CHAPTER 2
Sustainability Climate of Policy
2.1INTRODUCTION
2.2EMERGENCE OF POLICY SUSTAINABILITY
2.2.1Population and Resource
2.2.2Modernity and Sustainability 2.3 CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABILITY
2.3.1Steady-State Economy
2.3.2Carrying Capacity
2.3.3Ecospace
2.3.4Ecological Footprints
2.3.5Natural Resource Accounting/Green Gross Domestic Product
2.3.6Ecoefficiency
2.4 SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVE
2.1 INTRODUCTION
Although there are volumes of discussion on sustainable development and the environment, sustainable policy merits a special attention. Policy sustainability can be considered as a kind of new connection to all efforts of sustainable development. A sustainable policy designates the integration of goals and activities of a policy with sustainable development. Therefore, sustainability assessment of a policy can be considered as a process that helps policy managers to integrate the objectives of sustainability into policy actions in a given sociopolitical environment and to plan a strategy for policy implementation. The sustainability of resource and environmental policies depends on socioeconomic and sociopolitical issues considered in planning and management of a resource system to meet the needs of society. Perhaps, that is why different policies attempt different strategies for the improvement of resource use and to ensure sustainability. However, social attitude like corruption, nepotism, and nonprofessionalism of policy actors
Sustainability Assessment. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-407196-4.00002-7
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14 Sustainability Assessment
may cause policy failure in many instances. Thus, performances of resource policy largely depend on social factors, sociopolitical actors, and resource sectors of a country. These factors and their interplay within the society constitute the sustainability climate, an understanding of which is important for policy evaluation. This chapter essentially aims at presenting sociopolitical elements that create a congenial climate for sustainable policy.
The factors of sustainability climate are not exogenous; rather, they evolve along with the society. A good understanding and explanation of policy issues addresses the social activities as well as the processes of modernization. As a result, rationalization of resource use and negotiation of social contradictions are important issues for sustainable policy. The fundamental way of looking at those processes is to select different forms of ecomodernist tools and practices, which can be used in mitigating social contradictions but which have not been given importance in the policy action. Thus, understanding the economic processes, social dynamics, development progress, and institutional characteristics is important for general clarification of policy climate.
The problems of definition as well as solution to sustainability should be socially acceptable and technically viable. If an environmental problem is addressed by a technically efficient but socially insensitive policy, that policy may result in regulatory failure. There are certain policy instruments that need to be utilized appropriately for solving the problem and for the viability of policy. For example, an intervention or a nonintervention method, if adopted to prevent social construction of an environmental problem, may not help in achieving environmental planning for sustainability. The social construction of a problem should be prevented by social measures not by intervention measures. According to Hajer (1995), the social climate of a policy problem largely depends on the following three dimensions:
1.Discursive closure—delineates which aspects of the problem are included and which aspects have been left out from the policy.
2.Problem closure—which shows whether the strategy of regulation helped to achieve certain goals of sustainability.
3.Social accommodation—gives the understanding of any particular way the problem has been positioned or priority it has been given.