Perspectives on Rural Policy and Planning?A LIVING COUNTRYSIDE

Perspectives on Rural Policy and Planning?A LIVING COUNTRYSIDE

What is most striking about the concept of ‘sustainable development’ today ishow ubiquitous it has become and consequently how various and potentiallycontestable its meanings have proved to be. Certainly there is no shortage of criticsof the concept. Michael Redclift’s (2005) review article carries the revealing title:‘Sustainable Development (1987–2005): An Oxymoron Comes of Age’. Whatimpresses Timothy Luke (2005, p. 228) is how ‘the intellectual emptiness ofsustainable development has clung to it from the moment of its official articulationby the World Commission on the Environment and Development’.Despite its complexity and potential contestability, it is nonetheless possible tofind in the concept of sustainable development some useful general features (seeBaker 2006, pp. 212–3). The broad normative ideal of sustainability that it inscribesmay be a difficult one to live up to in practice (some would even see the task asutopian), but it can be argued that as a general ideal it is morally commendable andthat it can potentially provide a standard of sorts by reference to which actors inthe real world (and those who study them) can position themselves.As soon as we move from the rather lofty general level, however, mattersbegin to become more complicated. At the lower altitudes the normative idealof sustainable development inevitably encounters the question of ‘whosesustainability?’ or ‘sustainable for whom?’ Such a question implies two things:that different interests (or at least those who speak for them) must at some pointdecide what is ‘sustainable’ and ‘unsustainable’ for them in light of their ownspecific circumstances; and that what different interests take to be ‘sustainable’and ‘unsustainable’ may throw up a number of possibilities as regards how theychoose to deal with one another. They may, for instance, agree and co-operate,disagree and come into conflict or perhaps both agree and disagree in ways thatmix co-operation and contention in varying proportions.