Sustainability

Thomas Pfister, Martin Schweighofer, André Reichel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134688128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Sustainability as a reference frame for dealing with the interconnection of environmental, economic and social issues on a global scale is not only characterized by complex problems and long-term strategies but also by differences and disagreements with regard to its meanings and how they should be realised. Therefore, Rather than seeking a single most appropriate definition of Sustainability, the main focus of this book is on how specific Sustainability problems are defined by whom and in which contexts, what solutions are pursued to tackle them, and which effects they have in practice. This account of the social nature of Sustainability is intended to assist its readers to better understand the complexities, dynamism, and ambivalence of this concept as well as to find their own position in relation to it. For this purpose, the book traces the historical development of the larger discourse on Sustainability and investigates responses to three grand Sustainability challenges: climate change, energy, and agricultural food production. It suggests that promoting Sustainability requires continuous and active care and is inseparable from political debate about the normative foundations of society.

1

Introduction

The idea of Sustainability has become a global norm that is adopted and pursued by a vast number of people and organisations worldwide. International organisations, national, regional, and local governments assumed this idea as a political objective and developed strategies and practices for its realisation. Businesses publish Sustainability reports and have specialist staff to monitor their ecological and social impact. They practice corporate social responsibility (CSR) and market specific products on the basis of their Sustainability. Moreover, many scientific disciplines have integrated the analysis of challenges to Sustainability and possible responses in their research agendas ranging from meteorology and oceanography to engineering, economics, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Finally, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements play a particularly important role in defining the meanings of Sustainability, key challenges, responses, as well as in scrutinising governments and businesses in terms of Sustainability. On the whole, the idea of Sustainability is meanwhile so embedded in the agendas and everyday practices of those agents that not many dare to claim openly that they would prefer to be unsustainable or do not care at all.

However, what exactly does it mean if, for example, a society is aiming for Sustainability? Does it mean that this society should focus on becoming ‘carbon neutral’ with regard to the operations of its economy and the everyday activities of its citizens? Or should it pursue more ambitious goals and seek to reduce its overall ecological footprint by not using more resources than the world’s ecosystems can reproduce and by not causing more emissions and waste than they can absorb? Would such a development be possible by ‘greening’ the currently dominant modes of production and consumption through technological innovations and ethical consumption? Should our societies more generally seek technological solutions to the most pressing Sustainability challenges? How should we assess risky and uncertain technologies such as nuclear power, climate engineering, carbon capture and storage, or genetically modified organisms (GMOs)? Or is promoting Sustainability rather about transforming life styles, everyday practices, and culture? Would Sustainability even require a more fundamental re-orientation away from a globalised economy continuously seeking to maximise growth? Would sustainable development not also include a strong element of social justice? Moreover, would it also not imply that politicians should consider the impact of their decisions on future generations? And what about those living in the poorer parts of the world? Does the idea of Sustainability imply that societies redirect some of their wealth in order to increase the well-being of those people who are much poorer? Is it just basic common sense to be sustainable or are we living in times of much more pressing crisis and urgency? Finally, one important aspect must not be forgotten: the actual effects of the idea of Sustainability remain limited. Ecological pressures and social disparities persist and in many cases increase. Hence, one could also ask whether sustainable development is a useful concept at all or whether it is not more than a rhetorical frame people use strategically to make them look responsible or naively to feel good.

It seems that each of these questions has its relevance and that each question captures important aspects of Sustainability and how this concept is used in real world interactions. On the one hand, Sustainability is a concept that has entered the everyday life of politicians, bureaucrats, business managers and activists from the global to the local level. On the other hand, even a brief first look at the multiple contexts in which it is used, reveals a multiplicity of understandings and activities. Helping readers to make sense of this plurality of uses of Sustainability and to navigate more comfortably between them is a central aim of this book.

