Sustainability and the future of environmental sociology

No single concept is mentioned by more articles published in Environmental Sociology than the concept of sustainability. This is not surprising. No other concept has done more to shape contemporary understanding of the social, economic and ecological interdependencies implicated in environmental change. Sustainability has become part of our collective common sense to a point that few contributing authors reflect critically on its meaning or importance.

To be fair, meeting our needs in ways that do not undermine the ability of either ourselves or other people to do the same, now or in the future, does make pragmatic and moral sense. Since the WCED (1987) defined sustainable development in these terms nearly 30 years ago, most governments and major industries have adopted policies, plans and targets to pursue it. Judicious management of natural resources and meaningful action to address poverty and other forms of inequality are widely accepted as being in the long-term self-interest of communities, businesses and institutions just as they are (or ought to be!) objects of shared responsibility.

More recently (1 January 2016 to be precise), the United Nations officially commenced implementation of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. According to the relevant agreement (UN, 2015, 5):

Sustainable development recognizes that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, combating inequality within and among countries, preserving the planet, creating sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth and fostering social inclusion are linked to each other and are interdependent.

At the centre of the Agenda are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets that supersede and expand on the Millennium Development Goals (see Table 1). These establish an ambitious and, it is hoped, transformative framework for the universal abolition of hunger, poverty, violence and exploitation. Utopian perhaps, but essential, according to the agreement, for ensuring progress and accountability.

Table 1. United Nations sustainable development goals.

Goal 1.	End poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Goal 2.	End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
Goal 3.	Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Goal 4.	Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Goal 5.	Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
Goal 6.	Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
Goal 7.	Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
Goal 8.	Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.
Goal 9.	Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
Goal 10.	Reduce inequality within and among countries.
Goal 11.	Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
Goal 12.	Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
Goal 13.	Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
Goal 14.	Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.
Goal 15.	Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
Goal 16.	Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
Goal 17.	Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.

The idea of sustainability is not going away any time soon. Indeed, given its elevation in recent multilateral agreements it is worth giving more thought to how we approach sustainability as environmental sociologists and how we might best contribute to the goals of social and environmental justice embedded within it.

The ‘slipperiness’ of sustainability

Take a close look at almost any sustainability plan, policy or report and one will be confronted with what at least some stakeholders will read as contradictions and compromises. Moving from general agreement about the meaning and importance of sustainability to concrete plans and actions is notoriously difficult. As a consequence, some dismiss sustainability as, at best, meaningless and, at worst, open to misappropriation. As an idea that can mean ‘anything to anybody’, they argue, sustainability distracts attention from the root causes of environmental and social degradation (i.e. capitalist relations of production) and thereby legitimates the continued exploitation of people and environments. In the absence of radical political and economic change, we are told, the sustainable development agenda is doomed to failure (Gunderson 2015).

There can be little doubt that many companies and governments do attempt to ‘greenwash’ their activities with appealing but ambiguous claims to be ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘socially responsible’ (Sodero and Stoddart 2015). Others, less cynically, implement well-meaning programs but fail to grasp the magnitude of change required to reverse environmental decline or do something serious about social injustice. Here though, we see another important dimension of sustainability – its materiality (see Lockie 2012). Sustainability has a life and a voice beyond human discourse that confronts greenwashing and superficial policy reform with observable outcomes including pollution, illness, species decline etc. The spatial and temporal complexity of relevant cause and effect relationships may at times weaken this voice. However, material outcomes will speak to the adequacy of sustainability initiatives long before social scientists reach theoretical agreement over the intrinsic (un)sustainability of capitalism.

Another, increasingly common response to conflict and implementation failures is the recasting of sustainability as a complex, multidisciplinary and, indeed, ‘wicked’ problem. The complexity and multidisciplinarity of sustainability are obvious. Appending these adjectives to statements about sustainability (or any other phenomena of interest) achieves little unless we unpack the specific relationships, processes and indeterminacies that produce or result from complexity.¹ Appending a morally loaded adjective like ‘wicked’ may achieve even less. Just about any social issue deserving of scholarly attention will be characterized by fuzzy boundaries, multiple interpretations, moral ambiguity and unclear pathways to resolution. Bundling these characteristics together and attaching a novel label does not explain how an issue came to be, why some interpretations of that issue prevail over others, or how more democratic decision-making processes might actually be instituted.

