Report
This interview was conducted while collecting themes for student thesis from different partners in society. The respondents were three environmental strategists at Huddinge Kommun, the municipality where Södertörn University is located, south of Stockholm city. The municipality has a very mixed population, both homeowners dispersed over a wide area and major building blocks with a mixture of apartments for tenants and condominiums. As a peri-urban area, there are still semi-rural areas with agricultural and forest lands, providing for an amount of outdoor activities. The municipality is very expansive, with advanced plans of establishing itself as the “South Stockholm Business Centre”. This would be established in the same area as Södertörn Uiversity, with a communication hub with trainstation, tramways and bus connections throughout the rural areas of the municipality. These plans are challenging to the environmental strategists in various ways, as they both has to safeguard the environment and being creative for the development of the municipality. Hence, they are in the midst of the challenges that sustainable development is about. The following provides some examples of tasks that the environmental strategist are struggling with.

Summary of the interview
Circular economy and recycling 2.0
The establishment of the Business Centre means that land previously used for industry close to the railway will be used for office buildings and shopping malls. Among the activities that need to move is the collection depot for recyclable goods. This has created complaints among the users, bth citizens and enterprizes as the most logic would be to relocate from a central area to a rather remote location. The strategists are there for pondering if there could be other solutions than a drive in collection depot, what they think of as recycling 2.0. Such ideas needs to be anchored with both the companies running the logistics, to find solutions that will not be too expensive, and equally or more environmentally hazardous than the current ones. It would also need to be anchored with the citizens opinions of easy ways to deposit their redundant goods.
The strategists are also thinking of opportunities that the redundant goods in some cases could be of reused rather than recycled. They refer to trials made at daycare centres where parents can leave clothes their kids have grown out of in exchange for larger sized clothes left by other parents. Thinking of extending this to schools, immediately met objections as kids might not like to appear in clothes that previously were seen on their older friends. Circulating second hand clothes between schools in different parts of the municipality could be a solution, but require a more advance type of logistics. Similarly, extending this type of exchange to other types of household goods as a kind of service from the municipality would require creative thinking and a dialogue with both citizens and entrepreneurs.
The recycling 2.0 idea is a typical example of a task that would require systems thinking, as it is a complex issue with many actors involved and with many variables where the outcome is uncertain and probably counterintuitive.
Conclusions for higher education
This example provided by the environmental strategists, as well as other examples concerning climate qware procurement practices showed that higher education cannot lean back on “things as they are”, but must prepare students for thinking of things “as they could become”. This require much more of training on understanding evolutionary processes, that is, what are possible pathways from here to there and what should guide the selections necessary for evolutions. The Unesco framework on sustainability competences seem to very relevant for the type of challenges described by the environmental strategist in this interview.

Specific suggestions on training on complexity and systems thinking
The example of Recycling 2.0 shows that a study of systems transformations would be useful as preparation of students for tasks like this. The concepts of stock and flows from System Dynamic analysis would be very useful as a starting point, as well as the type of feedback loops needed to change behaviours in the system. The transformations needed might also require a shift of the objectives of the recycling process. The example could very we be transformed to a student task, where a mapping of the current recycling system could be used as a point of departure and the students challenged to come up with ideas and at least partial solutions to system changes.