The book outlines Sustainability as a key idea that informs contemporary social practice and order. This idea is characterised by the complexity of the problems and goals it aims to capture. Moreover, this implies that Sustainability comes with different meanings and is related to different practices at different times, in different places, by different actors. To make matters worse, this implies that attempts to define challenges to Sustainability and to promote responses regularly run into tensions and conflicts with others – even if they are not generally opposed to the idea. In other words, Sustainability is an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1956), which means that its complexity, variability, and interpretive flexibility will stay and continue to create tensions, contradictions, and conflict. Therefore, this book aims to make sense of these characteristics rather than attempting to prescribe one particular definition or set of related activities. At the same time, the book does not attempt to provide a panoptic account of all present and historical meanings used since this idea entered the global normative landscape. Instead, it operates at a slightly more abstract level offering an account on the social nature of Sustainability that explains its hybridity, dynamism, and ambivalence.

By now, it should be clear that this brief account is mainly written from a perspective of the social sciences. Hence, the book treats the idea of Sustainability as a social phenomenon and struggles to overcome related challenges and to promote transformations towards this goal as essentially social processes. Of course, most challenges to Sustainability are closely connected with the materiality of natural environments and human artefacts, for example, the atmosphere, oceans, soil, and plants, as well as photo-voltaic panels, electricity grids, and nuclear reactors. Moreover, the social science perspective fully acknowledges the importance of the natural sciences in this context. In order to gain thorough understanding of the most pressing problems of un-sustainability and to formulate strategies to counter them is in many cases impossible without the sophisticated expertise of natural scientists and engineers. However, even the most sophisticated models and most certain knowledge do not determine appropriate actions.¹ In contrast, a perspective from the social sciences emphasises exactly those (inter)actions that are necessary when people define complex and large-scale problems, when they formulate values and objectives they want to achieve, and when they search for ways how to realise them. Such situations always involve room for (differing) interpretations, different options, choices, norms, and interests as well as winners and losers. In short, the way – or transformation – towards greater Sustainability is always political (see also Scoones, Leach, & Newell, 2015).

More specifically, this book approaches the key idea of Sustainability with a focus on how it operates in practice. Therefore, rather than seeking a single most appropriate substantive definition of Sustainability, our interest is more on how specific Sustainability problems are defined, what solutions are pursued to tackle them, and which effects they have in practice. Sometimes they cooperate but often they find themselves in competition with other understandings and actors. Moreover, such attempts to become more sustainable will rarely be restricted to a single sphere, say politics or science, but mostly extend across different arenas at the same time.

In theoretical terms, this view on transformation projects and Sustainability in practice is grounded in the broader and more general discourses about practice theory. Theories of social practice have a long tradition and can be found in many nuances in the social sciences. The illustrious group of authors contributing to this body of literature includes, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Judith Butler, Harold Garfinkel, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Theodore Schatzki, Bruno Latour, and Michael Lynch. Their theories differ in emphasis and detail but all of them conceptualise practice as the basic unit of social analysis – in contrast to individuals or social structures. According to Andreas Reckwitz,

A practice (…) is a routinised type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, things and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.

(Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249)

More recently, practice theories have been applied to Sustainability issues, but mainly to show the difficulties to transform arrangements of practices that produce Sustainability problems as side effects, for example, when the air conditioning and heating have become more or less invisible infrastructures required for the smooth performance of practices of clothing (mainly in suits) in office environments (Shove, 2003). On the other hand, social practice theories are not rigid or static. Especially, academics from science and technology studies have demonstrated the relevance of practices for the production of new knowledge and technologies (Knorr Cetina, 2001; Latour, 1987; Lynch, 1993). All of those more recent uptakes of practice with regard to Sustainability as well as science and technology also emphasise the embeddedness of practice within the material world. For example, farming practices developed differently in different places because they have to deal with very different environmental conditions such as weather, soil, and temperature. Moreover, in many cases, material and social aspects will overlap in farming practices, for example, in a large farm, which produces for the world market with large machineries and resource input.

