ABSTRACT
Since the publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, sustainable development has become one of the most frequently articulated concepts in world environmental politics (Dryzek 1997: 125). The European Union (EU) has also committed itself to promoting sustainable development, internally as well as externally (COM 2001, 2002). Since the Amsterdam Treaty, which entered into force in 1999, sustainable development has even been codified as an overarching aim of the European integration process. Similarly, the Treaty of Lisbon, which came into force in December 2009, strongly reaffirmed the EU’s commitment to sustainable development. Accordingly, the EU ‘shall work for the sustainable development of Europe’ and ‘in its relations with the wider world’, the Union is to contribute to ‘the sustainable development of the Earth’ (Article 3, paragraphs 3 and 5, Treaty on European Union). However, the gap between commitment and policy output (Lenschow and Sprungk 2010) has provoked a stream of general critique of sustainable development as a guiding political concept (Voß et al. 2006: 3). So far, the EU is not giving up on the idea of sustainable development (Baker 2007). On the contrary, the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ continue to feature highly on the political agenda of the EU. In 2009, the European Council confirmed that
sustainable development remains a fundamental objective of the European Union under the Lisbon Treaty […] the Union’s Sustainable Development Strategy […] will continue to provide a long-term vision and constitute the overarching policy framework for all Union policies and strategies.
(European Council 2009: 8) This chapter questions how the ‘long-term vision’ of sustainable development is actually translated into concrete policies in the European Union. It is argued, in line with a substantial literature on sustainable development (Hajer 2005; Rydin 1999), including this book, that sustainable development is not a blueprint for development that merely needs to be implemented. On the contrary, based upon post-structuralist discourse theory, it is assumed that sustainable development can be understood as a floating signifier that is particularly open to different ascriptions of meaning which potentially enable different forms of action, i.e. policy measures (Jorgensen and Philips 2002). Although the meaning of sustainable development can never be fully fixed, a temporary fixation of meaning, which includes and excludes specific elements, is still possible. This process is referred to in discourse theory as discursive closure (cf. Hajer and Laws 2006; Hajer 2005; Jorgensen and Philips 2002; Laclau and Mouffe 2006).