Making Sustainability Mainstream

Today, sustainability is a familiar concept among planners and communities. Many communities have developed some iteration of a sustainability plan, climate action plan, resilience plan, or similar initiative. However, significant disparities persist in the effectiveness of these strategies and plans.

A sustainable society is built on behaviors that are unnecessarily difficult to foster amid today’s public policies, services, and built environment design. To gain broad adoption of sustainable practices, we need a new mentality that makes such practices easier and more attractive than the status quo. This requires two elements: a better understanding of how widespread adoption occurs, and a framework for designing the built environment and its services in ways that make sustainable behaviors and lifestyles the norm and accelerate society’s movement in that direction.

The Rogers innovation adoption curve and the 5A frameworks can work very well together in efforts to direct behavior and lifestyles toward more sustainability and, eventually, make sustainability mainstream by integrating those concepts into planning processes.