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Environmental Politics
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To cite this article: Lucas Seghezzo (2009) The five dimensions of sustainability,
Environmental Politics, 18:4, 539-556, DOI: 10.1080/09644010903063669
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Environmental Politics
Vol. 18, No. 4, July 2009, 539556
persons;
place;
sustainability;
sustainable
Introduction
Our common future, the report released in 1987 by the World Commission on
Environment and Development (WCED) chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland,
stated that development is only sustainable if it meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs (WCED 1987, p. 8). The concept of sustainable development was
launched by the WCED as a global objective to guide policies orientated to
balance economic and social systems and ecological conditions. It is often
represented with the triple bottom line of economy, environment, and society
(Elkington et al. 2007, p. 1). A sustainable development triangle formed by
People, Planet, and Prot (the three Ps), with Prot sometimes replaced by the
*Email: lucas.seghezzo@wur.nl
ISSN 0964-4016 print/ISSN 1743-8934 online
2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09644010903063669
http://www.informaworld.com
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(Bell and Morse 2008, Hanley 2000). Although CBA was never meant to be a
stand-alone method, it is still widely promoted as one of the best ways to guide
the ecient allocation of resources and to assess the feasibility (and
sustainability) of projects and policies (Pearce et al. 1989). A number of
limitations, obstacles, and behavioural anomalies that undermine the validity
of CBA for environmental policy making have been identied, forcing
economists to devise a variety of coping strategies to overcome these
limitations and make it more appealing to governments and the general public
(Barde and Pearce 1991, Hanley and Shogren 2005). The main ethical,
philosophical, and practical objections raised against the use of CBA derive
from the very assumptions on which the method is founded. Especially
questioned have been the legitimacy of valuation of some forms of nature, the
acceptability of unlimited trade-os between natural and man-made capital,
and the validity of discounting (Freeman III 2003, Hanley 2000, Mason 1999,
Shechter 2000). Discounting is a particularly contentious issue, especially in
terms of intertemporal equity and distributive implications. According to
Hanley (2000), the assumption made by CBA that the net present value of
products and projects must be maximised lays potentially heavy costs on future
generations. In fact, at any (reasonable) discount rate greater than zero, the
present value of damages expected far in the future could be neglected when
confronted with present benets. This constitutes a clear, pervasive, not to say
perverse, bias in CBA tests in favour of the present generation at the expense of
the yet unborn. As compensating future generations may be impossible as well,
the possibility that the winners can compensate the losers and still be better
o with the changes produced by the project, one of the foundations of CBA, is
signicantly reduced. Additional criticisms have been directed to the
assumption that everybody should be eventually willing to accept some kind
of compensation in exchange of environmental or social losses, an idea rejected
by strong sustainability advocates. Besides, poor people would tend to accept
lower compensations in exchange for natural goods (if they are compensated at
all), and this would help perpetuate the present state of inequitable distribution
of wealth. Even strong defenders of CBA consider that a sustainability
constraint should be used as an additional criterion to prevent the depletion
of natural resources threatened by excessive exploitation (which, by their own
account, is encouraged by high discount rates) (Pearce et al. 1990, p. 37).
Others have pointed out that CBA should not be viewed as either necessary or
sucient for designing sensible public policy (Arrow et al. 1996), or that
additional measures are always needed to ensure that projects that passed a
CBA are sustainable (Hanley 2000). It could instead be argued that economic
tools like CBA might be more useful after, not before, other sustainability
assessment methods have been carried out in order to reject unacceptable
alternatives. In this respect, the use of multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and
participatory approaches is steadily growing (Hajkowicz 2008, Hanley and
Shogren 2005). Criticism of CBA does not automatically mean a concomitant
criticism of all market-based processes. It is possible, as some authors have
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needs as perhaps the ultimate goal of any development policy (WCED 1987,
p. 43). Yet humans cannot be equated only to their needs. Moreover, human
needs are not only physiological. Many types of needs have been identied,
such as safety, love, esteem, and the desire for self-fullment (Chuengsatiansup
2003, Holden and Linnerud 2007, Maslow 1943). Most of these needs involve
feelings, felt by individuals, and cannot be catalogued as social. Whether the
management and coordination of economic, environmental and social aspects
is the right strategy to satisfy all human needs is therefore debatable. As will be
discussed in more detail below, a development paradigm that fails to take these
feelings into account might not guarantee that issues related to, for instance,
personal happiness are incorporated in the sustainability debate.
