Week 11 Assignment

1. The definition formed by the Bruntland Commission, conceptualizes the notion of meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This allows for the broad based application necessary to facilitate effective regulation.

Any policy direction that integrates social, environmental, or economic implications specifically into a sustainability frames work, as Goodman suggests, could be problematic, and thus shift spirit of the policy from its original intent.

2. Sustainability, as a policy directive or goal, can be difficult to implement into practice because of the different political, economic, and societal covenants that bound people.

Each section of society has a different set priorities based on its specific needs, which can change based on conditions at any moment in time. Policy has the tendency to be designed around a specific lobby or special interest, which is usually in conflict with another thus establishing winners and losers. This predisposition to win can conflict with societal sustainability.

A free market economy, which has its place in the policy making process, states follows some form of the capitalist principle of self interest, which history has proven can be in conflict with planet interest that a sustainability framework would support.

This is not to invalidate the need for social, environmental, or economic sustainability, but only to point that these paradigms often conflict with one another.

3. An effectively designed sustainability framework would have to follow the cliché principle of equal opportunity inclusion of stakeholders. Experts, such a engineers, planners, and other disciplines as deemed necessary for each application are necessary to the process. Sustainability operates from a technological stand point of efficiency whether the area economic, ecological, social, or environment. The experts have knowledge and training to most effectively achieve the benchmarks a policy framework would desire.

Citizen or the general public also has to buy in the process. Inclusion of the public into the process allows the experts to gain an understanding of a particular expertise that they do not posses, which that of everyday application of the process. Those who are expected to follow the process and live by policies should have input into the design process as they see the process and will partake in its evolution or sustainable evolution.

The cliché think local act global should have a principle purpose into the policy process and implement action at the local level and the global goals be achieved through a trickle up effect.

4. Long-term sustainability planning in a society based on short increment quick fix is an oxymoron in concept. The stability of the planet and societies within it is contingent on that oxymoron becoming a reality. While there are a multitude of publications that discuss principles of the three E’s, the implications climate change, over consumption, and pollution, as well as quantification tools such as the ecological foot print or life cycle analysis, most will only local at the issues facing them right now. This is the result of choice or circumstance.
Only through a paradigm shift that results in a true buy in to the practice of long-term sustainability and resource planning will any of the conceptualized scenarios of stabilization become a reality.