Sustainability: characteristics and scientific roots

Abstract

Literature about sustainable development is abundant and expanding, and syntheses are therefore increasingly necessary. This paper represents an effort to characterize the main principles behind the concept of sustainability and to identify and describe the scientific approaches at the root of each of those principles. From a scientific point of view, the identification of sustainability principles is possibly more interesting than providing one rigid definition because they are more abstract and conceptual. As a first step, three scientific approaches relevant in the context of sustainability—ecological economics, sustainability transition, and sustainability science—were characterized and synthesized into four sustainability principles. The next step was the identification and description of the scientific approaches at the root of each sustainability principle. All descriptions are based on a literature review. Four sustainability principles were identified: the stressing of biophysical limits that constrain the scale of the human economy; the focus on societal welfare and development; the understanding that each system has its own minimum irreducible needs in order to be viable; and the acknowledgment of system complexity. From an evolutionary perspective, scientific approaches at the root of sustainability progressed from a static view of environmental limits and human impacts to a dynamic and integrative vision of them; from an emphasis on human impacts and availability of natural resources to a more balanced position that puts human and social capital at the center; from a rigid definition of goals to the understanding that the process of transition toward goals is as important as the goals themselves. The four principles of sustainability incorporated in varying degrees a broad range of scientific contributions. Sustainability may, as such, be regarded as a step toward consilience, an attempt to bring together scholars from different backgrounds and disciplines in order to create an integrated thesis.