Dehierarchization and Sustainable Development in Liberal and Non-liberal Societies

Marcel Wissenburg

Global Environmental Politics, 2001, vol. 1, issue 2, 95-111

Abstract: Modern societies appear to be going through a phase of dehierarchization, that is, a change in the way of governance of nation states, from direction of, to cooperation with, civil society; and in more general terms political pluralization, the emergence of "polities" other than the nation state. The paper argues that one of the most stressing problems of political pluralization is the co-existence of mutually effacing or contradictory systems of political norms. To tackle this problem of incompossibility, it has been suggested that policy teloi, shared conceptions giving direction to cooperative political ventures, in particular sustainable development, could be helpful. This article investigates whether sustainable development as a policy telos can tackle incompossibility, both in liberal (democratic) and non-liberal (democratic) societies. The paper concludes that its best chances of being temporarily successful lie in understanding it in the broadest sense possible-particularly if one values moral pluralism. Copyright (c) 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152638001750336613 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:tpr:glenvp:v:1:y:2001:i:2:p:95-111

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().