1 Sustainability
This section gives a short introduction to sustainability and pointers to relevant debates for the purpose of establishing enough core sustainability science concepts to make a discussion of sustainable digitalization possible.
Fundamentally, in this context, a key distinction to be made when discussing sustainability is the distinction between:
- Sustainability as a normative concept, including its discoursive contestation and imaginaries
- Sustainability transformations as socio-technical change processes oriented toward sustainability
1.1 Sustainability as a normative concept
1.1.1 The Brundtland definition
This is the original (in the sense of the first widely read and most referenced) mission statement/ definition in (The World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987, Conclusion, emphasis added):
- Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: • the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and • the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.
- Thus the goals of economic and social development must be defined in terms of sustainability in all countries
- developed or developing, market-oriented or centrally planned. Interpretations will vary, but must share certain general features and must flow from a consensus on the basic concept of sustainable development and on a broad strategic framework for achieving it.
- Development involves a progressive transformation of economy and society. A development path that is sustainable in a physical sense could theoretically be pursued even in a rigid social and political setting. But physical sustainability cannot be secured unless development policies pay attention to such considerations as changes in access to resources and in the distribution of costs and benefits. Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation.
The Brundtland definition is still relevant today and often referenced. Often, it is reduced to the first line in point 1. above. Seeing the definition in context is helpful to recognize that intra- and intergenerational justice (especially distributive justice) has always been at the core of sustainability as a normative concept.
1.1.2 Strong and weak sustainability
Before and after the Brundtlandt definition, many different variations on sustainability definitions emerged. A key, helpful way to make sense of how people talk about and define sustainability is the differentiation between strong and weak sustainability (Ott, Muraca, and Baatz 2011). On important difference between strong and weak sustainability concepts relates to the possibility of substitution:
We will not go into the widespread “three pillars” (variants of economy, society and nature spheres of sustainability) model here, except for noting that its foundations and origins are very unclear and shaky - and that upon closer inspection, it just continues to raise questions because of that (Purvis, Mao, and Robinson 2019).
- Weak sustainability concepts basically argue that “nature” (without going into nature as a concept here, which has many pitfalls) or natural capital is nothing special among other forms of capital and can be substituted at will. This is important for sustainability when considering the world that a current generation should leave to future generations. Ott, Muraca, and Baatz (2011) make the example of forests - under weak sustainability, a world without forests would be a perfectly acceptable world to leave to future generations, given that all functions of forests can be fulfilled by other means (eg. wood replacements, direct carbon capture, nature films..) and that this substitution is cost-effective (non-declining utility over time).
This notion of substitution obviously is very relevant when considering sustainability in the light of digitalization.
- Strong sustainability concepts are of the “nature is the foundation, not a pillar” variant and advocate that natural capital needs at least to be maintained for future generations. The argument is generally not about the possibility of substitution but its desirability and advocates of strong sustainability use arguments (among others) such as multi-functionality of the biosphere, the need to not reduce options for future generations or the precautionary principle (Ott, Muraca, and Baatz 2011, 20).
It also needs to be noted here that notions of substitution rest on very specific ways of thinking about relationships between nature and humans, which are not by any means shared across knowledge systems across the world.
1.1.3 Three core strategies: Efficiency, sufficiency, consistency
Sustainability is an interconnected problem of distributive justice and resource use. One of the key developments of the sustainability science literature was the differentiation of three essential strategies that are possible to reduce resource use. In a simplified form:
- Efficiency strategies reduce the resource used per unit of output. For example, reducing the amount of energy used for a computer to compute a specific task.
- Sufficiency strategies reduce the actual number of units of output to reduce resource use impact. For example, one can ask if the specific computation is actually necessary if it has an environmental impact. There is much more to the concept, as it is often connected to broader questions of what is really needed (or suffices) for a good life but we’ll keep the definition simple for our purposes here.
- Consistency strategies try to embed entire processes in natural cycles. As such, consistency is often only possible on a larger level (circular economy concepts). For example, if energy used for a computation is sourced from renewable energy sources and the hardware components making the computation possible can be recycled.
The combination of efficiency and sufficiency strategies is often refered to as twin or double decoupling (Schneidewind 2018) (as in decoupling economic activity from resource use), compared to single decoupling as used in many green growth narratives, which often only targets efficiency strategies.
