The True Meaning of “Taking Ownership” in the Pursuit of “Sustainable Development”: From Global to Local, from Macro to Micro, from Public to Private

Octavian-Dragomir Jora (), Mihai Vladimir Topan, Matei-Alexandru Apãvãloaei () and Mihaela Iacob
Additional contact information
Octavian-Dragomir Jora: The Bucharest University of Economic Studies
Matei-Alexandru Apãvãloaei: The Bucharest University of Economic Studies

PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2018, vol. 1, issue 1, 403-410

Abstract: The widespread idea of “sustainable development” may look either like a truism, at a first glance (development is hardly acceptable in both mundane and erudite talk as a spasmodic move, with steep push-ups and sudden downfalls), or like a pleonasm, on a second thought (despite humans’ time preference for immediateness over remoteness or only for own life-long horizons, no sane person aims for dead-ends). Still, the main concern with this economic syntagma is not its eventual conceptual redundancies, but its translations into practice/policy. Sustainable development is being preached as the so longed triumph of public/societal spirit over private/individual short-sightedness, of coordinated macro- instruments over disarrayed micro- tools, of global frameworks for managing spill-over effects over ineffective local setups. The present papers aims to do justice to a scientific principle (and societal purpose) that risks to become “sustainably unsustainable”, arguing that the only meaningful way for its processing and professing is to reconcile it with some basic features of human cooperation: property rights and free markets, sound money and low taxes, unhampered research, education and culture, solid family and community bonds. The main argument of this plea is that properly defined, disposed and defended ownership rights in scarce resources are the crux of the issue. Only in a society where (property) rights are assigned according to non-contradictory and nondiscretionary rules, individuals beget the responsibility to “take ownership” with respect to the harmonious betterment of their own lives as well as those of their fellows and descendants.

Keywords: sustainable development; private property; free markets; personal responsibility; societal prosperity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://icess.ase.ro/index.php/archive/icess-2018/icess-2018-proceedings (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:rom:conase:v:1:y:2018:i:1:p:403-410

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES from Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Zamfir Andreea ().