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Environmental Politics
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The five dimensions of sustainability

Lucas Seghezzo
a a

Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientficas y Tcnicas (CONICET), Instituto de Investigacin en Energa No Convencional (INENCO), Universidad Nacional de Salta (UNSa), Argentina Available online: 24 Jul 2009

To cite this article: Lucas Seghezzo (2009): The five dimensions of sustainability, Environmental Politics, 18:4, 539-556 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644010903063669

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Environmental Politics Vol. 18, No. 4, July 2009, 539556

The ve dimensions of sustainability

Lucas Seghezzo*
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientcas y Tecnicas (CONICET), Instituto de Investigacion en Energa No Convencional (INENCO), Universidad Nacional de Salta (UNSa), Argentina

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Sustainability is usually seen as a guide for economic and social policymaking in equilibrium with ecological conditions. More than two decades after the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) dened sustainable development and put the concept of sustainability on the global agenda, the concrete meaning of these terms and their suitability for specic cases remains disputed. A new conceptual framework to address sustainability issues is needed. The limitations of the WCED denition could be mitigated if sustainability is seen as the conceptual framework within which the territorial, temporal, and personal aspects of development can be openly discussed. Sustainability could be better understood in terms of Place, Permanence, and Persons. Place contains the three dimensions of space, Permanence is the fourth dimension of time, and the Persons category represents a fth, human dimension. The ve-dimensional sustainability framework is arguably more inclusive, plural, and useful to outline specic policies towards sustainability. Keywords: permanence; development persons; place; sustainability; sustainable

Introduction Our common future, the report released in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, stated that development is only sustainable if it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED 1987, p. 8). The concept of sustainable development was launched by the WCED as a global objective to guide policies orientated to balance economic and social systems and ecological conditions. It is often represented with the triple bottom line of economy, environment, and society (Elkington et al. 2007, p. 1). A sustainable development triangle formed by People, Planet, and Prot (the three Ps), with Prot sometimes replaced by the
*Email: lucas.seghezzo@wur.nl
ISSN 0964-4016 print/ISSN 1743-8934 online 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09644010903063669 http://www.informaworld.com

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more moderate Prosperity, is common use in business and governments (European Commission 2002). The term sustainability is considered a synonym of sustainable development although, as pointed out by Dresner (2002), some distinctions between these two concepts can be identied. The WCED paradigm of sustainable development advocates the environmental and social implications of economic growth must be included in the decisionmaking process. It is my contention that the suitability of this paradigm to explain and solve environmental, social, and economic problems needs to be reconsidered. I begin by examining some antecedents of the concepts of sustainable development and sustainability and by identifying key points in the debate that could be useful to analyse their validity and reliability. I also look at some aspects of the WCED denition that, in my view, represent serious limitations to its universality and usefulness. In particular, I provide some arguments to show that the essential anthropocentrism of the WCED denition makes it a weak conceptual framework to discuss issues of development. While this denition overestimates the explanatory power of economic reasoning, it does not pay enough attention to other, fundamental aspects of development. To overcome these shortcomings, I propose an alternative sustainability triangle formed by Place, Permanence, and Persons (the new three Ps). To justify this triangle, I try to show that: (a) Place, the three-dimensional physical and geographical, but also culturally constructed space where we live and interact, should be more adequately represented in a sustainability paradigm; (b) Permanence, the fourth, temporal dimension, has been largely neglected in the sustainability debate, in spite of the widespread recognition of the potential long-term eects of our actions, and all the inter-generational justice rhetoric; and that (c) Persons, the fth dimension, a symbol of people as individual human beings and not as undierentiated members of society, has been all but excluded from the WCED notion of sustainability. Some antecedents and debates around sustainable development and sustainability The notions of sustainable development and sustainability are often related to ideas introduced by economists, philosophers, scientists, and writers from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, as described in Holland (2003), Lumley and Armstrong (2004), and Pepper (1996). More recent antecedents can be found in the writings of Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Donella Meadows, Arne Naess, Murray Bookchin, E.F. Schumacher, Fritjof Capra, James Lovelock, and Vandana Shiva, among many others (Edwards 2005, Nelissen et al. 1997, Pepper 1996). As discussed below in more detail, critical objections have been raised against the idea that development can ever be sustainable (Tijmes and Luijf 1995). The underlying ambiguity of the concept of sustainable development, rather than its historical foundations, has probably led to its worldwide acceptance as a framework for environmental and social action (Mebratu 1998, Mitcham 1995, Redclift 1993).

