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What is the story with sustainability? A narrative analysis of diverse and contested understandings

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Abstract

Since the coining of the term “sustainability/sustainable development,” diverse and contested understandings of sustainability theory and practice have circulated both within the academy and the public at large. For the most part, sustainability has been approached from a very science-dominated perspective. That is only part of the story: while science is important for sustainability, science alone cannot account for the many situated dimensions of life. In contrast to science, story—or narrative—as both a mode of knowing and process of knowledge construction, can account for life’s place-, time-, and event-dependent dimensions. This paper performs a narrative analysis of eight different conceptual frameworks of sustainability—Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, Ecofeminism, Environmental History and Human Geography/Ecology, Complex Adaptive Systems, Political Ecology, Ecological Economics, and Business and Sustainability—to identify where these frameworks are commensurate and irreconcilable, with the aim of exploring a coherent alternative to current practice and conventional ways of thinking.

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Notes

  1. The term “science” here is used in reference to the social institution made up of scientists plus the relations among them (Latour 1987, 1993; Cozzens and Gieryn 1990), the total body of knowledge, and a methodology describing how to carry out investigation of the world (Pickering 1992; Clarke and Fujimura 1992).

  2. For a more detailed discussion of the political implications of choosing one view of sustainability over another, see Cronon’s (1992) description of the social and environmental impacts of subscribing to one particular narrative account of history over another.

  3. The word “narrative” is among the most versatile and plastic of all words in the English language. Moving aside the human-centeredness of Barthes’ (1977) following quotation about narrative, his famous statement does capture well narrative’s multivalency: “Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting… stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every location, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives… Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself” (p. 79).

  4. For more arguments in support of narrative as a mode of knowing, see Epstein (1983, 1990), Howard (1991), Mair (1988), McAdams (1985), Sarbin (1986).

  5. While both the Romantic and Social (Enlightenment) Critiques of modernism shared a support of humanism, this worldliness, Prometheanism, and a focus on human consciousness, there were important differences. Tarnas (1991) describes the differences between Romantic and Social (Enlightenment) thinking as, respectively: viewing the world as a unitary organism vs. as an atomistic machine; finding motivation from the ineffability of inspiration vs. the enlightenment of reason; prizing emotion, imagination, spirituality, creativity, individual self-expression and self-creation vs. reason; viewing nature as live vessel of spirit and source of mystery and revelation vs. as an object for observation and experiment; inquiring via theoretical explanation vs. via technological manipulation viewing truth as transfiguring and sublime vs. as testable and objective; seeking the goals of a new person, a new world vs. seeking understand and control of the world andviewing reality a construct of the mind vs. as independent of the mind (see Table 2 ).

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Frank, A.K. What is the story with sustainability? A narrative analysis of diverse and contested understandings. J Environ Stud Sci 7, 310–323 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-016-0388-3

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