Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties

Abstract

As sustainability gains popularity in public discourse, scholars have noted its diverse uses, multiple meanings, and contradictory outcomes. This paper explores how the current proliferation of the concept of sustainability stems in part from its varied normative appeals, which in turn motivate, legitimate, and unsettle its diverse mobilizations. As the concept of sustainability calls for an extension of moral horizons beyond the immediate here and now, this redrawing of moral boundaries has simultaneously produced new externalities as well as enduring anxieties and responses within these moral bounds themselves. Drawing on ethnographic and historical materials, we argue that sustainability’s moral boundaries have become both an object of scholarly critique and their own productive site of anxiety and negotiation. Questions about sustainability’s moral horizons and externalities often surface in the concept’s public deployment itself. We suggest that these tensions can be made visible by attending to the intersections between sustainability and a broader range of moral concerns at work.

seesus: a social, environmental, and economic sustainability classifier for Python

“…Sustainability is an important topic in contemporary discourse. However, the delineation and interpretation of this concept are often different across disciplines (Salas-Zapata et al, 2017), which hinders effective communication, causes inconsistencies in research and practice, and impedes measurable actions to achieve sustainability (Waseem & Kota, 2017;Yamada et al, 2022). With the increasing popularity of text-based assessments (Amini et al, 2018;Olsen & Fenhann, 2008;Singh et al, 2023), these issues have become more prominent, as the criteria vary for evaluating sustainability commitments and contributions.…”

Morally literate: Forging communities of moral sensitivity and care through Theatre Pedagogy

“…The latter also interrelates moral literacy with what Sterling referred to as 'deep sustainability learning' (Sterling, 2008), connecting it with contemporary crucial issues, which requires from the learner to commence posing ontological questions about existence as it remains entangled in multiple ways of experiencing and knowing (Wals, 2017). Problematizing the sustainability of contemporary life and thinking on the moral standing of humanity in front of age-old concerns (Yamada et al, 2022), is an updated version of an apprenticeship in moral literacy. A morally literate person, thus, develops dispositions on which he can count in the face of dilemmas and hard decision-making (Yacek et al, 2023), demonstrating a readiness to examine the means towards the ends, securing thus a fair, worthwhile manner of living life.…”

Environmental Sustainability Generated by the Views of the Skolt Sami and Gregory Bateson

“…In this case, the person's position in relation to different perceptions of sustainable and unsustainable action could also be considered. (Yamada et al 2022) On the other hand, David Throsby and Ekaterina Petetskaya (2016: 120, 134) have claimed that the paradigm of sustainability is universal, but that culture-bound solutions are varied. The article at hand presents one way of connecting the culture focused approach with the universal one.…”

“…As the key problem of sustainability, Shoko Yamada et al (2022) have emphasised the importance of who defines what sustainable development means and how this concept is applied in practice, by whom and for whom. Of these points of interest, this article focuses on one, namely what sustainability means.…”