What is most striking about the concept of ‘sustainable development’ today is
how ubiquitous it has become and consequently how various and potentially
contestable its meanings have proved to be. Certainly there is no shortage of critics
of the concept. Michael Redclift’s (2005) review article carries the revealing title:
‘Sustainable Development (1987–2005): An Oxymoron Comes of Age’. What
impresses Timothy Luke (2005, p. 228) is how ‘the intellectual emptiness of
sustainable development has clung to it from the moment of its official articulation
by the World Commission on the Environment and Development’.
Despite its complexity and potential contestability, it is nonetheless possible to
find in the concept of sustainable development some useful general features (see
Baker 2006, pp. 212–3). The broad normative ideal of sustainability that it inscribes
may be a difficult one to live up to in practice (some would even see the task as
utopian), but it can be argued that as a general ideal it is morally commendable and
that it can potentially provide a standard of sorts by reference to which actors in
the real world (and those who study them) can position themselves.
As soon as we move from the rather lofty general level, however, matters
begin to become more complicated. At the lower altitudes the normative ideal
of sustainable development inevitably encounters the question of ‘whose
sustainability?’ or ‘sustainable for whom?’ Such a question implies two things:
that different interests (or at least those who speak for them) must at some point
decide what is ‘sustainable’ and ‘unsustainable’ for them in light of their own
specific circumstances; and that what different interests take to be ‘sustainable’
and ‘unsustainable’ may throw up a number of possibilities as regards how they
choose to deal with one another. They may, for instance, agree and co-operate,
disagree and come into conflict or perhaps both agree and disagree in ways that
mix co-operation and contention in varying proportions.
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COUNTRYSIDE Perspective Rural Policy Planning