Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Sustainability is generally represented as being at the nexus of environmental, eco-
nomic and social concerns, such that sustainability can only exist if all three are
addressed together (e.g., Sneddon, 2000; Whitehead, 2007). This offers a different
way to think about the major problems of our time, and holds out the promise that
something can be done to address these problems. In so doing, sustainability also
recognises the integration of humans and nature as an inescapable reality. The ques-
tion is
not
how do we re-integrate humans and nature in order to have a sustainable
existence (suggesting that humans are currently an external disturbance to nature),
but why do we have socio-ecological systems that are unsustainable and what do
we need to create more ecologically friendly and socially just human-environment
relations? It is in this sense that the bridging capacity of sustainability as a concept
raises key political issues.
However, just as policy debates manage to subvert the political potential of sus-
tainability at the very moment politics seemed to erupt, the same is true of academic
debates. As Redclift (1994; 2005) has long emphasised, it is not always clear to
what sustainability refers, or what is being sustained. Sustainability can refer to
maintaining ecological processes, sustained resource production, or sustained profi t-
ability. There is 'strong' sustainability that focuses on ecosystem services in the
broadest sense and 'weak' sustainability that focuses on protecting only those parts
of nature for which people cannot develop substitutes (Neumayer, 2003). Sustain-
ability can refer to fostering the well-being of all people, now and in the future
(both intra- and inter-generational equity). Or it can refer to any set of practices
that can be maintained over the long-term, regardless of their effect on particular
people or environments! These differences make the neat triangle of sustainability
- environment, economy, society - a little less neat. If people mean different things
by these terms, and tend to prioritise one over the others, then reference to sustain-
ability becomes a means to avoid hard discussions.
This suggests that using the term sustainability in any seriousness requires having
some answer to the question 'sustainability of what?' Further, answers to this ques-
tion cannot be found through scientifi c analysis. While research can certainly answer
questions about the social and ecological effects of certain actions, it can only tell
us if those outcomes are 'sustainable'
if we have already defi ned
sustainability. In
other words, the process of defi ning sustainability is an inherently normative, politi-
cal process. Yet many academic researchers fail to address these political issues,
trying instead to use supposedly objective research about sustainability to answer
questions about what sustainability should mean. In other words, researchers often
try to turn sustainability into a technical, rather than political, issue
.
The outcome is that there is tension between the promise of sustainability as a
bridging concept and the pitfalls of sustainability as a retreat into the technical. In
his review of contributions from ecology, ecological economics, and livelihoods,
Sneddon (2000) argues that these fi elds all push the sustainability framework away
from that offered by mainstream sustainable development, and do so by creating
bridges between social and ecological processes (see also Sneddon et al., 2006). But
he also argues that these fi elds 'tend to side step the power discrepancies embedded
within social relations . . . which lie at the heart of many environment and develop-
ment dilemmas' (2000, p. 538). In other words, they tend to avoid and ignore poli-
tics, thus blunting their effectiveness. The following sections build from and illustrate
these insights regarding the potential and pitfalls of sustainability by examining
several fi elds to which geographers have contributed most centrally.
