Sustainable development: looking for new strategies (original) (raw)
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Recognizing the urgent need for sustainability, we argue that to move beyond the rhetoric and to actually realize sustainable development, it must be considered as a decision-making strategy. We demonstrate that sustainability assessment and sustainability indicators can be powerful decision-supporting tools that foster sustainable development by addressing three sustainability decision-making challenges: interpretation, information-structuring, and influence. Particularly, since the 1990s many substantial and often promising sustainability assessment and sustainability indicators efforts are made. However, better practices and a broader shared understanding are still required. We aim to contribute to that objective by adopting a theoretical perspective that frames SA and SI in the context of sustainable development as a decision-making strategy and that introduces both fields along several essential aspects in a structured and comparable manner.
Towards sustainable development: a complex process
International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development, 2008
Sustainable development is a complex societal problem belonging to the field of societal complexity and must be handled according to the scientific ideas of this field. Sustainability includes agricultural and industrial production as well as production ways. Capitalism tolerates differences in power, wealth and work. To reach a more sustainable society, capitalism should be socially based and democratically controlled by international organisations. Whether it is possible to develop a sustainable world should be carefully explored in multidisciplinary workshops using the concept of quality of life operationalised by cultural, social and economic capital. The complex process of organising societies towards a sustainable world can be guided by using the Compram methodology. The Compram methodology is developed to analyse, define, guide and evaluate complex societal problems. By using the guidelines of this methodology, one can find the causes of complex problems and suggests directions for change.
A new approach to the application of the principles of sustainable development
22nd International Scientific Conference. “Economic Science for Rural Development 2021” No 55 Sustainable Bioeconomy, Integrated and Sustainable Regional Development, Rural Development and Entrepreneurship, Circular Economy: Climate Change, Environmental Aspect, Cooperation, Supply Chains, Effici..., 2021
Most of the environmental, economic, social and political problems that have given rise to the global crisis continue to grow negatively and rapidly. It is with this situation that the world community has faced, feeling the consequences of earlier decisions. It is natural to raise the question: why, despite enormous efforts, it is not possible to reverse the negative trends and ensure the transition to sustainable development of the world community. In order for the criteria of sustainable development to meet these requirements, it is necessary to determine the main governing laws and find a way to measure different quality social, natural processes and resource flows in stable and universal units of measurement (measures). The article presents the basic definitions for the development of a formalized description of the tasks of monitoring sustainable development that meets the principles and requirements of sustainable development. It provides examples of calculating the parameters...
THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Sustainable development stands for development processes that combine economic and social wellbeing and efficiency with ecological resilience and health, as well here and now, as elsewhere, and later. This implies that every method designed to assess impacts with regard to sustainable development needs a broader scope and deeper focus than the many already existing methods to assess environmental, economic, or social impacts. Their object is the quality of live, in the broadest meaning of the term. If we look closer at the requirements for such a tool we come across a paradox. On the one hand there is a broadly shared understanding that the assessment of social aspects and developments should get more and better attention. On the other hand it is also quite clear that assessments-models are not well suited to come to terms with the social dimension. Concepts and indicators that refer to the social reality, always refer to social change. As a result, they are themselves always prone to change. In other words: that what defines our goals or target is itself continuously and visibly changed by us. From a social point of view, sustainability is a process instead of a condition, and as such not something that can be measured unambiguously. What we need is a tool that addresses this fluidity and comes to terms with the fact that sustainability has more in common with a qualitative perspective than with quantitative norms, at least if we look at it from the social angle. If we want to develop assessment-methods for sustainable development, we have to take this into account, and work out the eventual consequences for the assessment of social sustainable development and the sustainable interaction between the social, economic and ecological domains. In this paper we want to address these issues.
Sustainable development: how to manage something that is subjective and never can be achieved
This article examines the notion of sustainable development that has emerged as a new normative orientation of Western society. We argue that sustainable development is an inherently subjective concept and for this reason requires deliberative forms of governance and assessment. We outline the contours of sustainability science as a new form of science, complementing traditional science. Such science is to be used in service to reflexive modes of governance, for which we outline the general principles and offer a practical illustration, the transition-management model. The example shows that it is possible to work toward sustainable development as an elusive goal through provisional knowledge about our needs and systems to satisfy these needs. Heterogeneous local understandings and appreciations are not suppressed but drawn into the transition process in various ways such as participatory integrated assessment and social deliberation. The social interest in sustainable development is exploited without falling into the modernistic trap of rational decision making that disregards local cultures.