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The sustainability debate has been greatly inuenced by previous divisions in the environmental movement between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric worldviews (Pepper 1996). Anthropocentrism is based exclusively on human-related values, and considers the welfare of mankind as the ultimate drive for dening policies related to the environment (Norton 2005). Ecological modernisation, a recent and well-known anthropocentric (or even technocentric) theory, postulates that technical and managerial approaches could well solve the environmental crisis. Therefore, there would be no need to radically change the present patterns of development (Baker 2007). This theory is perfectly suited to the limited opportunities available, desired or permitted by political leaders and the business community (Barry 2003, p. 209). As discussed below, not all anthropocentric views are necessarily technocentric. Non-anthropocentrism, on the other hand, rejects the idea that nature has value only because, and insofar as, it directly or indirectly serves human interests (McShane 2007, p. 170). It can include radical lines like ecocentrism or biocentrism, which consider that nature has value in itself (intrinsic value). Non-anthropocentric views are relatively sceptical of largescale technological developments and the commitment of big corporations to environmental matters. Radical social changes are usually advocated under these views, and ethical issues are considered the main driving force for the protection of nature (Mason 1999). In this context, the concept of sustainable development is regarded as just another product of the market economy that could never cure the crises that the market economy helps to produce. The anthropocentrism/non-anthropocentrism debate has also been a major focal point of theoretical concern among environmental sociologists. A clear distinction between the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm (HEP) and the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) was proposed by Dunlap and Catton Jr. (1979). The HEP is based on the assumption that the physical environment is relatively irrelevant for understanding social behaviour (humans are exempt from natures inuence). In contrast, the NEP points out that humans, who are supposedly exceptional because of their possession of culture and technology, remain one among many species in the world and they are thus also inuenced by the forces of nature. Human societies can make use of nature in order to survive but they also have the power to exceed natures carrying capacity and, eventually, destroy it (Buttel 1987). The relationship between nature and society can be perceived in dierent ways. Awareness of these dierences is important to understand the sustainability debate. It can also be a useful tool to assess current development paradigms in terms of their ability to integrate, reconcile, or transcend the anthropocentrism/non-anthropocentrism dichotomy. Limitations of the WCED denition of sustainable development In this section, I address some characteristics of the WCED denition of sustainable development that would represent serious theoretical and practical

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limitations that undermine its usefulness as a comprehensive conceptual framework for sustainability. First, the WCED denition, as most of the denitions that were introduced later, is essentially anthropocentric. The WCED report sees the satisfaction of human needs as inherently conicting with environmental constraints and, as a result, the usual sustainability triangle represents society and environment as separate pillars. This triangle is rooted in the belief that nature and culture are a dichotomy that can only be reconciled by the economy. Whether there is such a dichotomy at all is often questioned. Merchant (1980, 2006, p. 514) resisted the idea of nature and culture as a structural dualism and argued that such dissociated nature could be easily dominated by science, technology, and capitalist production. Macnaghten and Urry (1998, p. 29) also believe that there is no simple and sustainable distinction between nature and society because, to a great extent, nature is a cultural construction. The devastating human consequences of environmental events like hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, oods, and tsunamis highlight how dicult it is now to separate social and environmental issues (Mittman 2006, Newton 2007). Complexity theories have also indicated the existence of hybrid systems which are neither natural nor social (Urry 2006, p. 112). The idea of a nature/culture dichotomy and the anthropocentrism of western and westernised societies have been denounced long ago (White Jr. 1967), but these modern conceptions have not been questioned by the WCED report, as indicated by Tijmes and Luijf (1995) and Dresner (2002). The anthropocentrism of the WCED denition is in line with the notion of weak sustainability. The dierence between weak and strong sustainability lies basically in the extent to which exchanges or trade-os between natural and man-made capital are acceptable. Weak sustainability requires maintaining a non-declining stock of economic capital into the indenite future and allows unlimited substitution among natural and man-made types of capital (Norton 2005, p. 307). On the other hand, strong sustainability species limits on substitution based on the intrinsic value of some natural assets (Norton 2005, p. 307). Natural capital is regarded as providing some functions that s 1996, p. 147). are not substitutable by man-made capital (Cabeza Gute According to the WCED report, species and ecosystems must be preserved because they have an economic value that is deemed crucial for development and important to human welfare (WCED 1987, pp. 147150). The report acknowledges conservation of nature is not only justied in economic terms (WCED 1987, p. 155). Yet the additional reasons provided (aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and scientic considerations) are markedly anthropocentric. It can then be inferred that, for the WCED, human welfare is the ultimate reason for the protection of natural capital. The anthropocentrism of the WCED denition is not a critical issue for those who advocate weak or reexive forms of anthropocentrism, which are allegedly closer to non-anthropocentric ethics than strong anthropocentrism (Barry 1999, p. 39, Norton 2008). According to Barry (1999), green politics

