Values and Sustainable Development: Reflection on Selected Czech Policy Documents 1988–2010

Abstract

A coherent value system and attitude towards the social and natural environment are considered to be a basic condition for the implementation of sustainable development as implicitly contained in the Rio+20 Declaration ‘The Future We Want’. The importance of human values such as justice, equality, shared responsibility, empowerment, solidarity or tolerance also need to gain appeal anew because of the ongoing economic crises. Although politicians have often taken advantage of the powerful concept of values, extensive research in this field is still lacking. The main goal of the study is to analyse the meaning of values and how their importance has changed over time. The values under scrutiny were identified in selected national policies relating to environmental protection and sustainable development covering the period 1988–2010. The study presents a method for the operationalization of values to understand their meaning and to obtain the first quantitative findings on changes of values in selected policies over the past two decades. The results of the analysis revealed the absence or low representation of sustainable development values (e.g. solidarity or tolerance) which may open up a discussion on the role of values in policy-making and possibly improve new, relevant Czech policies accordingly.

Keywords:

• Sustainable development
• human values
• sustainable development values
• environmental policy
• content analysis
• ‘Beyond GDP’ initiative

Acknowledgements

This article has been supported through the BRAINPOol (Bringing alternative indicators into policy), a research project under grant agreement no: 283024, funded by the European Commission under its 7th Framework Programme.

Notes

The term ‘equality’ can be understood in some documents as ‘equity’.

Despite the fact that this document was created in a different political context (communist period) we included it in our analysis for comparative purposes.

Semantic validity is the degree to which a method is sensitive to relevant semantic distinctions in the data being analysed. It is the degree to which a content analysis recognizes and correctly represents the symbolic qualities, meanings and conceptualizations in the system of interest (Krippendorff, 1980).