SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND THE PROCESS OF JUSTIFYING CHOICES IN A CONTROVERSIAL UNIVERSE

Olivier Godard

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: All in all, neither the path of the generic principle nor that of the reduction to existing principles would appear to be fully satisfactory as the basis for establishing the legitimacy of sustainable development or as a way of making sustainability a principle of legitimacy by its own. We should probably resign ourselves to seeing in this idea a composite construction, still striving towards the formation of a new "superior common principle", without this principle yet being able to be completely clarified and validated. What we have here is an example of the sort of "compromise" described by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991, p.338): "In the compromise, the participants abandon the idea of clarifying the principle of their agreement but endeavour to maintain a frame of mind aiming at the common good." If we want to consolidate the compromise developing around sustainability, it would be well advised to seek the support of tests using well-formed objects. To this end, steps should be taken to move the emphasis away from long-term and unknowable sustainability requirements and closer to secondbest criteria focused on the transitional developments and possible risks of intentional human action, the ways of managing the linking of the different temporalities in play -- as regards the biophysical phenomena, their understanding and the main worlds of legitimacy (Godard, 1992) -- and the introduction of deliberation within the present generations as to what they feel best describes their identity, those things they would like to pass on.

Date: 1998-12-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00622855v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Sustainable Development: Concepts, Rationalities and Strategies, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 'Economy & Environment Series', pp.299-317, 1998

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00622855v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00622855

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().