Sustainability Governance in Democracies

Abstract

The pursuit of sustainable development requires a political system that secures effective citizen participation in decision-making, an economic system that is able to generate surpluses on a sustained basis and a social system providing for a solution to tensions arising from disharmonious development; it recognizes also the rights of the individual to adequate conditions of life through balancing environmental, economic and social norms. Although international law is neutral towards different forms of government, increasingly democracy is regarded as the only form of government truly reflecting the “consent of the governed” and therefore being in accordance with the right of the self-determination of people and thus the basis for the realization of human rights. But the theoretical and practical linkage between democracy and sustainable development is still weak. Although there is a burgeoning literature on democratic mechanisms and sustainability, democracy is not regarded as prerequisite for sustainability. The authors argue in this paper that although sustainable development seemingly does not need democratic forms of governance as the values attached to SD could also be implemented in a non-democratic system, research on democracy, human rights and sustainable norms need to be better linked to each other in order to be able to implement the political requirements simultaneously. The authors propose an integrated approach that respects the ideas of sustainable development, as well as human rights and democratic forms of governance. Thus, the authors present different systems of democratic governance, sustainable development indicators systems as well as human rights systems. From there the authors develop ideal-type models that represent those ideas and develop an integrated approach to a democratic sustainable development system in accordance with human rights.