Sustainability Revamping Systems promote participation in sustainable development processes through the formulation of innovative actions based on assessments of current situation and possible prospects. This cognitive process of reaching decisions requires time for reflection, awareness and commitment to formulate views and suggestions on the basis of what is known in specific local contexts. Sustainability Revamping Systems are additional to the current decision making and fully respect institutional frameworks, structures and mechanisms of the concerned local contexts while contributing to their democratic life.

Sustainability is the reconciliation between humanity and nature, since “nature is society and society is also nature”(*). Participation is of a paramount importance for sustainability.

Participation is the condition of sharing in common with the other components of a system, the act of sharing in the activities of a system. In the case of human beings, participation is to share in rights, opportunities of and responsibilities for decision making. Several stakeholders are concerned: for instance, public authorities, social partners, civil society organisations, companies, citizens, practitioners, researchers and people experiencing hardship, problems and difficulties. The mobilisation of stakeholders is a necessity of, and a driving factor for developing relationships that allow a system to live.

System is the globally organised unity of interrelationships between elements, actions or individuals (**). The quality of a systems depends upon the quality of its internal and external interrelationships and is determined by its dynamics as a recursive combination of parts that are at the same time parts of a shared system and individual systems. In other words, the quality of relationships allows a system to co-evolve and self-organises itself. Human beings seem to have contributed to solve several problems, but also to create them to a wider system, the Earth, because of misunderstanding (e.g. quality of life as a mere economic and technological growth), segmented knowledge (e.g. diciplinary hyperspecialisation) and actions (e.g. lack of integrated strategies and of coordination between different policies) that divided themeselves while separating themselves from nature.

That is why human beings need to reorganise and renovate understanding, knowledge and ways of acting. It is an ongoing process of revision, stimulated by the capacity of thinking and acting in a recursive way through the combination of different dimensions of time (past, present and future) and space (global and local) where the life of a system is embedded.

(*) Beck U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, London
(**) Morin E. (1977), La Méthode – 1. La Nature de la Nature, Éditions du Seuil, Paris

For these reasons, Sustainability Revamping Systems constitute a platform of approaches, methods and tools developed through different but converging projects.

Approach is the theoretical framework that makes clear ways of thinking about specific issues. It contains concepts that allow researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders to share a common language and to formulate strategies in a given context.

Methods form the operational framework of a project; they describe how the theoretical framework can be put in operation according to the project context.

Tools are the practical means that allow methods (i.e. the operational framework) to be implemented in a specific context while following the theoretical framework of the project.

All persons who become member of the Sustainability Revamping Systems have a free of charge access to a series of tools, including a Demo of customised on-line systems, while the general public can easily download the associated examples.

Customised on-line systems Demo

The on-line systems support the participation of stakeholders in all the phases of a new project. Stakeholders evaluate the current situations and decide innovative actions through easy manageable questionnaires. A simplified Demo is here available to show how to carry out this particular task.                                     Exercise Demo Stakeholders constitute a virtual and interactive forum that produces several points of views and suggestions. Trained persons process all results, additional information and data according to the project indicators. The on-line systems produce automatically reports that are utilised to elaborate customised publications. The on-line systems can be fully utilised by the interested persons only when they initiate a new project because the systems are continuously updated to fit their specific needs.

Approaches, methods and tools, so far developed in an integrated way with environmental, social, economic and employment issues, concern the following themes and challenges:


Sustainability Revamping Systems constitute an evolution of SQM (Sustainable Quality Management).