If climate change, resource consumption or mobility transition – attempting to solve environmental problems segregated from one another terminates in an intricate challenge for environmental policy. The reason: the underlying causes are systemic, they can only be solved by a comprehensive societal change. This calls for an integrated societal policy that links objectives and agents. On international level, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an approach in this direction; on national level faced by the German Federal Sustainability Strategy.

The consortium of IÖW, FFU, sociodimensions and kommunikation@arbeit examined, how new alliances with labor unions and charity organizations can leverage a transition-oriented environmental policy and an ambitious sustainability policy. Both the federal level and the state level as well as the municipal level were considered for developing cooperation strategies for a modern, integrated environmental policy.

The project “new alliances for sustainability policy” aimed at identifying potential synergies between environmental policy stakeholders, labor unions and charity organizations and developing cooperation strategies in theory and exemplarily in practice. The diversity of interests, world views, operating logics, and expectations for services needs to be grasped in order to elaborate the conditions for collaborative practices.

In addition to the scientific analysis, the project initiated and supported an agreement process that is supposed to contribute to planning and implementing joint activities between potential partners. To achieve its objectives, the project investigated the following questions:

1. Considering contemporary challenges as well as contemporary environmental policy strategies and programs, how can new debates about the future, and alliances with labor unions and charity organizations succeed?
2. Which issues, challenges and solutions are particularly appropriate, which are less?
3. How can new collaboration strategies be designed, and in how far can a modern, integrated environmental policy support them?

You can find the brochure „new alliances for socio-ecologic transitions“, that summarizes the project’s results, here.