews and Bonn.
It was a sunny Tuesday morning when I picked up four wonderful colleagues from the University of St Andrews – Ian, Antje, Lydia and Joseph – just across the street in the hotel to start our small sustainability tour through Bonn. Being able to do this was the result of more than three years of a hearty and trusting exchange on sustainability topics, including different disciplinary, interdisciplinary, ontological and epistemological perspectives, between St Andrews and Bonn. It all started with a staff exchange between two colleagues coordinating the St Andrews Network for Climate, Energy, Environment and Sustainability and myself. They introduced me to a broader circle of colleagues in sustainability studies. It took this circle about a year to start a joint book project on teaching sustainability beyond disciplines, and another good year to start a conversation about collaborating in the St Andrews Centre for Critical Sustainabilities. The visit to Bonn was our initial milestone in this collaboration – to get to know each other’s sustainability environments and conceptualize joint initiatives.
Our first stop that morning was the sustainability campus of the University of Bonn. It encompasses premises that are at the same time agricultural learning facility, production-oriented and experimental farm, and experimental innovation lab. All these are run by Ralf Pude, who is not only an expert in researching perennial plants, but also in translating innovation into practice. He managed to bring ecological packaging made from plant fiber into local supermarkets and building material from plant fiber into model houses. It was not only a learning experience for our guests, but also for me, as our colleague was about to start into a new role in the first Bioeconomy Council of North-Rhine Westphalia, bringing expertise from the campus into local policies. Common ground between Bonn and St Andrews was the importance being laid on research-led teaching and good support of students.
Sunny moods continued in the afternoon when we gathered with a group of Bonn early career researchers, professors and managers to discuss everybody’s take on ‘sustainability’ and ‘critical sustainabilities’ and identify potential synergies to combine interests in concrete activities. This was a valuable exchange on many levels: first of all, for the Bonn group to connect with like-minded people and vice versa. Then, of course, to discuss opportunities and challenges to work on ‘sustainability’ that takes into account diverse understandings of human-nature-relations and a good life, in institutionalized structures of European universities. And finally, this meeting also meant for the Bonn group to meet like-minded people from other faculties, fields of studies and institutions in Bonn. Hosting guests together turned out to be an added value for the hosts, too, showing how important extended collaboration in our (academic) world is.
This value was also highlighted in our second day of the sustainability tour. We started with a great guided tour at the Research Museum Koenig through the latest rainforest exhibition that took ten years to establish. Its creators took real plants and photographs as examples to artificially remodel a two-story rainforest part. Then we went behind the scenes, browsing through large insect collections, before we got a virtual biodiversity tour to Madagascar from Livia Schäffler. Based on her own research, she showed multiple connecting points for further research in combination with social sciences and along sustainable development goals, highlighting the value of trustful, interdisciplinary research to cover the complexity of biodiversity, climate and societal development issues in one single area. How such collaboration can be supported by institutional network initiatives was the core theme over lunch, when we met Jakob Rhyner, former Director of the Bonn Alliance for Sustainability Research, former Vice-Rector of the United Nations University in Europe and former Director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University (UNU-EHS). If you establish an institute representing many colleagues and disciplines or if you set up a structure that connects researchers around sustainability themes across institutions (with different legal entities), is similar in many aspects. Continued dialogue about steering, managing, and leading in the field of sustainability (studies) is wishful for collegial learning on both sides.
The afternoon was dedicated to a global perspective on research and policy advice, with insights into the development of Bonn’s UN campus and a conversation with the current Vice-Rector of the United Nations University in Europe and Director of UNU-EHS, Shen Xiaomeng. In a nutshell, after the relocation of the German capital from Bonn to Berlin in the 1990s, the freed-up urban space at the Rhine attracted many international organizations. The former federal district today hosts 25 UN agencies on the UN campus and is the heart of Bonn as a global hub for international politics and sustainable development, with UNU-EHS at its core. Breaking down the complexity around sustainability and climate issues for policy and people is at the core of UNU-EHS’s new flagship report on Interconnected Disaster Risks, around which we discussed science communication in our fields of research.
Our last station were the Botanic Gardens of the University of Bonn. Custodian Cornelia Löhne gave us an overview of the gardens and greenhouses, being accompanied by a reporter from Deutsche Welle (German international broadcaster) who was interested in the special theme of our tour: colonial traces in the Botanic Gardens. While appreciating the beauty of foreign-origin plants, we were introduced to the difficult paths they took to get to the Gardens. Plant taxonomy bears traces of coloniality and imperiality as well. There was much to think and reflect about which will continue in the future.
At the Botanic Gardens, admiring invasives © Ian Lawson
Probably everyone knows this: you live in a city with beautiful excursion destinations, monuments, museums – but if you live there, you rarely go there. Until you get a visitor who you show around, becoming co-tourist in your own city. The tour with the colleagues from St Andrews felt a bit like that. You are looking at what is actually or supposedly familiar, the sustainability hub Bonn, once again from a certain perspective (critical sustainabilities) and are getting to know it jointly with the guests from a visitor’s perspective. I am glad that we took several days to explore Bonn together and to reflect with a wide range of colleagues. This visit showed me once again how important it is to take time for people in our day-to-day work and for the spaces between established structures – between disciplines, between institutions, between faculties and institutes – to see what opportunities open up here. I look forward to the next steps in our collaboration with StACCS, especially regarding opportunities for early career researchers.