1.1.4 Sustainability imaginaries
Sustainability as a normative concept ultimately needs to be and is translated into actions, where it is needed to legitimize these actions. As such, the normative concept of sustainability can also be studied from a more sociological perspective. Various configurations of actors leverage the concept, rephrase, translate and adapt it in an ongoing discourse (Göpel 2016). In doing so, they draw up visions and imaginaries for future societal pathways.
It is not surprising that many sustainability scientists are obsessed with science fiction. “In a certain sense, a sustainable world is a fiction” (Martens 2006, 40). For a beautiful example of science fiction based sustainability imaginaries, see https://radicaloceanfutures.earth.
One interesting starting point here is the idea of ideal typical imaginaries of “futures of sustainability”, modernization, transformation and control (Adloff and Neckel 2019), which can also be considered related to digitalization (Lenz 2021). These imaginaries are not actual futures but reference points that actors can refer to in discourses.
Sustainability as Modernization: Based on weak sustainability concepts, sustainability as modernization describes futures the leave current capitalist economies largely untouched but reorient them to work within or solve environmental problems. Economic growth is not questioned and sustainability challenges might even be seen as a growth opportunities (“green growth”, emissions markets, Green New Deal…).
Sustainability as Transformation: Imaginaries based on transformation ideas reject the weak sustainability foundations of modernization and call for more fundamental changes in society in a “great transformation” sense. Their proponents draw up visions of a post-growth, solidarity society moving away from limitless consumption and capitalist extraction (Wiedmann et al. 2020 is a recent read).
Sustainability as Control: This imaginary is driven by ideas of resilience, inevitability and emergency. Here, powerful entities (eg. autocratic states) “solve” sustainability crises by leveraging emergency (see Patterson et al. 2021 for a nuanced discussion of emergency framings around climate change) powers to mitigate consequences of crises in possibly undemocratic ways.
1.1.5 Modern developments
Among more recent higher-level concepts shaping thinking around sustainability, three interconnected developments stand out:
The concept of planetary boundaries (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015) has been hugely influential in providing a high-level heuristic to diagnose the state of the earth system with regard to being a “safe operating space for humanity”.
The concept of the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin 2015), positing a new geological epoch defined by the impact of humans on the earth has both captured and influenced thinking around sustainability, from critiques of how useful the term “environmental” still is (Biermann 2021) to fundamental reconsiderations of nature-culture dichotomies (Buscher and Fletcher 2020).
The concept of the doughnut economy (Raworth 2017) has been one of the more elegant ways of designing a narrative combining the planetary boundaries concept as a upper limit for human activity on the planet with a lower limit for human prosperity that should be met for all. The space inbetween is the “safe and just space for humanity”.
There is obviously much much more that has happened recently in sustainability science (Clark and Harley 2020). One more mention should probably be work on shallow and deep leverage points and their application to sustainability transformation (Fischer and Riechers 2019), which are a heuristic to think about how to intervene in complex systems.
1.2 Sustainability transformations
Sustainability transformations are the actual socio-technical change processes happening that are oriented toward sustainability. These can be studied in their own right.
1.2.1 Sustainability transitions
The sustainability transitions literature is a lively, interdisciplinary field of research which is concerned with how radical changes toward sustainability come about in sectors that fulfill key societal functions (like energy, transport, healthcare, water/sanitation, etc.) and how they can be actively navigated by stakeholders (Truffer et al. 2022; Loorbach, Frantzeskaki, and Avelino 2017).
1.2.2 Sustainability governance
Another literature coming from policy studies and social-ecological systems perspectives (in the Ostrom 2009 sense) focuses more on the processes in sustainability governance not necessarily contained to radical changes. Lubell and Morrison (2021) is a good entry point.
1.2.3 The UN 2030 Agenda
The UN 2030 Agenda (United Nations General Assembly 2015) and its associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been the outcomes of a high-level political process that has developed normative power in defining areas for action on sustainability since its inception in 2015. In their conceptual foundations, the SDGs are probably closer to the “three pillars” model of sustainability in raising more questions, the closer one looks into them. Further, the goals are very broad global goals and their actual political impact beyond agenda setting (which should not be underestimated however!) appears to have been limited until now (Biermann et al. 2022).
Still, research on the SDGs occupies a lot of space in the sustainability science literature at the moment, for example with interesting work on indicators for SDGs (Koch, Beyer, and Chen 2023), local adaptation of SDGs and their implementation (Patel et al. 2017) or SDG interactions (Bennich, Weitz, and Carlsen 2020).