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should be consistent with the principles of green ideology while being acceptable to non-greens concerned about social and environmental problems. He postulates it is not necessary to be a rights-based ecocentric to identify some absolute limits to human action. As an alternative, an anthropocentric ethics of use could also delineate the ethical threshold beyond which the human use of nature becomes abuse (Barry 1999, pp. 5863). Similarly, Hill Jr. (2006, 331) considers an ethics of virtue is probably the only reason we need to protect nature, and argues that commitment to metaphysics of intrinsic value is not really required by virtuous agents to value the environment. Whatever the case, Smith (2006) and Norton (2008) argue that the gap between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism is not so wide in practical situations because to them, virtuous agents and those who hold rights-based beliefs would tend to promote comparable policies on many environmental issues. Even though the essential anthropocentrism and technological optimism of the WCED denition could be alleviated by more moderate positions, some non-anthropocentric authors might still feel uncomfortable. McShane (2007, 2008), for instance, without discarding Nortons convergence theory on practical policy issues, insists that some ethical objections can still be raised against strong and weak anthropocentrism alike. She identied reasons to reject anthropocentrism from the point of view of norms for feeling that go beyond the contested idea that nature has intrinsic value (McShane 2007, p. 169). For her, anthropocentrism implies certain ways of caring cannot be applied to non-human objects, an implication that is dicult to accept for many environmentalists (McShane 2007, p. 179). In line with this idea, Dunlap (2006, p. 325) argues that the ultimate justication for environmental concern should be found on reasons of a more spiritual nature like those that inspired early environmentalism, a movement that combined a predominantly ecocentric perspective with an attempt to give a renewed answer to peoples deep hunger to belong to a community and have a place in it. The theoretical motivations to protect nature are not the only thing under discussion. The adequacy of dierent economic and technical instruments to measure sustainability is also a contested issue (Beckerman 1995, Dobson 1996). For that reason, practical agreements might not be so easy, even between people who do agree on values. Moreover, Ziegler (2009) warns that such agreements, if possible at all, will probably lead to the empowerment of the experts and technocrats who decide which assessment criteria and indicators should be measured. This empowerment might come at the expense of those who believe that open discussions and (some) agreement on values are, if not indispensable, at least highly desirable before specic policies are implemented. Secondly, the importance of the economy is overestimated in the WCED denition. The WCED report makes it clear that sustainable development is far from requiring the cessation of economic growth (WCED 1987, p. 40). It even goes on to say the international economy must speed up world growth that is allegedly essential to avert economic, social, and environmental

