Principles for Sustainability: From Cooperation and Efficiency to Sufficiency

Thomas Princen

Global Environmental Politics, 2003, vol. 3, issue 1, 33-50

Abstract: If analysts of political and ecological economy take seriously critical trends in environmental degradation and accept social responsibility for contributing to the reversal of such trends, they must go beyond the descriptive and predictive to the prescriptive, beyond marginal environmental improvement to sustainability, beyond cooperation and efficiency to sufficiency.Cooperation and efficiency principles are useful when biophysical underpinnings remain intact. Otherwise, sufficiency principles-restraint, precaution, polluter pays, zero, reverse onus-address the defining characteristics of current trends, namely environmental criticality, risk export, and responsibility evasion. They engage overconsumption. They compel decision-makers to ask when too much resource use or too little regeneration risks important values such as ecological integrity and social cohesion, when material gains now preclude material gains in the future, when consumer gratification or investor reward threatens economic security, when benefits internalized depend on costs externalized. Under sufficiency, one necessarily asks what are the risks, not just in the short term and for immediate beneficiaries, but in the longterm and for the under-represented. Copyright (c) 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152638003763336374 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:3:y:2003:i:1:p:33-50

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 ().