Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that the large-scale and long-term transitions needed to mitigate climate change and to implement policies for sustainable development within planetary boundaries require significant shifts in values and behaviours. Consequently, there is increasing interest in the processes through which major societal transitions for sustainability can occur through peaceful cooperation and widespread embrace of pro-environmental values, and the values associated with the broad concept of sustainability such as care for the interests of future generations and concern for the poor. This encompasses the search for compelling narratives to frame the process and goals of change and the need for the fostering of virtues and ethical frameworks of identity and practice that can underpin advocacy and change for sustainability. This requires drawing on richer sources of values and ethics. We suggest that important resources can be found in religious, as well as secular traditions of social values and ethical analysis. While major religions have begun to reflect environmental concerns and sustainability goals in their theology and praxis, with immense potential and actual influence over value and behaviours, little research has explored the impacts and implications of this development; nor indeed, the intellectual stimulus and social capabilities they can offer to secular thinkers and practitioners in sustainable development. In particular, we argue that there is a need to consider the affinities between secular sustainability frameworks for ethics and policy and the concepts of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) on the Common Good, recently updated by Pope Francis to integrate ecological concern and a call for universal ‘ecological conversion’ and cooperation. We outline the key features of CST and the Pope’s new ‘Integral Ecology’ framework and identify affinities, in particular, with Elinor Ostrom’s system of design principles for sustainable management of commons. We conclude with suggestions for research to investigate the interrelationships of the Integral Ecology reframing of CST with initiatives for transformational change in values and practices for sustainability.
Highlights
There is widespread acknowledgement that the transitions needed to achieve sustainable development within ‘planetary boundaries’ (Steffen et al 2015) require major political, technological and financial changes that will both depend on and generate significant shifts in values and behaviours
In the West, sustainable development debates have been largely conducted in secular terms, with little acknowledgement of the role potentially played by religious faiths as major social systems offering narratives, ethics and practices that can give powerful expression and support to value shifts and behavioural changes
Adopting the notion of social values advanced in Kenter et al (2015), in particular, their account of shared values as ‘implicit, communal or public values... that are brought forward through deliberative social processes’; and of social values as common principles and ‘the values held in common by a group, community or society’, we argue that religious faiths have long offered important framings of social values
Summary
There is widespread acknowledgement that the transitions needed to achieve sustainable development within ‘planetary boundaries’ (Steffen et al 2015) require major political, technological and financial changes that will both depend on and generate significant shifts in values and behaviours. In the West, sustainable development debates have been largely conducted in secular terms, with little acknowledgement of the role potentially played by religious faiths as major social systems offering narratives, ethics and practices that can give powerful expression and support to value shifts and behavioural changes. The substantive view of the common good refers to the variety of shared requirements (e.g. material, cultural) that are beneficial to most or all members of a particular community; whilst the procedural view frames the common good as a set of outcomes resulting from individual and collective civic action (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2018) This very brief sketch of some ‘secular’ and Christian understandings of the common good clearly indicates that it is a multifaceted concept with no necessarily agreed definition but, has strong connections to a relational interpretation of social values as described in Kenter et al (2015). Whilst we recognize these (quite often vigorous) debates, here we use the terms sustainability and sustainable development interchangeably, acknowledging that, despite their various actualizations, at their core they are both concerned with moving society towards a model grounded in human prosperity and social-ecological flourishing
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