Rethinking Progress. On the Origin of the Modern Sustainability Discourse, 1970–2000

Abstract

Rethinking Progress. On the Origin of the Modern Sustainability Discourse, 1970-2000 Sustainability has become a key concept in the national and international policy discourse, and nonetheless it has not been clearly defined. This article argues that it is precisely the vagueness of the concept that has made it so attractive for politics. Focusing on the international politics arena and the West German case, the article shows that dominating political notions of development and progress were partly reconceptualised in order to incorporate long-term ecological and social issues around 1970. Against this backdrop, from the late 1980s onwards, «sustainable development» and «sustainability» became political concepts for the future which, explicitly vague, appeared to balance economic, ecological and social goals in both short-term and long-term perspectives. The notions of sustainable development and sustainability oscillated between crisis perceptions, steady-state thinking and a new semantics of modernisation from the 1970s to 2000. In this light, it is argued that there is no «end of confidence» but rather that understandings of progress have been reconfigured.

The Problems of Modern Societies — Epistemic Design around 1970

“…Inf luential media theories such as the agenda-setting theory, the knowledge gap hypothesis and framing theories were developed in the years around 1970 (Tichenor et al 1970;McCombs/Shaw 1972;Goffman 1974). In addition to these new or strengthened fields of social science several historians marked that at the peak time of the space age the unprecedented and iconic global environmental images of the blue marble shaped a newly global environmental consciousness, resulting in an 'ecological revolution' (Radkau 2014;Seefried 2015b). Consequently, the 'vast machine' of the environmental sciences emerged as a global knowledge infrastructure, a large-scale sociotechnical system collecting environmental data and modelling and projecting planetary processes (Jasanoff 2001;Edwards 2010;Cosgrove 2001).…”

Towards a Historical Understanding of Critical Raw Materials: Suggestions from a History of Technology Perspective

“…On the most abstract level, critical raw materials are considered to be essential within broader future scenarios. The relevance of such scenarios for the construction of technologies, scientific knowledge and environmental policies has been stressed in recent his-torical research (Heymann et al 2017, Radkau 2017, Seefried 2015. Scenarios are instrumental in generating and substantiating predictions.…”

Globalized Science. The 1970s Futures Field

“…Participants taking sides for or against the study began to speak of qualitative growth as a guiding principle: growth should be oriented towards quality rather than quantity, and should balance ecological, economic and social aspects in a global perspective. The debate laid the foundations for conceptions of ‘sustainable development’ (Seefried, ).…”