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To cite this article: Lucas Seghezzo (2009): The five dimensions of sustainability,
Environmental Politics, 18:4, 539-556
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Environmental Politics
Vol. 18, No. 4, July 2009, 539–556
(UNSa), Argentina
Introduction
‘Our common future’, the report released in 1987 by the World Commission on
Environment and Development (WCED) chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland,
stated that development is only ‘sustainable’ if it ‘meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs’ (WCED 1987, p. 8). The concept of sustainable development was
launched by the WCED as a ‘global objective’ to guide policies orientated to
balance ‘economic and social systems and ecological conditions’. It is often
represented with the ‘triple bottom line’ of economy, environment, and society
(Elkington et al. 2007, p. 1). A sustainable development ‘triangle’ formed by
People, Planet, and Profit (the three Ps), with Profit sometimes replaced by the
*Email: lucas.seghezzo@wur.nl
by Arrow et al. (1996, p. 14), the link between growth and equity may not be so
straightforward, especially in regions where it is needed most, namely where
‘the environmental costs of economic activity are borne by the poor, by future
generations, or by other countries’. Redistribution and equity are, to a certain
extent, contradictory with the primary objective of economic activity, being to
maximise ‘economic efficiency’ (irrespective of the initial distribution of wealth)
and increase national income (which is assumed to be directly proportional to
the well-being of society as a whole) (Hanley 2000, Norgaard 1992, Ziegler
2009). This contradiction implies that, unless intergenerational equity becomes
a more central issue in the analysis, the economic approach used in isolation
might not be very useful to address issues of sustainability. The potential
conflict between economic growth and sustainability is perhaps more sensitive
in industrial societies where environmental goods and amenities will never be
enough to satisfy the supposedly infinite needs of individuals. This ambivalence
between the concepts of economic growth and environmental scarcity has been
seen as a major flaw of the idea of sustainable development articulated by the
WCED (Tijmes and Luijf 1995). A joint criticism of both ‘ecoscarcity’ and
‘modernization’ has been given by Robbins (2004). He highlighted the ‘ethical
and practical weaknesses’ of these two approaches to explain and solve
environmental and social problems (Robins 2004, p. 7). The WCED report did
call for some international reforms intended ‘to deal simultaneously with
economic and ecological aspects’ (WCED 1987, p. 90). Arguably, because it
did not fundamentally challenge the dominant economic paradigm, it did little
in practice to diminish the predominance of economistic accounts over social
and ecological concerns. The ensuing ‘inevitability’ of a type of progress
understood only as plain economic growth should be put under more scrutiny
in debates about sustainability (Norgaard 1992). Yet the ‘politically powerful’
idea of progress could be recalibrated and re-appropriated, instead of rejected,
in an innovative development paradigm, as advocated by Barry (1999, p. 250).
A significant additional drawback of the inclusion of an economic
dimension in the definition of sustainability is that a purely economic approach
is, in some respects, incompatible with the long-term thinking required to
attain inter-generational justice. This can become clearer after we take a brief
look at one of the main decision-aiding tools used by economists to analyse
economic efficiency in the public sector, namely cost–benefit analysis (CBA)
Environmental Politics 545
(Bell and Morse 2008, Hanley 2000). Although CBA was never meant to be a
stand-alone method, it is still widely promoted as one of the best ways to guide
the efficient allocation of resources and to assess the feasibility (and
sustainability) of projects and policies (Pearce et al. 1989). A number of
limitations, obstacles, and ‘behavioural anomalies’ that undermine the validity
of CBA for environmental policy making have been identified, forcing
economists to devise a variety of coping strategies to overcome these
limitations and make it more appealing to governments and the general public
(Barde and Pearce 1991, Hanley and Shogren 2005). The main ethical,
philosophical, and practical objections raised against the use of CBA derive
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Chambers et al. 2000, Edwards 2005, Fresco and Kroonenberg 1992). Fruitful
debates held over the last two decades pointed out the prominence of space and
place in environmental justice debates (Agyeman et al. 2003). The importance of
time in the complexities associated with problem solving is also acknowledged
(Tainter 2006). However, when it comes to concrete cases, space and time are not
always taken into account in sustainability projects. Operational tools such as
sustainability indicators are usually defined only in economic, environmental,
and social terms (Bell and Morse 2008). Yet, as argued by Rosenau (2003), several
problems resist such categorisation. A paradigm based only on those aspects will
most likely be unable to understand and explain, let alone solve, these problems.