The Barriers and Possible Solution to Achieve Sustainable Development
The increasing spectrum of environmental and social challenges instigated by the failure of development strategies, the continuous proliferation of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption coupled with the anticipated level of population stimulated the pursuit of a new path. Sustainable development has emerged as a possible remedy. Despite increasing efforts to marry the social and environmental challenges with economic growth, progress remains remote. Against this background, the paper aims to investigate the root cause of the current poor progress in terms of the practical application of the concept. The paper reinforces the drawbacks of the current societal conflict resolution mechanism: market and political arenas. As a possible solution, it suggest the urgent need for a shift to the third arena, which facilitates integration of public debates, scientific evidence and policy, and extensive use of innovative tools such as precautionary principle to ensure a high-quality decisionmaking process.
Reconsidering Sustainable Development
Twenty-five years after it entered the mainstream of global development discourse, “sustainable” remains a vague concept. Adopted by the powerful and the powerless, the term has been used to describe everything from consumer products to entire economic systems. Meanwhile, conciliatory democratic politics have suffered under a heavily money-influenced political process. This paper critiques conventional views on the definition of sustainability, and the proposed solutions that emerge therefrom. Ultimately, even the most useful concept in sustainable development discourse —the “three-legged stool” of social, ecological, and economic concerns—remains inadequate. The failure to implement the three-legged stool in practice indicates that contradictions between desired outcomes in each leg are an inherent and perpetual problem for society. Modern sustainability discourse, in its focus on ideal outcomes, fails to provide guidance for what to do when these contradictions occur. In promoting deliberative democratic decision-making for government, business, and civil society as a means towards sustainability, the author emphasizes sustainability as a process, not an achievement, even if that process relies on some widely accepted sustainability indicators to gauge its direction. By paying attention to the limits and failures of current models of societal decision-making (including the ways economic structures delimit behavioral options), sustainability discourse can elaborate a successful alternative: widespread, multi-level, nested, and interacting deliberative democratic processes that address the usage and pollution of natural resources. This paper also analyzes urbanization as a contentious subject within sustainability discourse, and as a key element in deliberative democratic development and the iterative mitigation of environmental problems.
Vs sustainable development: scenarios for the future
Journal of Mining Institute
Issues of sustainable development began to concern mankind starting from the 20th century, when mass industrialization and the depletion of natural resource potential contributed to the formulation of environmental issues at one of the leading places in scientific discourse. However, what if the goals of sustainable development would not be achieved to 2030? What other way we can identify for humanity to survive? So, the study is about the problems of studying the understanding of the term “sustainable development”, considering the evolution of the formation of the concept of sustainable development and analyzing the modern goals of sustainable development for attainability. From an analysis of domestic and foreign experience, possible scenarios of the development of mankind are identified (such as 1. Creating an environmental framework, 2. Implementation of sustainable nature management practices in the conditions of natural and man-made objects, 3. Implementation of “geoengineerin...
Sustainable development: Our Common Future revisited
Global Environmental Change, 2014
Introduction ''Anything on which John Major, George Bush and Fidel Castro all agree can't really mean anything, can it?'' Whitelegg (1997, p. 101) Sustainable development is increasingly being presented as a pathway to all that is good and desirable in society. Some of the proposed national indicators of sustainable development from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Finland illustrate this point. They include such factors as crime rate; participation of 14year-olds in social organizational work; teacher capabilities; workforce skill level; the number of 19-year-olds in the UK with Level 2 qualifications, classes taught in a minority language, children in public care, daily smokers, and internet users; the manner in which children get to school; obesity rates; and R&D expenditures (Banister, 2008; Holden, 2007; Holden and Linnerud, 2007). And the list grows longer yearly. Thus, the sustainable development concept has become so comprehensive and complex that it is no longer useful in guiding policymaking. Not surprisingly, a number of scholars have argued that the sustainable development concept is in danger of becoming irrelevant (e.g., Hopwood et al., 2005; Redclift, 2005). Even though there is not yet any political or scientific agreement on a definition of sustainable development, it remains remarkably persistent as an ideal political concept, similar to democracy, justice, and liberty (Meadowcroft, 2007). Indeed, sustainable development ''is now like 'democracy': it is universally desired, diversely understood, extremely difficult to achieve, and won't go away'' (Lafferty, 2004, p. 26). Unquestionably, sustainable development still is an important concept, which was clearly illustrated at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. One of the conference's main outcomes was the agreement by member states to set up sustainable development goals, which could be useful tools in achieving sustainable development. Thus, achieving sustainable development is still high on the international and national agendas 25 year after the concept was launched with the publication of Our Common Future, commonly referred to as the Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987). However, to become a useful tool, the concept must be clearly defined. This article attempts to do so by going back to its origin, the Brundtland Report. We suggest an assessment method that involves four equally important primary dimensions mentioned in the Brundtland Report, and then define suitable indicators and assign minimum/maximum thresholds for each indicator.