The ve dimensions of sustainability
As discussed in the preceding section, the WCED concept of sustainable
development has contradictions and limitations. Nonetheless, its release by the
United Nations had a very powerful inuence on the worlds environmental and
social agenda. The report was allegedly made with people of all countries and all
walks of life in mind and called for immediate action on many fronts (WCED
1987, p. 23). Whether or not the ultimate purpose of the WCED report (1987) was
to be an all-encompassing theory of social change is dicult to say. Yet it made sure
to warn us that unless we changed our attitudes, the security, well-being, and very
survival of the planet were threatened (WCED 1987, p. 23). The academic world
seems reluctant to rethink the WCED paradigm although, as pointed out by
Reitan (2005), this vision of development does not appear to be working in
practice. The persistence of environmental, social, and economic problems is
attributed more to implementation decits than to intrinsic inconsistencies of the
concept itself. However, since it was released more than two decades ago, it is
obvious that the WCED denition could not have taken into account recent and
fruitful debates on sustainability that partly complement and partly counteract the
ideas in the WCED report.
Building on some of these debates, I will try to show that the limitations of
the WCED denition of sustainable development could be mitigated if
sustainability is seen as the conceptual framework within which the territorial,
temporal, and personal aspects of development can be openly discussed. To
illustrate this framework, I propose a sustainability triangle formed by Place,
Permanence, and Persons (Figure 1). In such a triangle, it is possible to
distinguish ve dimensions: Place contains the three dimensions of space (x, y,
and z), Permanence is the fourth dimension of time (t), and the Persons corner
adds a fth, individual and interior, human dimension (i). Place and Persons,
the base of the triangle, represent real, objective and concrete things that exist
in the present time. Permanence, which is located in the upper (or the farthest)
corner, is a more ideal, abstract and subjective projection of events from the
other corners into the future. I turn to a more detailed explanation of the
meaning I ascribe to the vertices of this new triangle.
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Figure 1. The new ve-dimensional sustainability triangle. Place: the three dimensions
of space (x, y, and z); Permanence: the fourth dimension of time (t); Persons: the fth,
human dimension (i). More details in the text.
Place
People tend to see the environment as the place in which they live and interact.
There are consequently as many environments or places as visions people
have of the space around them (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Place provides an
important share of the sense of belonging and identity that are partly
responsible for the generation of culture. It has been dened as the experience
of a particular location with some measure of groundedness . . . , sense of
boundaries . . ., and connection to everyday life (Escobar 2001, p. 140). As
Escobar suggests, the denition of any alternative development paradigm
should take into account place-based models of nature, culture, and politics.