The increasing centrality of a globalised economy in the relationships between
nature and culture has also undermined the importance of specific locations,
landscapes, or ‘places’ as critical components of sustainability, as highlighted by
Escobar (2001). He thinks a radical questioning of place is a common feature of
theories of globalisation that associate place with the limited and incomplete
realm of the local, while promoting a world without frontiers understood as an
absolute and universal space. Time, in spite of all the long-term rhetoric in most
debates about development, has not been explicitly included in the classical
sustainability triangle. The presence of an economic corner in that triangle is
probably the reason why temporal aspects have been so neglected in practice, as
discussed above. Contrary to space, which is associated with visible and tangible
assets, time is beyond the reach of our senses and, for that reason, its pertinence
within the environmental debate has been largely underestimated, as highlighted
by Adam (1998). She proposed to pay more attention to ‘timescapes’, the
temporal dimension of our environmental problems, in order to improve our
understanding of their nature and impact. The inclusion of a time dimension
seems indispensable for Adam because, from a temporal perspective, it is difficult
to ‘conceive of nature and culture as separate’ (Adam 1998, p. 23). Conceptions of
time, as notions of space and territory, can differ greatly in different cultures and
at different historical moments (Adam 1990, Bates 2006, Giddens 1984, Hubert
and Mauss 1905). Time is therefore, as the concept of nature itself, a contested
and culture-dependent issue that plays an important role in the way we perceive
and define nature (Macnaghten and Urry 1998).
Finally, personal aspects are as good as forgotten in the WCED definition
of sustainable development. The WCED report emphasises the role of human
Environmental Politics 547
‘needs’ as perhaps the ultimate goal of any development policy (WCED 1987,
p. 43). Yet humans cannot be equated only to their needs. Moreover, human
needs are not only physiological. Many types of needs have been identified,
such as safety, love, esteem, and the desire for self-fulfilment (Chuengsatiansup
2003, Holden and Linnerud 2007, Maslow 1943). Most of these needs involve
feelings, felt by individuals, and cannot be catalogued as ‘social’. Whether the
management and coordination of economic, environmental and social aspects
is the right strategy to satisfy all human needs is therefore debatable. As will be
discussed in more detail below, a development paradigm that fails to take these
feelings into account might not guarantee that issues related to, for instance,
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Figure 1. The new five-dimensional sustainability triangle. Place: the three dimensions
of space (x, y, and z); Permanence: the fourth dimension of time (t); Persons: the fifth,
human dimension (i). More details in the text.
Place
People tend to see the environment as the place in which they live and interact.
There are consequently as many ‘environments’ or ‘places’ as visions people
have of the space around them (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Place provides an
important share of the sense of belonging and identity that are partly
responsible for the generation of culture. It has been defined as ‘the experience
of a particular location with some measure of groundedness . . . , sense of
boundaries . . ., and connection to everyday life’ (Escobar 2001, p. 140). As
Escobar suggests, the definition of any alternative development paradigm
should ‘take into account place-based models of nature, culture, and politics’.
Places are much more than just empty geographical spaces. They contain what
Macnaghten and Urry (1998) call the spatialised, timed, sensed and embodied
dimensions of nature. Places are therefore a source of facts, identities, and
behaviours. They incorporate notions of culture, local ways of life, and human
physical and psychological health (Franquemagne 2007, Garavan 2007, Leff
2000). Place can also be constituted by a number of locations distant from one
another. This shared territory might be an important ingredient in social
cohesion, as studies on mobility, networks and migration have suggested (Urry
2002). Place is, to a certain extent, a social construct that helps people build a
sense of belonging to a given culture. On the other hand, it could also be
argued that culture is, in turn, delineated in terms of specific places. A
perception of place as an inseparable unity constituted by the natural and
cultural environments can help transcend the nature/culture dichotomy
and integrate or reconcile opposite worldviews such anthropocentrism and
Environmental Politics 549
Permanence
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Persons
The idea of the existence of an individual ‘person’ within each human being,
similar yet entirely different to those around them, has been the subject of
550 L. Seghezzo
precarious’ (Wilber 1998, 4–10). In the same line, Radford Ruether (1971, p.
214) believes modern society can still be the ‘age of the person’ because men
(and women) ‘have not capitulated entirely to a one-dimensional, secular
definition of man and reality and have retained some notion of transcendent
values which they believe apply not only to their personal lives but to the way
in which social organizations should operate as well’. In her view, the ‘modern
world’ has threatened the ‘foundations of freedom and the person by seeking to
eliminate the transcendent framework altogether’.
In recent decades, the environmental movement has contributed to the
development of personal and social identity. Environmental issues entered the
international agenda and began to shape personal attitudes and governmental
policies. As time went by, confidence on the ability of governments and
corporations to solve environmental and social crises somehow faded away.