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catastrophes in large parts of the developing world (WCED 1987, p. 89). Growth should be achieved, according to the WCED, by promoting freer markets, lower interest rates, greater technology transfer, and signicantly larger capital ows. Although the WCED report acknowledges that growth by itself is not enough (WCED 1987, p. 44), it still makes a direct and inseparable connection between growth and issues of poverty alleviation, equity, and income redistribution. Advocates of ecological modernisation, who often present this theory as the operational tool of sustainable development in industrial societies, continue to see economic growth as a central feature for a just and equitable development (Spaargaren and Mol 1992). However, as noted by Arrow et al. (1996, p. 14), the link between growth and equity may not be so straightforward, especially in regions where it is needed most, namely where the environmental costs of economic activity are borne by the poor, by future generations, or by other countries. Redistribution and equity are, to a certain extent, contradictory with the primary objective of economic activity, being to maximise economic eciency (irrespective of the initial distribution of wealth) and increase national income (which is assumed to be directly proportional to the well-being of society as a whole) (Hanley 2000, Norgaard 1992, Ziegler 2009). This contradiction implies that, unless intergenerational equity becomes a more central issue in the analysis, the economic approach used in isolation might not be very useful to address issues of sustainability. The potential conict between economic growth and sustainability is perhaps more sensitive in industrial societies where environmental goods and amenities will never be enough to satisfy the supposedly innite needs of individuals. This ambivalence between the concepts of economic growth and environmental scarcity has been seen as a major aw of the idea of sustainable development articulated by the WCED (Tijmes and Luijf 1995). A joint criticism of both ecoscarcity and modernization has been given by Robbins (2004). He highlighted the ethical and practical weaknesses of these two approaches to explain and solve environmental and social problems (Robins 2004, p. 7). The WCED report did call for some international reforms intended to deal simultaneously with economic and ecological aspects (WCED 1987, p. 90). Arguably, because it did not fundamentally challenge the dominant economic paradigm, it did little in practice to diminish the predominance of economistic accounts over social and ecological concerns. The ensuing inevitability of a type of progress understood only as plain economic growth should be put under more scrutiny in debates about sustainability (Norgaard 1992). Yet the politically powerful idea of progress could be recalibrated and re-appropriated, instead of rejected, in an innovative development paradigm, as advocated by Barry (1999, p. 250). A signicant additional drawback of the inclusion of an economic dimension in the denition of sustainability is that a purely economic approach is, in some respects, incompatible with the long-term thinking required to attain inter-generational justice. This can become clearer after we take a brief look at one of the main decision-aiding tools used by economists to analyse economic eciency in the public sector, namely costbenet analysis (CBA)

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(Bell and Morse 2008, Hanley 2000). Although CBA was never meant to be a stand-alone method, it is still widely promoted as one of the best ways to guide the ecient allocation of resources and to assess the feasibility (and sustainability) of projects and policies (Pearce et al. 1989). A number of limitations, obstacles, and behavioural anomalies that undermine the validity of CBA for environmental policy making have been identied, forcing economists to devise a variety of coping strategies to overcome these limitations and make it more appealing to governments and the general public (Barde and Pearce 1991, Hanley and Shogren 2005). The main ethical, philosophical, and practical objections raised against the use of CBA derive from the very assumptions on which the method is founded. Especially questioned have been the legitimacy of valuation of some forms of nature, the acceptability of unlimited trade-os between natural and man-made capital, and the validity of discounting (Freeman III 2003, Hanley 2000, Mason 1999, Shechter 2000). Discounting is a particularly contentious issue, especially in terms of intertemporal equity and distributive implications. According to Hanley (2000), the assumption made by CBA that the net present value of products and projects must be maximised lays potentially heavy costs on future generations. In fact, at any (reasonable) discount rate greater than zero, the present value of damages expected far in the future could be neglected when confronted with present benets. This constitutes a clear, pervasive, not to say perverse, bias in CBA tests in favour of the present generation at the expense of the yet unborn. As compensating future generations may be impossible as well, the possibility that the winners can compensate the losers and still be better o with the changes produced by the project, one of the foundations of CBA, is signicantly reduced. Additional criticisms have been directed to the assumption that everybody should be eventually willing to accept some kind of compensation in exchange of environmental or social losses, an idea rejected by strong sustainability advocates. Besides, poor people would tend to accept lower compensations in exchange for natural goods (if they are compensated at all), and this would help perpetuate the present state of inequitable distribution of wealth. Even strong defenders of CBA consider that a sustainability constraint should be used as an additional criterion to prevent the depletion of natural resources threatened by excessive exploitation (which, by their own account, is encouraged by high discount rates) (Pearce et al. 1990, p. 37). Others have pointed out that CBA should not be viewed as either necessary or sucient for designing sensible public policy (Arrow et al. 1996), or that additional measures are always needed to ensure that projects that passed a CBA are sustainable (Hanley 2000). It could instead be argued that economic tools like CBA might be more useful after, not before, other sustainability assessment methods have been carried out in order to reject unacceptable alternatives. In this respect, the use of multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and participatory approaches is steadily growing (Hajkowicz 2008, Hanley and Shogren 2005). Criticism of CBA does not automatically mean a concomitant criticism of all market-based processes. It is possible, as some authors have

