Advancing sustainability through change and innovation: a co-evolutionary perspective

This article addresses the problem of how change and innovation can create a fuller voice for ecological interests in organizations and public policy, raising issues about change mechanisms at the institutional versus organizational level. First, it suggests that the newer, systems-based and inclusive approaches to organizational development practice and theory may overcome shortcomings of earlier approaches to planned change. Second, it argues that co-evolutionary approaches that use complex adaptive systems thinking will more effectively structure such third-generation interventions by focusing on issues at the institutional level. Third, the article examines a dialectical model of institutional change which incorporates activist input and channels conflict into innovative outcomes. Finally, it presents a case example of how a dialectical model combined with a co-evolutionary perspective could foster the institutional change required to facilitate the integration of ecological priorities into the human systems of organizations.