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Topic Review
Features, Topics, and Barriers in Scientific Collaboration
Collaboration is defined as “a joint effort towards a common goal”. Collaboration drives complexity in organizational problems and is the key to innovation at the intra- and inter-organizational levels. Exploring scientific collaboration in large groups implies exploring human, social, and organizational factors.
  • 585
  • 18 Oct 2023
Topic Review Peer Reviewed
Future Literacy and Cultural Heritage Education: Integrating Anticipatory Competencies for Adaptive Cultural Sustainability
Futures Literacy, as defined and promoted by UNESCO, is the capability to imagine, question, and use the future as a resource for better understanding the present and acting with intention. When applied to Cultural Heritage Education, it reframes heritage from a static object of preservation into a dynamic anticipatory system that evolves through dialogue between past, present, and future. This integrative approach enables learners and communities to strengthen what can be called cultural adaptive capacity, understood as the ability to ensure continuity of identity and traditions, to promote responsive innovation in the face of change, and to transmit heritage knowledge across generations. This entry situates Futures Literacy within a wider theoretical framework that includes complexity theory, anticipatory systems, and sustainability education. It emphasizes that heritage education must increasingly address uncertainty, diversity of perspectives, and interconnected challenges such as globalization, climate change, and cultural transformations. UNESCO Futures Literacy Laboratories conducted in different regions of the world, as well as ICCROM’s foresight initiatives, provide concrete examples of how anticipatory competences can be fostered in varied cultural contexts, demonstrating both universal patterns and context-specific adaptations. By embedding Futures Literacy into heritage education, cultural heritage becomes a living resource for nurturing resilience, global citizenship, and creativity. It allows communities not only to preserve their legacy but also to reimagine it as a driver of innovation and inclusion. Ultimately, this perspective highlights the potential of education to enhance cultural sustainability, foster intergenerational solidarity, and cultivate temporal justice, preparing societies to face the uncertainties of the future with confidence and responsibility.
  • 54
  • 04 Nov 2025
Topic Review Peer Reviewed
Criminal Ecosystems: Autopoiesis, Adaptation, and Resilience in Organized Crime
Criminal ecosystems are durable social systems in which differentiated criminal functions become recurrently interdependent across organizations, networks, illicit markets, institutional actors, financial facilitators, territorial brokers, and social environments. The concept applies when coercion, illicit accumulation, political protection, territorial regulation, and other specialized capacities depend on one another over time and become structurally coupled with institutional, sociocultural, spatial, or technological conditions. A criminal ecosystem is therefore not defined by the presence of a particular organization, market, or territory, nor by resilience itself. It is identified by functional differentiation, recurrent interdependence, structural coupling, and temporal reproduction. Complex adaptive systems theory explains how decentralized interactions can generate adaptation, substitution, and emergent order, while autopoietic social systems theory explains how recurring communications stabilize expectations and reproduce boundaries. Digital infrastructure can mediate financial and transnational functions without constituting a separate operational dimension in the present framework. This distinction allows resilience, reconfiguration, displacement, and decline to be examined as empirical outcomes rather than assumed properties of the ecosystem.
  • 38
  • 03 Sep 2026
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