Sustainability Theory

Creating ecologically sustainable ways of life is desirable, necessary, and urgent for the collective future of life on Earth. Although this is acknowledged, aspired to, and increasingly pursued in action, broad-scale sustainability remains unrealised. Western cities offer a strategic place to exemplify and accelerate global sustainability transitions. Such cities are characterised by dense human populations with excessive per capita resource use, but they can also be cornucopias of economic development, progressive politics, and diverse culture and correspondingly act at global hotspots of innovation and change. This exploratory research proposes pragmatic backcasted pathways for furthering such change, constructing future visions of more sustainable ways of life in Western cities, identifying presentday barriers to realising these, and generating practical solutions ‘here and now’ that could contribute strategically to overcoming the barriers, towards a sustainable future. An insight and foresight rich distillation of evidence-based knowledge and practical experience was generated to inform these pathways, through qualitative interviews with 25 esteemed experts specialising in fields of socio-ecology and cities, including planning, design, sociology, psychology, philosophy, art, activism, economics, and government. To analyse this data and conceptualise alternative pathways, ‘ecological habitus’, an emergent socio-ecological theory, was developed and employed as a practical framework for conceptually linking broad-scale socio-ecological issues with everyday practice; analysing the inter-dependent variables (e.g. normative, material, social, and psychological) of social reproduction and change; and assessing their sustainability at different scales (e.g. individual and institutional). Two components were added to the theory: ‘natural capital’ (the ecological/biophysical factors within socio-ecological relationships), and ‘ecological reflexivity’ (people’s responses to natural capital whether intentional-critical, periodic-conscious, or routine-subconscious). These enhance ecological habitus as a versatile tool for socio-ecological and sustainability-transition research.The ultimate research outcomes are three backcasted pathways towards a future of ‘sustainable ecological habitus’, which could begin pragmatically with: collaborative practice among city authorities to develop as ecologically-reflexive sustainability leaders and overcome disciplinary silos; strategic enrichment of cities with accessible, place-based natural capital to enhance human-nature connection; and everyday self-, or socially-directed sustainability micro-interventions among city-dwellers, to incrementally grow mainstream sustainable ecological habitus. These actions combined could accelerate sustainable ecological habitus in Western cities and beyond. The power is ours.

The main goal of this paper is to summarize some of the definitions of sustainable development with relation to the sustainability ladder, proposed by a number of authors, as well as to compare the sustainability policies and documents of four business organizations that are primarily engaged in producing goods for/in the mountain regions, so as to arrive at conclusions about where they fit in the typology.

The idea of writing this essay begun as an attempt to enter into the current discussion about the theory and ethics of sustainability. The essay aims to compare the meaning of sustainability with two ethical theories that are currently used in developmental and environmental issues, namely the theories of Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer, and see how coherent these theories are with the concept of sustainability. In order to achieve the essays aims, the study will have to discuss first issues regarding the ‘meaning of sustainability’ and discuss the challenges in its conceptualisation to finally outline a reasonable framework meaning for sustainability. The paper contributes in this way in forming consistency between what the conceptualisation of sustainability represents and how ethical systems could be more coherent with these conceptualisation efforts. This essay aims to answer how deontological and utilitarian perspectives provide guidance regarding sustainability and if these perspectives are coherent with sustainability as a concept. The essay understands coherence as ideas or structures that are logically compatible and that logically support each other.
This study concludes that there is a possibility to delineate a coherent meaning for sustainability as a two-level meaning structure; one formal meaning where we found the principle of sustainability and without which, we would not be talking about sustainability and a second level, called the substantive meaning, where four main ethical relations arise, and where obligations and responsibilities appear. The study also concludes that there are certainly fundamental moral ideals and moral ideas embedded in sustainability that have the potential to be agreed upon in a global consensus. The formal meaning of continuance (sustainability moral ideal) gives in turn some fundamental moral ideas (normative relations) at a second level of definition. Additionally, the study shows that it is not self-evident which ethical model is more or less
coherent with sustainability but the results indicate that a strong, coherent and egalitarian idea about the value of life, whether as flourished and functional as opportunities and interests, on which many of today's ethical systems are based on, can help an ethical system to be more coherent with the meaning of sustainability.

The planning, monitoring, and evaluation of local/ regional development projects and programs has become more difficult as the result of several sources of confusion related to the dynamic interaction of different development paradigms and their sometimes contradictory objectives. Unclear development related concepts also complicate efforts directed at comparing and classifying those local/regional projects and programs. One way of clarifying the confusing issues raised above may be by addressing the following questions: Which are the different faces
of development? Which are the different personalities of development?; Is sustainable development unique?; Is sustainable development optimal development?; Is sustainability sustainable development or Is sustainable development sustainability; and Is sustainability
consistent with the concept of strong sustainability? The simple qualitative comparative analytical tool presented in this paper is described in such a way as to provide an answer to the above
mentioned questions from a system analysis point of view