مفهوم توسعه پایدار: روش ارزیابی اتصال ارزش ها، دانش، جهان بینی ها و سناریوها

Sustainability science poses severe challenges to classical disciplinary science. To bring the perspectives of diverse disciplines together in a meaningful way, we describe a novel methodology for sustainability assessment of a particular social-ecological system, or country. Starting point is that a sustainability assessment should investigate the ability to continue and develop a desirable way of living vis-à-vis later generations and life elsewhere on the planet. Evidently, people hold different values and beliefs about the way societies sustain quality of life for their members. The first step, therefore, is to analyze people's value orientations and the way in which they interpret sustainability problems i.e. their beliefs. The next step is to translate the resulting worldviews into model-based narratives, i.e. scenarios. The qualitative and quantitative outcomes are then investigated in terms of associated risks and opportunities and robustness of policy options. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) has followed this methodology, using extensive surveys among the Dutch population. In its First Sustainability Outlook (2004), the resulting archetypical worldviews became the basis for four different scenarios for policy analysis, with emphases on the domains of transport, energy and food. The goal of the agency's Sustainability Outlooks is to show that choices are inevitable in policy making for sustainable development, to indicate which positive and negative impacts one can expect of these choices (trade-offs), and to identify options that may be robust under several worldviews. The conceptualization proposed here is both clear and applicable in practical sustainability assessments for policy making.

The idea of sustainable development reflects one of the leading aspirations of humankind in the 21st century, not unlike the idea of socialism in the early 20th century and the Declaration of Human Rights after World War II. The words “sustainability” and “sustainable development,” however, have got an eerie ring and risk becoming just another one of those buzzwords with a lifespan of a decade, at the most. Hence, the importance of working on appropriate operationalizations. Initially, the concept of sustainable development was thought to be applied by establishing an ecologically or environmentally desired or target value. A formal indicator of sustainability would then measure the difference in the actual and the desired time path of the selected variable, often related to some reconstructed pre-industrial “natural” situation. In the 1990s, the interference by social scientists and notably economists made it clear that the setting of such a desired or target value in relation to sustainable development, could not legitimately be based on ecological-environmental criteria alone. First, there was a choice to be made of which indicators to use — should not economic and social aspects be part of the decision-making, too? Second, if there is agreement on the indicators, their future desired or target levels have to be – at least partly – the outcome of a societal negotiating process that is informed, but not determined by scientific assessments of risks and uncertainties related to the possible crossing of critical thresholds. Moreover, such an outcome could be renegotiated at any moment, in the face of changes in knowledge and values. These considerations have led economists to argue that the quest for sustainable development can be founded on welfare economics and approaches, such as societal cost–benefit analyses. Scientists with a background in ecology but also in institutional economy and other social sciences tend to disagree, bringing in their own observations, concepts and theories. It is against this background that the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL)1 has developed its own methodology for sustainability assessment. The word “methodology” is understood here to be a context-specific combination of formal, analytical methods (tools, models) and participatory methods (expert elicitation, games). The objective of the methodology is to assist in the construction of more comprehensive and adequate models of (non-)sustainable development and to help politicians and citizens to formulate strategies for action. In this paper, we communicate the sustainability assessment methodology that was developed at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and was applied in its First Sustainability Outlook (MNP, 2004, van den Heiligenberg, 2005 and Petersen, 2006a). The paper proposes a truly transdisciplinary methodology and starts with a sketch of the conceptual framework, followed by a reflection on the notions of values and beliefs. Subsequently, the construction of scenarios on the basis of worldviews and models is presented. We end with a discussion of how the methodology has been and can be used in (public) policy on sustainability issues.

The transition towards a more sustainable relationship between the human species and its natural life-support system, is a major challenge for humanity in the 21st century. Based on extensive cooperation with scientists from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and intense dialogue in a number of science–policy interfaces, we argue that an integrated framework for sustainability assessments is necessary and feasible. Its aim is to develop and continue quality of (human) life elsewhere and later, within the limits set by ecological and social constraints. The latter should be grounded in scientific knowledge about ecosystems, resources and technological developments, while acknowledging the plural realizations of quality of life by addressing the subjective values and beliefs of individuals, conceptually and empirically. We present a conceptual scheme, which broadens the economic notion of welfare with capabilities and with social and system aspects and which, in this way, permits a constructive resolution of the tensions between an objective and a subjective notion of sustainability and quality of life. The combination of value orientations and cognitive maps which make up worldviews in this scheme provides the basis for the construction of scenarios, that is, model-based narratives. Thus, sustainability assessments can support strategic decision-making, as well as heuristic exploration in complex sustainability related macro-problems. In incorporating explicit values and ‘facts’, one may hope that respect for diverse views and interests increases and irresponsible simplifications of the complex challenges ahead do not gain support. In our view, these are the preconditions for adequately facing the sustainability transition that lies ahead of us.