Sustainability, in the end, is neither wicked nor, for that matter, a problem. Pollution, resource depletion, food insecurity, disease and so on, are all problems. Sustainability offers a conceptual and normative framework with which to begin tracing the connections between these problems, negotiating shared understandings about what is and isn’t important and charting more desirable social and ecological futures. Doing so is, of course, complicated by the complexity of social and environmental relationships and the competing interests, if not outright dishonesty, of some stakeholders. However, the most fundamental challenge we face in operationalizing sustainability is incommensurability between the present in which actions in support of sustainability must be enacted, the futures in which outcomes related to those actions will be realized, and the ‘in between’ periods in which knowledge, aspirations and alliances are all likely to change.

As an inherently future-oriented and aspirational idea, there can be no fixed model of what a sustainable society looks like and no single, unambiguously objective end point against which progress can be measured. The only things we can know with absolute certainty are where we have absolutely failed – where inequalities have intensified and where options have been closed off by the exhaustion of natural resources or the collapse of ecosystem processes.² In the here and now – the present in which we make plans and take decisions – sustainability is innately difficult to measure and open to taking any one (or more) of multiple, equally plausible, trajectories.

Sociology and the pursuit of sustainability

The inevitability of conflict over how sustainability should be interpreted and implemented in specific settings opens a veritable barn door of opportunity for the social sciences. Questions about what ought to be sustained, and who it ought to be sustained for (to paraphrase Allen 1993), are fundamentally questions about whose knowledge, values, aspirations and interests are represented in sustainability plans and policies. They are questions that demand sociological input. And they are questions we can address standing on safe sociological ground, using familiar theory and methods – provided we focus more on the who than on the what.

Who decides, who acts, who benefits and who gets lost along the way in the pursuit of sustainability are all questions of distribution – specifically, the distribution of authority, the distribution of responsibility and the distribution of resources. Addressing these questions allows us to evaluate the decision-making processes behind sustainability programs, the potential social impacts of those programs and their effectiveness in changing dominant modes of production and consumption. Such evaluation is important – critically important – and requires no great rethinking of the sociological enterprise. We should just get on with it. Still, what are the prospects for a more direct role in determining what it is that ought to be sustained? Is there a place for sociology outside the so-called ‘social pillar’ of equality and inclusion?

Yes. Distinctly sociological perspectives on the question of what ought to be sustained require systematic investigation of how connections among people, institutions, technologies and ecosystems can be effected to make durable and just forms of society possible.

This is easy enough to say but fulfilling this requirement raises at least two challenges for sociology. First, by necessity, we must treat ecosystem processes, non-human species and machines as objects of sociological inquiry and theory building alongside people and institutions. We cannot treat the non-human either as self-evident or as the exclusive domain of the natural sciences. Fortunately, while expanding our conception of the social to include non-human processes and entities may remain somewhat controversial we do have, nonetheless, a number of theoretical and methodological models of how this might be achieved (see Lockie 2015). Second, we must come to grips with the future orientation of sustainability and the need to apprehend social and ecological relations that have not yet been realized. Again, we do have existing theory and method on which to build. Controversies may endure,³ but maintaining this link to theory and method is essential if we are to avoid conflating our own values, preferences and affiliations with sociological knowledge.⁴

Standards, targets and the sustainable development goals

What then can we say about the UN’s attempt to operationalize sustainability through the Sustainable Development Goals? Many observers of the SDG process expressed concern that the sheer number of goals and targets included in the agreement would ultimately undermine focus, effort and accountability. But removing goals and targets proved difficult. Parties were concerned that failure to identify specific issues and stakeholders within the SDGs would make those issues and stakeholders less visible and more likely, subsequently, to be ignored by policy-makers. An independent, multidisciplinary review coordinated by the International Council for Science and International Council for Social Science concluded that, of the 169 agreed targets, 54 per cent should be more specific and 17 per cent require significant work (ICSU and ISSC, 2015). The review criticized the SDG framework not for establishing too many goals and targets but for establishing targets that are vaguely defined and difficult to measure. It recommended giving more consideration to: the inter-connections among goals and targets; timescales and responsibilities for implementation; and the articulation of a narrative or theory of change outlining links between the underlying causes of environmental and social degradation, the ultimate aims of the SDG process, and intermediate steps required to get there.