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suggested, that ecological rationality could also be met within a classical liberal framework (Pennington 2008). Yet other authors see mounting evidence of the unsustainability of the consumer capitalist principles of innite economic growth and wealth accumulation, and of the failure of ecological modernisation strategies to secure sustainability (Blu hdorn and Welsh 2007, p. 198). Whatever the case, it is becoming increasingly clear that sustainability cannot be understood in terms of purely economic criteria (Holland 2003). The third limitation is that space and time have been largely neglected in the WCED denition of sustainability. The idea that a clear denition of spatial and temporal boundaries is essential to assess sustainability is not new (Bossel 2004, Chambers et al. 2000, Edwards 2005, Fresco and Kroonenberg 1992). Fruitful debates held over the last two decades pointed out the prominence of space and place in environmental justice debates (Agyeman et al. 2003). The importance of time in the complexities associated with problem solving is also acknowledged (Tainter 2006). However, when it comes to concrete cases, space and time are not always taken into account in sustainability projects. Operational tools such as sustainability indicators are usually dened only in economic, environmental, and social terms (Bell and Morse 2008). Yet, as argued by Rosenau (2003), several problems resist such categorisation. A paradigm based only on those aspects will most likely be unable to understand and explain, let alone solve, these problems. The increasing centrality of a globalised economy in the relationships between nature and culture has also undermined the importance of specic locations, landscapes, or places as critical components of sustainability, as highlighted by Escobar (2001). He thinks a radical questioning of place is a common feature of theories of globalisation that associate place with the limited and incomplete realm of the local, while promoting a world without frontiers understood as an absolute and universal space. Time, in spite of all the long-term rhetoric in most debates about development, has not been explicitly included in the classical sustainability triangle. The presence of an economic corner in that triangle is probably the reason why temporal aspects have been so neglected in practice, as discussed above. Contrary to space, which is associated with visible and tangible assets, time is beyond the reach of our senses and, for that reason, its pertinence within the environmental debate has been largely underestimated, as highlighted by Adam (1998). She proposed to pay more attention to timescapes, the temporal dimension of our environmental problems, in order to improve our understanding of their nature and impact. The inclusion of a time dimension seems indispensable for Adam because, from a temporal perspective, it is dicult to conceive of nature and culture as separate (Adam 1998, p. 23). Conceptions of time, as notions of space and territory, can dier greatly in dierent cultures and at dierent historical moments (Adam 1990, Bates 2006, Giddens 1984, Hubert and Mauss 1905). Time is therefore, as the concept of nature itself, a contested and culture-dependent issue that plays an important role in the way we perceive and dene nature (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Finally, personal aspects are as good as forgotten in the WCED denition of sustainable development. The WCED report emphasises the role of human

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needs as perhaps the ultimate goal of any development policy (WCED 1987, p. 43). Yet humans cannot be equated only to their needs. Moreover, human needs are not only physiological. Many types of needs have been identied, such as safety, love, esteem, and the desire for self-fullment (Chuengsatiansup 2003, Holden and Linnerud 2007, Maslow 1943). Most of these needs involve feelings, felt by individuals, and cannot be catalogued as social. Whether the management and coordination of economic, environmental and social aspects is the right strategy to satisfy all human needs is therefore debatable. As will be discussed in more detail below, a development paradigm that fails to take these feelings into account might not guarantee that issues related to, for instance, personal happiness are incorporated in the sustainability debate.