Research conducted by Macnaghten and Urry (1998) suggests that people are
resorting more and more to their own senses in order to perceive the existence
and the gravity of environmental problems. This is allegedly due to growing
distrust towards politicians and the objectivity of ‘others’ in general (including
companies, the media, etc.), and to a widespread perception of lack of personal
agency. This shift has been interpreted as a revaluation of ‘localized and
embedded identities’ and might be an adequate framework to understand the
relationship between nature and society from a more personal point of view.
This relationship involves actions but also feelings. As indicated by McShane
(2007, p. 175), feelings and moral lives ‘are lived from the inside, in the first
person’. Therefore, we should not only care about material ‘outputs’ but also
about the ‘inner life of the being that produces those outputs’.
As some studies have suggested, personal happiness and subjective well-
being seem to be relatively disconnected from economic wealth, environmental
quality, and even social justice (Marks et al. 2006, O’Neill 2008). According to
Dresner (2002), unhappiness is related largely to the impossibility of fulfilling
socially created desires. In contrast, happiness and personal well-being have
been associated with aspects of life such as ‘autonomy, freedom, achievement,
and the development of deep interpersonal relationships’ (Kahneman and
Sugden 2005, p. 176). The existence of projects and relationships is not only
meaningful from a personal point of view, but also complements ‘a purely
impartial ethical commitment’ towards society (O’Neill 2008, p. 138). This
Environmental Politics 551
personal commitment may play a distinctive role in the pursuit of better inter-
generational justice since humans have the freedom to be relatively
autonomous from both their environment and their culture, as postulated by
Maslow (1954). Arguably, individuals and society can play different roles in the
pursuit of sustainability. Barry (1999) thinks that we are not an ‘undiffer-
entiated ‘‘humanity’’ facing an equally undifferentiated ‘‘nature’’’. He proposes
a ‘citizen–environment’ perspective, as opposed to the classical society–
environment relation, as ‘the most appropriate standpoint from which to judge
politically the normative standing of the non-human world’ (Barry 1999, pp.
61–65, emphasis original). Merging individuals and society into one single
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dimension might fail to capture the complexity of human behaviour and the
relevance of personal relationships for sustainability. Explicit consideration of
personal aspects or ‘personscapes’ in the sustainability triangle can also be seen
as a challenge to the idea that nature and society are opposites. Individuals,
who play a fundamental role in the generation, shaping, and maintenance of
culture, are in consequence partly responsible for the construction of a culture-
dependent notion of nature. Therefore, from a personal point of view, it would
also be as difficult to separate nature and culture as it is to ‘neatly separate
mind and body’, paraphrasing Adam (1998) on timescapes.
The idea of some connection and interdependence between humans and
nature and between humans themselves, in recognising intrinsic value to
‘others’, is a powerful political instrument with normative implications
(Saravanamuthu 2006). Seeing individual persons as intrinsically valuable
might reduce the risk that sectoral (social, environmental, economic,
institutional, or political) interests override the rights of minorities and citizens
by considerations of public utility, as discussed in Norton (2005) and Caney
(2008). Only individuals, with their morals and values, can achieve the ‘change
of consciousness’ that, according to Dryzek (1987, pp. 150–160), is needed to
achieve an ecologically ‘rational’ world free from authoritarian top-down
moral ‘persuasion’. Norton (2005) and Hill Jr. (2006, p. 331) also provided
arguments against the idea individuals are always selfish and insatiable
consumers whose behaviour can only be restrained by compulsion. There are
many examples of collective institutions guided not by immediate gains but by
more altruistic aims, which have been effective in managing common resources
(Folke et al. 1996, Ostrom 1990). The individualistic pursuit of profit, which
has been usually supposed to lead to the common good (thanks to Adam
Smith’s ‘invisible hand’), could instead lead to environmental destruction and
economic crisis, as pointed out long ago by Hardin (1968).
Concluding remarks
I have tried to show that the conventional idea of sustainable development has
a number of conceptual limitations and does not sufficiently capture some
spatial, temporal, and personal aspects. To mitigate these shortcomings, I
introduced a five-dimensional conceptual framework arguably more sensitive
552 L. Seghezzo
Acknowledgements
Detailed and insightful observations from three anonymous referees were greatly
appreciated. The incisive comments of Gatze Lettinga and former colleagues of
Wageningen University (The Netherlands) on early versions of this paper are also
deeply acknowledged. I credit the lively discussions at the cafeteria of the National
University of Salta (Argentina) for some of the ideas in this paper. Many thanks to
James Champion and Tim Briggs for their grammatical input. The author is a full-time
researcher at The National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina
(CONICET) (www.conicet.gov.ar).
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