Places are much more than just empty geographical spaces. They contain what
Macnaghten and Urry (1998) call the spatialised, timed, sensed and embodied
dimensions of nature. Places are therefore a source of facts, identities, and
behaviours. They incorporate notions of culture, local ways of life, and human
physical and psychological health (Franquemagne 2007, Garavan 2007, Le
2000). Place can also be constituted by a number of locations distant from one
another. This shared territory might be an important ingredient in social
cohesion, as studies on mobility, networks and migration have suggested (Urry
2002). Place is, to a certain extent, a social construct that helps people build a
sense of belonging to a given culture. On the other hand, it could also be
argued that culture is, in turn, delineated in terms of specic places. A
perception of place as an inseparable unity constituted by the natural and
cultural environments can help transcend the nature/culture dichotomy
and integrate or reconcile opposite worldviews such anthropocentrism and
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Permanence
Permanence is not only mere maintenance of present conditions. It includes
changes and improvements. As indicated by Norton (2005, p. 304),
sustainability, whatever else it means, has to do with our intertemporal moral
relations. For that reason, Permanence could be seen as the main realm of
inter-generational equity. The need for long-term thinking has always been
acknowledged in the sustainability discourse. However, planning has been all
too often relegated to a secondary role. Permanence is consequently the
dimension where planning and consideration of the future eects of todays
actions and inactions are paramount. The explicit inclusion of temporal aspects
seems especially appropriate to deal with issues related to our material legacy
and personal transcendence. The sense of belonging to a given place is often
related to things that occurred at dierent, sometimes distant moments
(Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Therefore, it can be argued the very concept of
place is not complete until we attach to it a certain temporal component. As
indicated by Giddens (1984), time is not a mere background for action and
interaction. Instead, it is inextricably correlated with space, social institutions
and individual persons. Complementary concepts like Place and Permanence
seem pertinent within a development paradigm that intends to have local and
global, but also far-reaching implications. Nonetheless, it has to be considered
as well that a world dened only in terms of place and permanence can be a
very sad place for many people. Slavery, torture, tyranny and other human
monstrosities so widely distributed in space and time can never be considered
sustainable (George 1999). The concepts of justice and equity, though
essential to build a more sustainable world, are probably not comprehensive
enough to contain a number of more personal aspects. We can all be equal and
have the same access to goods and services but we can also all be equally
unhappy. For those reasons, I believe that the notion of sustainability should
include a personal dimension. This dimension, however fuzzy and contested
its denition may be, seems necessary to deal with issues of identity, values,
rights, happiness and well-being.
Persons
The idea of the existence of an individual person within each human being,
similar yet entirely dierent to those around them, has been the subject of
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personal commitment may play a distinctive role in the pursuit of better intergenerational justice since humans have the freedom to be relatively
autonomous from both their environment and their culture, as postulated by
Maslow (1954). Arguably, individuals and society can play dierent roles in the
pursuit of sustainability. Barry (1999) thinks that we are not an undierentiated humanity facing an equally undierentiated nature. He proposes
a citizenenvironment perspective, as opposed to the classical society
environment relation, as the most appropriate standpoint from which to judge
politically the normative standing of the non-human world (Barry 1999, pp.
6165, emphasis original). Merging individuals and society into one single
dimension might fail to capture the complexity of human behaviour and the
relevance of personal relationships for sustainability. Explicit consideration of
personal aspects or personscapes in the sustainability triangle can also be seen
as a challenge to the idea that nature and society are opposites. Individuals,
who play a fundamental role in the generation, shaping, and maintenance of
culture, are in consequence partly responsible for the construction of a culturedependent notion of nature. Therefore, from a personal point of view, it would
also be as dicult to separate nature and culture as it is to neatly separate
mind and body, paraphrasing Adam (1998) on timescapes.
The idea of some connection and interdependence between humans and
nature and between humans themselves, in recognising intrinsic value to
others, is a powerful political instrument with normative implications
(Saravanamuthu 2006). Seeing individual persons as intrinsically valuable
might reduce the risk that sectoral (social, environmental, economic,
institutional, or political) interests override the rights of minorities and citizens
by considerations of public utility, as discussed in Norton (2005) and Caney
(2008). Only individuals, with their morals and values, can achieve the change
of consciousness that, according to Dryzek (1987, pp. 150160), is needed to
achieve an ecologically rational world free from authoritarian top-down
moral persuasion. Norton (2005) and Hill Jr. (2006, p. 331) also provided
arguments against the idea individuals are always selsh and insatiable
consumers whose behaviour can only be restrained by compulsion. There are
many examples of collective institutions guided not by immediate gains but by
more altruistic aims, which have been eective in managing common resources
(Folke et al. 1996, Ostrom 1990). The individualistic pursuit of prot, which
has been usually supposed to lead to the common good (thanks to Adam
Smiths invisible hand), could instead lead to environmental destruction and
economic crisis, as pointed out long ago by Hardin (1968).
Concluding remarks
I have tried to show that the conventional idea of sustainable development has
a number of conceptual limitations and does not suciently capture some
spatial, temporal, and personal aspects. To mitigate these shortcomings, I
introduced a ve-dimensional conceptual framework arguably more sensitive
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L. Seghezzo
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