Reconciling “weak” and “strong” sustainability

Abstract

A conceptual and analytical approach is presented to reconcile weak and strong sustainability. It involves a reconsideration of the conception of total capital from an ecological‐economic system perspective. In particular, natural capital is classified into non‐renewable resources, renewable resources that are harvested, and those that are not used in production. Strong sustainability is defined in terms of constant environmental quality. Weak sustainability is characterised by non‐decreasing value of aggregate income and environmental quality, and formalised in terms of a “preference‐based social value function”. Ecosystem resilience and basic human needs are introduced as minimum sustainability requirements, and a “sustainability‐based social value function” is proposed, which is sensitive to potentially irreversible changes at the boundaries of the restricted opportunity space. It implies higher values associated to the trade‐offs between income and the environment than the preference‐based function, and the fact that sustainable development is only feasible if both minimum criteria are fulfilled.

Rainforest Alliance Certification of Kenyan tea farms: a contribution to sustainability or tokenism?

“…It seeks to improve the living conditions of farmers as well as to uphold the ecosystem's integrity. In this evaluation, only the environment and ecological system component is included as both weak and strong sustainability concepts consider basic human needs (social conditions) as a minimum sustainability requirement (Hediger, 1999). As earlier stated, the RFC standards outline 14 critical criteria which require farms to comply with before certification.…”

“…The weak sustainability concept was developed from the neoclassical theory of economic growth when the theory was upgraded to account for non-renewable natural resources as a factor of production (Dietz & Neumayer, 2006;Hediger, 1999). Proponents of weak sustainability advance the argument that natural capital is either abundant or substitutable, both as an input into the production of consumption goods and as a provider of direct utility (Neumayer, 2003).…”

The idea of weak sustainability is illegitimate

“…It is not aimed to give a detailed analysis of sustainability understandings and what the differences between the two understandings are, as this can be found elsewhere (see for example : Hediger 1999;Jabareen 2008;Quental et al 2011). However, a brief introduction is provided in order to follow the subsequent argumentation.…”

Sustainability–culture Interface in the Social, Environmental and Economic Perspective

“…Similarly P. Reed along with a team sees the interface in terms of software, when characterizing the progress in development of standards and guidelines for human-computer interaction 9 . A similar interpretation of the interface represent J. Gwizdka and M. Chignell, who understand it as a way of presenting (in the context of tasks realized by e-mail boxes) 10 , or S. Trewin, G. Zimmermann and G. Vanderheiden, who describe a selected types of user interface like: UIML, XIML, XForms and URC 11 . C.V. Copas and E. Edmonds make a research on the so called intelligent human-computer interface in terms of its intelligence, i.e.…”