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Despite all kinds of environmental goals and programmes, there has been a severe overshooting of the planet's ecological boundaries. The paper investigates various conceptual barriers contributing to the lack of ecological sustainability. The concepts discussed are weak sustainability, eco-efficiency, ecological modernization, and neoliberalism. This paper's empirical field comprises the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and what preceded them. It is about the report Our Common Future, the green economy, ecological modernization and the Millennium Development Goals. Even with partially positive effects, these programmes have not fulfilled their promises. The various conceptual barriers are recognizable in these programmes; they are exponents of an unshaken belief in efficient markets and conventional economic growth. This appears to be the overriding issue as economic growth in terms of GDP does not respect ecological boundaries, so that ecological sustainability comes closer to being realized. Neoliberalism-coupled with the power of the World Bank and the IMF and their long maintained "market fundamentalism"-has produced unsatisfactory outcomes in the social and ecological domains. The various crises during the last decades have caused governments to expand their roles, but every time this happened under the promise of a speedy return to normal, that is, small government and austerity. Ecological sustainability requires strong governmental roles. This paper does not provide a complete path towards ecological sustainability but discusses three possible conceptual foundations for it: steady-state economics, eco-development, and post-growth economics.
Despite all kinds of environmental goals and programmes, there has been a severe overshooting of the planet's ecological boundaries. The paper investigates various conceptual barriers contributing to the lack of ecological sustainability. The concepts discussed are weak sustainability, eco-efficiency, ecological modernization, and neoliberalism. This paper's empirical field comprises the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and what preceded them. It is about the report Our Common Future, the green economy, ecological modernization and the Millennium Development Goals. Even with partially positive effects, these programmes have not fulfilled their promises. The various conceptual barriers are recognizable in these programmes; they are exponents of an unshaken belief in efficient markets and conventional economic growth. This appears to be the overriding issue as economic growth in terms of GDP does not respect ecological boundaries, so that ecological sustainability comes closer to being realized. Neoliberalism-coupled with the power of the World Bank and the IMF and their long maintained "market fundamentalism"-has produced unsatisfactory outcomes in the social and ecological domains. The various crises during the last decades have caused governments to expand their roles, but every time this happened under the promise of a speedy return to normal, that is, small government and austerity. Ecological sustainability requires strong governmental roles. This paper does not provide a complete path towards ecological sustainability but discusses three possible conceptual foundations for it: steady-state economics, eco-development, and post-growth economics.
The paper aims at discussing the reciprocity of developing a dialogue between urban planning and degrowth by arguing for two interactive processes: 'spatialising degrowth' and 'degrowing planning'. Degrowth literature has not yet fully recognised the potentiality of urban/urban regional spatial development and planning in facilitating and driving the degrowth transformation for local and regional sustainability and justice. The possibility of urban planning to facilitate a downscaling of the economy, save the environment and secure distributive justice is predicated on the causal relationships between space and societal conditions. Therefore, planning has the potentiality of providing spatial instruments in a degrowth transformation. On the other hand, the mainstream growthoriented planning paradigm is facing internal and external imperatives for transformation. Degrowth values and principles provide inspiration for urban planning to rethink its role and function in urban and societal development, specifically on three fronts: ideology, substantive values and utopianism. The paper further discusses the dilemmas and advantages of planners, being situated in the complex political and institutional landscape, in taking proactive transformative practices.
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