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The ve dimensions of sustainability As discussed in the preceding section, the WCED concept of sustainable development has contradictions and limitations. Nonetheless, its release by the United Nations had a very powerful inuence on the worlds environmental and social agenda. The report was allegedly made with people of all countries and all walks of life in mind and called for immediate action on many fronts (WCED 1987, p. 23). Whether or not the ultimate purpose of the WCED report (1987) was to be an all-encompassing theory of social change is dicult to say. Yet it made sure to warn us that unless we changed our attitudes, the security, well-being, and very survival of the planet were threatened (WCED 1987, p. 23). The academic world seems reluctant to rethink the WCED paradigm although, as pointed out by Reitan (2005), this vision of development does not appear to be working in practice. The persistence of environmental, social, and economic problems is attributed more to implementation decits than to intrinsic inconsistencies of the concept itself. However, since it was released more than two decades ago, it is obvious that the WCED denition could not have taken into account recent and fruitful debates on sustainability that partly complement and partly counteract the ideas in the WCED report. Building on some of these debates, I will try to show that the limitations of the WCED denition of sustainable development could be mitigated if sustainability is seen as the conceptual framework within which the territorial, temporal, and personal aspects of development can be openly discussed. To illustrate this framework, I propose a sustainability triangle formed by Place, Permanence, and Persons (Figure 1). In such a triangle, it is possible to distinguish ve dimensions: Place contains the three dimensions of space (x, y, and z), Permanence is the fourth dimension of time (t), and the Persons corner adds a fth, individual and interior, human dimension (i). Place and Persons, the base of the triangle, represent real, objective and concrete things that exist in the present time. Permanence, which is located in the upper (or the farthest) corner, is a more ideal, abstract and subjective projection of events from the other corners into the future. I turn to a more detailed explanation of the meaning I ascribe to the vertices of this new triangle.

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Figure 1. The new ve-dimensional sustainability triangle. Place: the three dimensions of space (x, y, and z); Permanence: the fourth dimension of time (t); Persons: the fth, human dimension (i). More details in the text.

Place People tend to see the environment as the place in which they live and interact. There are consequently as many environments or places as visions people have of the space around them (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Place provides an important share of the sense of belonging and identity that are partly responsible for the generation of culture. It has been dened as the experience of a particular location with some measure of groundedness . . . , sense of boundaries . . ., and connection to everyday life (Escobar 2001, p. 140). As Escobar suggests, the denition of any alternative development paradigm should take into account place-based models of nature, culture, and politics. Places are much more than just empty geographical spaces. They contain what Macnaghten and Urry (1998) call the spatialised, timed, sensed and embodied dimensions of nature. Places are therefore a source of facts, identities, and behaviours. They incorporate notions of culture, local ways of life, and human physical and psychological health (Franquemagne 2007, Garavan 2007, Le 2000). Place can also be constituted by a number of locations distant from one another. This shared territory might be an important ingredient in social cohesion, as studies on mobility, networks and migration have suggested (Urry 2002). Place is, to a certain extent, a social construct that helps people build a sense of belonging to a given culture. On the other hand, it could also be argued that culture is, in turn, delineated in terms of specic places. A perception of place as an inseparable unity constituted by the natural and cultural environments can help transcend the nature/culture dichotomy and integrate or reconcile opposite worldviews such anthropocentrism and

