The art of long-term thinking: A bridge between sustainability science and politics

Bernd Klauer, Reiner Manstetten, Thomas Petersen and Johannes Schiller

Ecological Economics, 2013, vol. 93, issue C, 79-84

Abstract: Policy makers are dependent upon scientific knowledge. However, scientific results cannot be applied straightforwardly in practical decision making. We deploy Kant's term “power of judgment” – the human capacity to apply general insights to specific, contingent situations – to show that this problem is systematic rather than coincidental: decision making requires the power of judgment to make use of scientific knowledge. Power of judgment, in turns, can be supported by heuristics. Against this background, we focus on sustainability politics and outline a heuristic for framing and analyzing sustainability problems. Because time is a key factor in relation to sustainability we distinguish three distinct concepts of time and argue that the economic concepts of “stocks” and “institutions” can be used to foster power of judgment with respect to these time concepts. Based on these concepts, the heuristic serves to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and practical decision making in sustainability politics.

Keywords: Sustainability; Time; Power of judgment; Stocks; Science-policy gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800913001572
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolec:v:93:y:2013:i:c:p:79-84

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.04.018

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().