Negotiations at a United Nations climate conference, decentralised energy production by local energy cooperatives, or the certification of fair trade products are all different practices, each consisting of specific elements, knowledge, meanings, and material elements (see Shove, Pantzar & Watson, 2012). On the one hand, human agents need to know what situation they are in and how to act accordingly – which practices to enact. On the other hand, this requires that others are able to recognise a specific practice even if its meaning is not explicitly stated. This is possible, when practices achieve a degree of regularity or, in other words, constitute social order. Moreover, practices can be disrupted by external events, changes in the material world, or by other practices intentionally or unintentionally intervening in a particular order. These could, for example, be practices of innovation, critique, and resistance. All of them are relevant with regard to Sustainability. Building an order that is more sustainable requires establishing transforming and establishing extensive regimes of different practices that implicitly or explicitly address particular Sustainability problems. Moreover, given the political nature of such processes, critique, contestation, compromise, and other innovations remain essential elements throughout (otherwise they would break down).

How does this theoretical basis influence the understanding of Sustainability as an idea? Sustainability needs to be thought of as embedded in different social practices, for example, practices of writing academic papers, newspaper articles or blog posts, giving speeches, or holding debates is the material one has to investigate what specific actors mean when referring to Sustainability. In the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘the meaning of a word is its use in language’ (1953 no. 43) – how it is used in practice. Hence, if we are speaking about meanings and practices of Sustainability, we still assume that meanings are part of and embedded in practice. In addition to these discursive practices of defining, regulating, elaborating, and contesting the notion of Sustainability, there are practices people pursue who want to be more sustainable without making it explicit. For example, some people use public transport rather than cars, some farmers adopt practices of organic farming, and some scientists gather satellite data to feed computer simulations and to determine particularly critical thresholds after which the negative effects of global warming would increase significantly. This points to the more general issue of all those mundane practices from cooking, to farming, from vacationing to global logistics, which could be more or less sustainable. They pose serious and often very difficult questions with regard to how certain Sustainability challenges could be overcome and how unsustainable societies could be transformed.

In order to make sense of the multiple and contested uses of Sustainability and related practices, we trace, for example, phases and contexts when certain meanings and implicit practices have stabilised. In this manner, the next chapter identifies several major phases of the global debate on Sustainability, each related to particular concerns, objectives, problem analysis, and agents. Moreover, Chapters 3–5 focus on more specific challenges to Sustainability and identify several stabilised constellations of more specific practices and meanings as well as specific agents promoting them. Such more specific contexts could be described as specific ‘projects’ carried by certain networks of agents, tackling different challenges to Sustainability, and following different meanings and aspects of this idea. They can develop around a common language, institutions, shared procedures, or specific technologies and infrastructures.

Before this notion of Sustainability in practice is further explored, the remainder of this chapter introduces some key terms and explicates the focus, structure, and omissions of this rather short treatise. To begin with a working definition, Sustainability can be understood in a narrow physical sense, for example, as an equilibrium between all material flows that go into the economy (i.e. resources) and the material output in terms of waste and emissions. This is, for example, the view on the earth as a closed ecological system that was prominent in the report Limits to Growth or Herman Daly’s physical conceptualisation of a steady-state economy embedded in a limited biosphere, where throughput and material output of the economy are in balance with input of non-renewable resources (Daly, 1977).

However, in 1987, when the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) presented its famous report Our Common Future (often cited as the ‘Brundtland Report’ after the Commission’s chair Gro Harlem Brundtland) and introduced the concept of sustainable development to the global policy arena, it included much more than physical analysis and material flows. Instead, it defined sustainable development in terms of human needs and equity creating one of the most influential definitions to the present day: ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987 part I, chapter 2, no. 1).

As we will discuss in the next chapter, the history of Sustainability is to a lesser extent about the emergence of a new idea but rather about new connections and realignments of several ideas that have been established for a very long time. Ecological concerns about environmental impacts of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems are the most recent and central source of the Sustainability discourse. Concerns about persisting global inequalities constitute another core issue.