Such a narrative would need to integrate current understanding of Earth system processes (climate, biodiversity, nitrogen cycle etc.) with theories of macro-societal change and multi-scalar governance. As ambitious as this seems, it is worth remembering that many social and environmental targets have been established on smaller, jurisdictional or sectoral, scales from which we might learn.

One of the mechanisms through which this can occur is the development of performance standards. Social and environmental performance standards specific to distinct sectors (such as manufacturing, agriculture, fisheries and forestry) take a number of forms (see Boström et al. 2015). Some specify tangible outcomes while others focus on management processes. Some are imposed by governments while others are negotiated among stakeholders and adopted voluntarily. Either way, the process through which they have been established must be broadly accepted as legitimate if standards are to work as an effective regulatory strategy (ISO, 2004). Noting, again, the diversity of approaches and histories behind existing standards, a small number of broad generalizations can be made. First, while sustainability gets no less messy when applied at the scale of unique industries or locales, it is possible to give the idea more analytical purchase by tightening its definition and proposing measurable indicators of progress. Second, people can come together with initially quite divergent ideas about what is and isn’t socially and ecologically desirable and still use their shared commitments to sustainability to negotiate agreed goals, standards, actions and regulatory arrangements.⁵

It would be naïve to assume that people can always negotiate a shared perspective on sustainability. However, it would be equally naïve to assume sustainability can be enacted in the absence of negotiation and shared understanding. Sustainability assumes just and inclusive political processes both because they are right⁶ and because they are a precondition to the alignment of effort by multiple actors and institutions. Time will tell, but perhaps the greatest weakness in the SDG framework is the treatment of sustainability as an achievement or a destination rather than as an array of possible futures accompanied by goals and targets that encourage dialogue, creativity and negotiation.

Conclusion

Endorsement of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is good news for environmental sociologists. The explicit linking of social, economic and environmental targets sends a clear message about the importance of the social sciences and the need for genuinely multidisciplinary research and development programs. But sustainability is bigger than the SDGs or any other UN-led agenda. We can do more than monitor progress towards the ‘social’ targets agreed through multilateral negotiations. We can engage more directly with questions of what ought to be sustained alongside questions of who decides, who acts and who benefits. In doing so, we are presented with additional theoretical and methodological questions about how best to apprehend and influence social relationships that do not yet exist – questions we should be encouraging all sociologists to consider.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The use of so-called ‘complexity theory’ or ‘complexity science’ to explore complex problems does not provide a framework, as might be implied, for genuinely multidisciplinary collaboration. It assimilates, rather, a variety of disciplinary perspectives within conceptual and methodological frameworks derived from systems theory and cybernetics. While a number of systems concepts make intuitive sense (feedback, non-linearity, emergent properties, self-organization etc.), the decentering of conflict, power, agency and intentionality draws into question their relevance to the social domain (see also Olsson et al. 2015).

2. The unsustainability of natural resource exhaustion or ecosystem collapses cannot, however, be taken for granted. Resources may be substituted and phase shifts in ecosystems at relatively small scales may be more or less inconsequential at larger scales (Roeger, Foale, and Sheaves 2016).

3. Debates over the merits of ecological modernization and critical realism, for example, reflect discomfort among critics with what they argue to be: (1) the normative status granted by ecological modernization to incremental reform; and (2) the deterministic thrust within realism that defines all capitalist relations a priori as exploitative and unsustainable. These arguments will not be defended here (see Lockie 2015).

4. Our values as scholars are certainly no less important than existing knowledge and theory in guiding the sorts of questions we ask. However, we are much more likely to arrive at valid and useful answers to those questions if we approach research with a willingness to prove ourselves mistaken and modesty about what we can subsequently claim to know. A degree of reflexivity is needed to avoid the traps of theory-laden observation, confirmation bias, circular reasoning etc. that lead us back, after much hard work, to where we started – even when that starting point was wrong.

5. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (Oosterveer 2015) offers a useful case in point, as do attempts to reform chemical regulation in manufacturing (Cordner and Brown 2015).

6. SDG Targets 10.2 and 16.7 thus commit signatories to the empowerment of all, regardless of age, sex, disability, ethnicity, origin, religion, economic or other status, along with participatory and representative decision-making. As the ICSU and ISSC (2015) report notes, these are difficult to measure.