Building upon the Millennium Development Goals, in the 2030 agenda for Sustainable development the United Nations established 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These are expected to become a key reference point for the development of mainstream global policies in the coming years, and to spur a greater focus on sustainability not only in theoretical perspectives but also, and mainly, in practical applications in every field of human action.
 
An increasing global effort on “renewed sustainable development” with influences and constraints at multiple scales (from global to national, regional and local) can already be observed. We understand “renewed sustainable development” as the development of a former concept, widely explored in multiple scientific domains (from planning and management to decision science, from environmental science to economics and econometrics, from social science to operative research) that involves increasing awareness of the long-term environmental and social consequences of everyday human activities. Hence this renovation concerns the recognition of the need to assess sustainability by taking into account the balance that needs to be struck between the use of resources and their reconstitution in a proper time frame.
 
Such new starting point follows excellent failures, among which prominent is that of the Kyoto protocol, which showed how a global agreement on challenging objectives can be undermined if human communities play the sole role of “les agìs” in such process. We refer to the general case of top down approach promoted without any effective inclusive actions for people and local communities: people “suffer” the decision without opportunities to participate actively in the policy making process. 
Renovation entails innovation: through the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations launched a permanent call for innovation where sustainability is understood as a cross-sectoral value that needs to be operationalized and measured, in order for it to underpin effective actions in every resource-consuming sector, therefore challenging lond-standing knowledge, processes, and behaviors.
Innovation, in turns, implies complexity: both research and technical applications need to steer towards interdisciplinarity; moreover, rigorous assessment methods are needed in order to allow for comparisons and rankings, and in this respect researchers and practitioners do not start from scratch, as they can draw useful lessons from available outstanding projects and best practice applications.
If we take it that ‘assessing sustainability’ means ‘assessing long term impacts’ on environmental and/or human resources, then to deliver products or supply chain models with required necessary features in a resource-scarce world is a mandatory innovation. If we consider social sustainability, then the inclusiveness degree of social dynamics and policies represents an up-to-date indicator to be defined especially in the current EU development policy-making. If we look at sustainability assessment in human activities (such as agriculture, industry, land use, urban development, including infrastructure), then environmental risks, energy issues, climate change represent challenging arenas for both academic investigations and operative applications as regards decision making, production, market and governance.
This list could become much longer if we enlarged the scope of subject areas or implementation domains. That’s the case if will focus on the hot spots: natural resources (including water, soil and biodiversity), food production, energy production and consumption, land take, technological innovations, social inclusion, as well as on their combinations.
 
The Workshop will pay particular attention to methodologies, research reports, case study assessment concerning the various combinations of these and other areas in a multi- and interdisciplinary way.
General research questions to be answered:
How to enhance effectiveness in policy making, planning, development programs etc? Looking at actions or procedures based on (or stemming from) Sustainable Development Goals or widely applying sustainability principles.
Assessing sustainability through place-based approach: innovation in methods and practices.
Do assessment matrices help? Comparing different quantitative and qualitative approaches in sustainability evaluation.
How to learn from failures and to discuss success examples: the critical appraisal of ongoing concrete practices