Interdisciplinary Anthropology and the Politics of Sustainable Development

Abstract (English)

Sustainable development, or sustainability, are both phrases globally referred to as conceptual signifiers and value systems, though ambiguous in both language and in real-world processes. Over time and in different cultural contexts, the meanings of sustainable development deserve interdisciplinary investigation informed by anthropological as well as ethical and political understanding. This paper investigates the political economy and culture of sustainable development in relation to both the future of what is called democracy and contemporary globalized markets. Sustainable development as an ideology has had complex relations, sometimes conflicting, with the ideology of democracy, for example in the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, from 1987, and in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, announced in 2015, and intended to shape events from 2015 to 2030. In addition to issues about sustainable development and democracy, there are questions about the interaction between fostering sustainable development in a world in which varieties of markets and capitalism predominate (markets and capitalism themselves subject to major convulsions). This paper argues for the inevitability of conflicts between some normatively attractive ideas of sustainable development and some ideologically questionable forms of democracy. This paper also argues for the inevitability of conflicts between sustainable development and market economies. In concluding, the paper considers how the types of conflicts might be dealt with. In arguing for its contentions, the paper draws on both anthropologically informed empirical evidence, and ethically and politically normative reasoning.