The zoom that never quite lands

This article was written for Uncover magazine – From Global to Ground (10th edition). You can read the full magazine here. 

Author: Ajay Kapur is Director of the Academy for Leisure & Events at Breda University of Applied Sciences.

I find my position in this conversation both inspiring and faintly ironic. I lead an academy dedicated to leisure and events – one of the largest contributors to global carbon emissions, land use, water consumption and social inequality, depending on which indicators you apply. It is also one of the most powerful domains for reimagining what a good life looks like, which is equally important. This tension is not a problem to be managed. It is the very heart of our work.

Complexity science is useful here – not merely as a rhetorical flourish, but as a genuine diagnostic tool. Sustainability transitions are complex phenomena involving the co-evolution of diverse actors and components, where path dependency means that minor events can lead to major consequences. In plainer language: the system we are trying to change is the same system we are embedded in, and the tools we reach for are largely those provided by that system. This is sometimes called a ‘wicked problem’ – not as an expression of frustration, but as a technical designation. Traditional scientific and policy approaches are increasingly seen as inadequate, or even counterproductive, for problems of this kind, where societal systems are inherently complex. Curriculum reform, a new research centre and a circular procurement policy are all reasonable interventions, but none of them, alone or together, resolve the underlying tension.

What does begin to resolve it, in my experience, is surprise. Not the manufactured surprise of a provocative lecture, but the genuine kind – the moment when a student's working assumptions turn out to be instructively wrong.

I see this most clearly when students engage with event organisers navigating current sustainability regulation. Many of our students arrive without strong environmental convictions. They are pragmatic, professionally oriented, not especially idealistic  – which is fine, and honest. What they do not expect is to discover that the industry has already made significant strides without them. Dutch event organisers today operate under a growing framework of municipal sustainability requirements, permit conditions tied to energy use and waste management, and procurement criteria that increasingly demand measurable environmental accountability. Compliance is not simple. It requires documentation, supplier audits, logistical redesign and genuine expertise. Students who assumed sustainability was a values question – optional, aspirational, belonging to a particular type of person – find themselves looking at a skills gap. The sector does not need them to be idealists. It needs them to be competent in a domain they had not taken seriously. That realisation lands differently, and more durably, than any amount of persuasion.

This is, I think, what complexity science means when it points away from optimal solutions and towards the conditions for emergence. Networked actors can display adaptive learning and emergent self-organisation, with innovation arising not from a central plan but from a plurality of experimental approaches. Regulation, in this framing, is not the enemy of creativity – it is one of the pressures that forces adaptation. And education's role is not to hand students a framework for a stable world, but to build their capacity to navigate one that keeps shifting beneath them. That means consciously developing students' capacity for solutions to complex and wicked problems – which looks rather different from training them to apply existing models to predictable conditions.

I am struck, reading through this edition, by how many of the contributors have chosen to stand in exactly this uncomfortable position – bringing rigorous thinking to questions that resist clean answers, sharing work in progress rather than only polished conclusions. From regenerative placemaking in Amsterdam to music that matters in Ukraine, from plant-based and hospitable Brabant to the creative economies and cultural heritages of KreativEU, what I see is not just intellectual quality but a disposition: the willingness to engage publicly with difficulty. That willingness is itself a form of contribution, and it should not go unremarked.

I am less consistently good at this than I would like to be – in my own institute, in my own decisions. The campus that aspires to planetary responsibility still runs on familiar procurement logic, familiar travel budgets, familiar incentive structures (but we are trying!). This is not a reason for despair. It is, in complexity terms, the current state of a system that is, in principle, capable of tipping. And systems tip, more often than we expect, because enough people across enough nodes quietly decide to behave differently. The contributors to this magazine are among those people. I hope our students are too – once the surprise has done its work.