The sustainable development: veritable societal project or simple imposture of capitalism?

Abstract

The different approaches (economist, environmentalist, humanist, territorialist, etc.) to Sustainable Development (Gagnon, 2008) reveal its equivocal nature. Often understood as a search for balance between the economy, the social and the environment, Sustainable Development is also approached as a hierarchy of poles, positioning respect for the environment as an essential condition, social development as an objective and economic development as the means to achieve it. A fourth dimension is added to these three, the cultural aspect, which touches on identity, art and heritage and represents a crucial element of community building. Moreover, governance is gaining recognition to become the structuring element of Sustainable Development, serving as an integrating dimension to the other pillars (Boivin, 2016). Additionally, according to Gendron (2006), the founding idea of Sustainable Development is the improvement of the population's quality of life, which makes it a vast societal project. In this sense, the ultimate goal of sustainability is not the conservation of nature, but that of humanity. Far from revealing all the mysteries of a concept that is heavily invested by researchers and international bodies, Sustainable Development is a concept that carries contradictions, as revealed by the division between supporters and opponents. While the former consider it to be a genuine inter- and intra-generational societal project, the latter, on the contrary, see it as a mere sham of capitalism using "conceptual bricolage" (Latouche, 2004) to "civilize capitalism" (Mathias, 2005). The main objective of this article is to shed light on this dichotomy, between environmentalist or ecologist theses and productivist theses, which characterizes the reading of the concept of Sustainable Development.  

JEL Classification : F64, Q01, Q56, Q57, P12

Paper type: Theoretical Research