ABSTRACT
Contested meanings I: sustainability The UN World Commission on Environment and Development, through its publication Our Common Future (WCED 1987), was highly influential in popularising and internationalising the concept of ‘sustainability’.1 It promoted the idea of ‘sustainable development’ as the appropriate mechanism for responding to global environmental and development concerns, defining it as meeting ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987: 8). This ‘human-centred’ model of sustainable development has marginalised other ‘ecology-centred’ definitions, such as that proposed in Caring for the Earth – a joint International Union of Conservation Scientists (IUCN), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF ) publication defining sustainable development as ‘improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems’ (IUCN, UNEP and WWF 1991: 10). The Brundtland definition, with its emphasis on ‘human needs, rather than protection of nature or the biosphere’ (Redclift 1992: 395), is the focal point of national and international environmental policy and governance. However, given the ongoing deterioration in many environmental indicators and UNEP’s (2002: 1) claim that ‘sustainable development remains largely theoretical for the majority of the world’s population’, it seems appropriate to ask what meaning is attached to sustainability and whether or not ‘sustainable development’ is an adequate, or even useful, concept. Indeed, the ideas frequently associated with sustainability are not at all self-evidently compatible with the ‘human-centred’ notion of sustainable development as it has come to be institutionalised. In light of the ‘paradigmatic’ status achieved by the Brundtland characterisation, there have been innumerable attempts at definitional clarification.2 The pursuit of clarity is understandable here, especially from the ‘policytechnocratic’ perspective, which requires precision in definition and agreement over meaning in order for the concept to be adopted as a policy objective (Jacobs 1999: 22; cf. Lele 1991: 607). However, establishing conceptual rigour has proven difficult, not least because of the diverse roots of the concept, but also because of the variety of interests and ideological perspectives that are brought to bear on such a task (Dryzek 2005: 146).3 Indeed, following the seminal work of Gallie (1955), some theorists have argued that these efforts are misguided because sustainable development, like other political concepts, is ‘essentially contested’4 (Dryzek 2005: 147; Davison 2001; Jacobs 1999; Lafferty 1995; Eckersley 1992a). Connolly (1993: 225) explains that this label applies when ‘the universal criteria of reason . . . do not suffice to settle . . . contests definitively’. ‘Freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’, for instance, are readily accepted terms at one level, yet political argument persists over how such concepts ‘should be interpreted in practice’ (Jacobs 1999: 25). The argument over positive and negative freedoms and their relationship to liberty, within the liberalist lexicon, is an enduring example. Such contestability, though, allows for the ‘reconsideration of received views’ and makes possible the continuing negotiation of legitimate political difference (Connolly 1993: 41). Rather than a weakness, therefore, contestability and its associated vagueness, can be perceived as ‘a source of political strength’ (Davison 2001: 61). Similarly, Jacobs (1999: 26) argues that there is broad agreement around the Brundtland definition of sustainable development, but at the same time it is accompanied by contestation that represents, not semantic disputations over the ‘meaning of sustainable development’, but rather the substantive political arguments that shape the direction of social and economic development. Although
the concerns of sustainability are in part physical and ecological, sustainable development is not a concept that can be technically or scientifically defined in order to render it operational (cf. Connolly 1993: 15). It also includes a range of economic, political and social goals drawn from a variety of ethical and ideological orientations. Sustainable development should therefore be understood as a normative concept, the practice of which emerges out of ongoing political contestation. The attempts to pursue a unitary and precise definition have the effect of obfuscating the plurality of normative perspectives and understandings implicit in the concept. In contrast, understanding sustainable development as a social and political construct has fostered consideration of the complexity associated with the differing conceptions that lay behind the concept’s contestability. As a result, the development of typologies has become a feature of the sustainability literature. There are numerous and disparate conceptions of sustainable development evident in such typologies, sometimes entailing radically different ideological positions.5 They reflect differing sets of beliefs that exist about the world and embody, to greater or lesser degree, economic, political and cultural agendas for social change (Baker et al. 1997: 7). Within this complexity though, there is an important underlying polarity around which the various positions coalesce.