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non-anthropocentrism. It could be said that acknowledgment of local conditions, constraints, and opportunities is necessary to devise more sustainable policies (Rootes 2007). However, without explicit consideration of temporal issues, policies based only on the economic, environmental, and social facets of a place will exaggerate the relevance of the present time. The concept of Place, though essential, is hence only the restricted realm of intragenerational equity (Zuindeau 2007). Permanence Permanence is not only mere maintenance of present conditions. It includes changes and improvements. As indicated by Norton (2005, p. 304), sustainability, whatever else it means, has to do with our intertemporal moral relations. For that reason, Permanence could be seen as the main realm of inter-generational equity. The need for long-term thinking has always been acknowledged in the sustainability discourse. However, planning has been all too often relegated to a secondary role. Permanence is consequently the dimension where planning and consideration of the future eects of todays actions and inactions are paramount. The explicit inclusion of temporal aspects seems especially appropriate to deal with issues related to our material legacy and personal transcendence. The sense of belonging to a given place is often related to things that occurred at dierent, sometimes distant moments (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Therefore, it can be argued the very concept of place is not complete until we attach to it a certain temporal component. As indicated by Giddens (1984), time is not a mere background for action and interaction. Instead, it is inextricably correlated with space, social institutions and individual persons. Complementary concepts like Place and Permanence seem pertinent within a development paradigm that intends to have local and global, but also far-reaching implications. Nonetheless, it has to be considered as well that a world dened only in terms of place and permanence can be a very sad place for many people. Slavery, torture, tyranny and other human monstrosities so widely distributed in space and time can never be considered sustainable (George 1999). The concepts of justice and equity, though essential to build a more sustainable world, are probably not comprehensive enough to contain a number of more personal aspects. We can all be equal and have the same access to goods and services but we can also all be equally unhappy. For those reasons, I believe that the notion of sustainability should include a personal dimension. This dimension, however fuzzy and contested its denition may be, seems necessary to deal with issues of identity, values, rights, happiness and well-being. Persons The idea of the existence of an individual person within each human being, similar yet entirely dierent to those around them, has been the subject of

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intense philosophical, psychological, and religious speculation. It has been argued most human beings have always had a sense of corporal and spiritual individuality (Mauss 1938, p. 6) and people have always been concerned with meaning and the nature of existence (Macnaghten and Urry 1998, p. 95). Wilber (1998) argues the basic problem of modern societies (especially western) is not a development-related issue or even a social one. Instead, it is the abandonment, neglect, or rejection of the interior, spiritual dimensions of the world, a situation that leaves people in a atland devoid of meaning and value. He believes that without some kind of marriage between modern knowledge and pre-modern wisdom the future of humanity is, at best, precarious (Wilber 1998, 410). In the same line, Radford Ruether (1971, p. 214) believes modern society can still be the age of the person because men (and women) have not capitulated entirely to a one-dimensional, secular denition of man and reality and have retained some notion of transcendent values which they believe apply not only to their personal lives but to the way in which social organizations should operate as well. In her view, the modern world has threatened the foundations of freedom and the person by seeking to eliminate the transcendent framework altogether. In recent decades, the environmental movement has contributed to the development of personal and social identity. Environmental issues entered the international agenda and began to shape personal attitudes and governmental policies. As time went by, condence on the ability of governments and corporations to solve environmental and social crises somehow faded away. Research conducted by Macnaghten and Urry (1998) suggests that people are resorting more and more to their own senses in order to perceive the existence and the gravity of environmental problems. This is allegedly due to growing distrust towards politicians and the objectivity of others in general (including companies, the media, etc.), and to a widespread perception of lack of personal agency. This shift has been interpreted as a revaluation of localized and embedded identities and might be an adequate framework to understand the relationship between nature and society from a more personal point of view. This relationship involves actions but also feelings. As indicated by McShane (2007, p. 175), feelings and moral lives are lived from the inside, in the rst person. Therefore, we should not only care about material outputs but also about the inner life of the being that produces those outputs. As some studies have suggested, personal happiness and subjective wellbeing seem to be relatively disconnected from economic wealth, environmental quality, and even social justice (Marks et al. 2006, ONeill 2008). According to Dresner (2002), unhappiness is related largely to the impossibility of fullling socially created desires. In contrast, happiness and personal well-being have been associated with aspects of life such as autonomy, freedom, achievement, and the development of deep interpersonal relationships (Kahneman and Sugden 2005, p. 176). The existence of projects and relationships is not only meaningful from a personal point of view, but also complements a purely impartial ethical commitment towards society (ONeill 2008, p. 138). This

