Abstract
The idea of sustainability is intrinsically normative. Thus, understanding the role of normativity in sustainability discourses is crucial for further developing sustainability science. In this article, we analyze three important documents that aim to advance sustainability and explore how they organize norms in relation to sustainability. The three documents are: the Pope’s Encyclical Laudato Si’, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. We show that understanding the role of different types of norms in the three documents can help understand normative features of both scientific and non-scientific sustainability discourses. We present the diverse system of norms in a model that interrelates three different levels: macro, meso, and micro. Our model highlights how several processes affect the normative orientation of nations and societies at the meso-level in different ways. For instance, individual ethical norms at the micro-level, such as personal responsibility, may help decelerate unsustainable consumerism at the aggregate meso-level. We also show that techno-scientific norms at the macro-level representing global indicators for sustainability may accelerate innovations. We suggest that our model can help better organize normative features of sustainability discourses and, therefore, to contribute to the further development of sustainability science.
Highlights
Normativity defines a significant research field within sustainability science, where scientific knowledge and normative orientations are intrinsically linked (Carnau 2011; Miller et al 2014; Ziegler and Ott 2011)
We suggest ways to understand and model norms in sustainability discourses based on the analysis of three documents: the Pope’s Encyclical Laudato Si’, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement (PA)
Humanity and the entire planet Earth are the macro-level parameters of normativity in all three documents, while techno-science dominates the PA and the SDGs; metaphysical ethics prevails in the Encyclical
Summary
Normativity defines a significant research field within sustainability science, where scientific knowledge and normative orientations are intrinsically linked (Carnau 2011; Miller et al 2014; Ziegler and Ott 2011). We analyze the three important documents produced in 2015 and look at how they structure and organize the ethical and techno-scientific norms that characterize current discourses in sustainability. The norms governing these documents define the broad social, political, and scientific direction of sustainability discourses and interventions in the near future (Nature 2015; Edenhofer et al 2015)
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