ABSTRACT
In 1994, the Scientific Council for Government Policy, one of the Dutch government's key advisory councils, dropped a bomb on the public debate on sustainable development in the Netherlands. Until then, the notion of ‘environmental utilization space’ (Siebert, 1982) had been pivotal in the customary elaboration of sustainable development policy. This notion implicitly assumed that it is scientifically feasible to determine the limits to the burden that may be imposed upon the environment. In other words, scientists were deemed able to determine the carrying capacity of the earth and a ‘safe zone’ for human activities, giving policy-makers an unequivocal and objective precept by which to steer their environmental policy. In its report Sustained Risks: a Lasting Phenomenon (WRR, 1994), the Scientific Council argued, however, that sustainable development hinges on dealing with uncertain risks and therefore requires inherently value-driven and hence political choices that cannot be made by scientists. At the core of the Council's argument was the Cultural Theory of risk (see, for example, Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Schwartz and Thompson, 1990), which holds that, faced with incomplete and often contradictory information, people perceive the world through a cultural filter that influences the way issues are defined and preferences as to how they should be handled. Since, in this view, no one ‘risk filter’ is superior to others, completely opposing perspectives on courses of action may be equally worthy of the predicate ‘sustainable’. In order to elaborate the concept of sustainability as a genuinely operative policy concept, the Scientific Council therefore recommended that normative choices in relation to identified risks and uncertainties be rendered explicit. In more recent reports, the Scientific Council has reiterated its views and recommendations (WRR, 1999, 2002, 2006).