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personal commitment may play a distinctive role in the pursuit of better intergenerational justice since humans have the freedom to be relatively autonomous from both their environment and their culture, as postulated by Maslow (1954). Arguably, individuals and society can play dierent roles in the pursuit of sustainability. Barry (1999) thinks that we are not an undierentiated humanity facing an equally undierentiated nature. He proposes a citizenenvironment perspective, as opposed to the classical society environment relation, as the most appropriate standpoint from which to judge politically the normative standing of the non-human world (Barry 1999, pp. 6165, emphasis original). Merging individuals and society into one single dimension might fail to capture the complexity of human behaviour and the relevance of personal relationships for sustainability. Explicit consideration of personal aspects or personscapes in the sustainability triangle can also be seen as a challenge to the idea that nature and society are opposites. Individuals, who play a fundamental role in the generation, shaping, and maintenance of culture, are in consequence partly responsible for the construction of a culturedependent notion of nature. Therefore, from a personal point of view, it would also be as dicult to separate nature and culture as it is to neatly separate mind and body, paraphrasing Adam (1998) on timescapes. The idea of some connection and interdependence between humans and nature and between humans themselves, in recognising intrinsic value to others, is a powerful political instrument with normative implications (Saravanamuthu 2006). Seeing individual persons as intrinsically valuable might reduce the risk that sectoral (social, environmental, economic, institutional, or political) interests override the rights of minorities and citizens by considerations of public utility, as discussed in Norton (2005) and Caney (2008). Only individuals, with their morals and values, can achieve the change of consciousness that, according to Dryzek (1987, pp. 150160), is needed to achieve an ecologically rational world free from authoritarian top-down moral persuasion. Norton (2005) and Hill Jr. (2006, p. 331) also provided arguments against the idea individuals are always selsh and insatiable consumers whose behaviour can only be restrained by compulsion. There are many examples of collective institutions guided not by immediate gains but by more altruistic aims, which have been eective in managing common resources (Folke et al. 1996, Ostrom 1990). The individualistic pursuit of prot, which has been usually supposed to lead to the common good (thanks to Adam Smiths invisible hand), could instead lead to environmental destruction and economic crisis, as pointed out long ago by Hardin (1968). Concluding remarks I have tried to show that the conventional idea of sustainable development has a number of conceptual limitations and does not suciently capture some spatial, temporal, and personal aspects. To mitigate these shortcomings, I introduced a ve-dimensional conceptual framework arguably more sensitive

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than the traditional triple-bottom-line approach to understand the complex issues of sustainability. The new framework could be useful for both academic analysis and policymaking. It has been based on more fundamental ontological categories as those that serve as underpinning principles of the social sciences in general (such as space, time, persons, and the relationships among them). For that reason, its potential for plurality and its adaptability to specic settings might be higher, making it more appropriate to understand local, regional, and global processes. As discussed in Norton (2005), pluralism is unavoidable in any model, especially for facing wicked problems like those posed by the collision of collective and individual values and rights. Whether or not the proposed framework is a suciently distinctive, improved framework for the analysis of sustainability issues remains to be seen. The concept of sustainability is highly contingent to cultural and natural characteristics. Therefore, agreement on a single denition is not only impossible but also objectionable. Within the mutually-agreed connes of a suciently inclusive conceptual framework, multiple meanings and site-specic denitions are possible. Dierent visions on what sustainability is and how it should be measured could coexist, not only for plurality but also because dierent frameworks of analysis could give a better idea of the sustainability (or unsustainability) of processes and regions. In that sense, the new conceptual framework could augment or complement previous paradigms, instead of replacing them. Space, time, and human aspects are not independent from each other and interact in complex ways. In fact, most denitions of place include a certain notion of time and the conceptualisation and use of space and time form important cornerstones of peoples cultural identity. The vertices of the new sustainability triangle are so closely linked to each other that it would not be easy to deal with them in a fragmented way, as is usually the case for economic, environmental, and social problems. Acknowledgements
Detailed and insightful observations from three anonymous referees were greatly appreciated. The incisive comments of Gatze Lettinga and former colleagues of Wageningen University (The Netherlands) on early versions of this paper are also deeply acknowledged. I credit the lively discussions at the cafeteria of the National University of Salta (Argentina) for some of the ideas in this paper. Many thanks to James Champion and Tim Briggs for their grammatical input. The author is a full-time researcher at The National Council of Scientic and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET) (www.conicet.gov.ar).

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