Despite the seriousness of these disparities between global North and South and despite the importance of related concerns, this book will mainly use the more general term Sustainability (not generally including the development aspect). In part, this reflects the main focus of this book on Sustainability challenges mainly caused by western/northern states. For the greater part, however, this use reflects the various degrees and shifts in meanings, emphasis, and composition that the key idea of Sustainability has undergone since its introduction to global politics by the WCED. In fact, in many instances global equity is less prominent than environmental aspects of Sustainability. At the same time, issues of global action, distribution, and equity feature prominently throughout the whole study. Finally, in order to distinguish the main topic of this book from more colloquial uses of the word such as in a ‘sustainable budget’ or a ‘sustainable competitive advantage’, we follow Andy Stirling (2009) by using Sustainability with a capital ‘S’ as a more specific key idea of human thought.

Overall, enquiring about the meaning of Sustainability as a contemporary key idea requires attention to the various meanings-in-use and practices that are mobilised by different agents in order to realise it in specific contexts. Moreover, this contextualised and practical nature of Sustainability requires that related challenges and struggles are broken down in more detailed enquiries but also re-assembled into larger pictures of general crosscutting themes and complex problems. The following chapter rather moves in the latter direction, describing the history of Sustainability in terms of larger patterns that have remained dominant at particular times. Then, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 present more detailed investigations of specific themes, while the final chapter returns to reflecting on the key idea of Sustainability as a whole.

As mentioned, Chapter 2 takes a historical look at the development of the larger discourse on Sustainability. It inquires how particular meanings and elements of Sustainability became dominant at certain times and distinguishes three main phases. This historical narrative is far from linear but characterised by significant junctures, a consistent plurality of different outlooks, and essential contestedness even within phases of longer stability.

The next three chapters look at three grand Sustainability challenges: climate change, energy, and agricultural food production. The chapters largely follow the same structure. They analyse the main problems in these contexts from a Sustainability perspective, illustrate how certain projects respond to these challenges, mobilising specific ideas of Sustainability and putting them into practice – at times in very different ways.

The final chapter takes a more general view on Sustainability as a key idea again drawing conclusions about its composite, fragile, and contested nature. Moreover, it reflects on the potential gains and limits of Sustainability as an important idea in the contemporary world. It argues that the most important role of Sustainability is not as a (physically defined) equilibrium that could be achieved or an endpoint to be achieved. Rather, Sustainability as an idea should be seen as a much more dynamic and open-ended social process that provides an important source of reflexivity for today’s industrialised, energy intensive, consumerist societies and a world where access to well-being is distributed very unequally.

However, the links between climate change, energy, food, and Sustainability are so manifold and complex that these chapters can only scratch at the surface of those issues added and have to leave many questions open and many aspects unmentioned. Moreover, the list of possible further challenges to Sustainability is without end. For example, the book could also have discussed questions of biodiversity, water, waste, mobility, deforestation, urbanisation, finance, health, or private consumption to gain equally relevant insights. Moreover, we could add another equally long list of agents, institutions, policies, strategies and instruments addressing one or several of these challenges. Yet, the book is meant to provide a rather short conceptual introduction not an exhaustive empirical study of all aspects of Sustainability. On the one hand, it should help to better understand its specific character as an intellectual framework consisting of diverse and contested elements. On the other hand, this framework is closely connected with material aspects of resource use, outputs such as waste and emissions, and the world’s ecosystems. It is the world where challenges are detected but it is the idea of Sustainability that makes them visible, urgent, and provides orientation in response to them.

Note

1 It is impossible to elaborate on this point in the confined space of this book. Instead, we have to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgement
• About the authors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Historical reflection: A brief genealogy of sustainable development
• 3. Sustainability and climate change
• 4. Sustainability and energy systems
• 5. Sustainability and food systems
• 6. Sustainability as transformation and reflexivity
• Bibliography
• Index