ABSTRACT
Sport is faced with an extraordinary challenge: the increasing societal demand for integrating matters of sustainable development into its own development. Sustainability will be a dominating motif of the twenty-first century. It is the omnipresent question about how to provide a decent standard of living for all, while preserving and renewing an effective societal infrastructure, and balancing this development with our sensitive ecosystem on which all life depends. Due to the uncertainty of social and environmental needs (those of present and future generations), as well as the difficulty in predicting our technological capacity to address these needs, sustainable development is to be understood rather as a guiding principle than a static prescription. Yet it is a concept in its infancy and most stakeholders – politicians, entrepreneurs, consumers, and so on – pay only lip-service to it. While sustainable development offers considerable opportunities to broad strata of our society, going through a sustainable development process can be complex and risky. Hence, achieving sustainable development is a challenge that will increasingly occupy the multifaceted attention of a very diverse range of interest holders that were traditionally external to a focused topic. These will create temporary societal institutions that aim to form practical knowledge for the purpose of reaching sustainable development. Sustainable development requires the ability to effectively recognize and respond to pressures that are often context-specific,
conflicting and sometimes ambiguous. A just argumentation process of equally legitimated interest holders will result in a temporary, at best perceived, solution to development that can be defined as sustainable as long as no better insights create a more sustainable solution to development.
