Abstract
Purpose
The 1990s produced two distinct engineering ideologies of sustainability—one emphasizing engineering innovation and the other emphasizing socio-cultural change. The technological change ideology of sustainability refers to engineering reform controlled and directed by engineers themselves—in other words, technological practices can be improved through the application of expertise. The technopolitics’ ideology of sustainability is about engineering challenge; it places more emphasis on the devolution of expertise from the existing model of engineering and society, and it questions the dominant values of engineering practice. In this article, I present a historico-philosophical perspective on the development of social life cycle assessment (SLCA) to highlight how the dialectic between sustainability and engineering has been defined largely by the ideology of technological change.
Methods
I provide original historical evidence regarding the roles of key actors and institutions in fitting the life cycle perspective and corporate social responsibility (CSR) into sustainable development. Primary data for this chapter is based on archival materials as well as on 30, in depth, semi-structured interviews with North American and European LCA and SLCA experts. Other primary data were collected from participant observation in SLCA webinars and workshops.
Results and discussion
Technology is at the heart of SLCA—it is a shared faith in technology as the solution. At the same time, there is growing appreciation amongst SLCA proponents that such technology must be construed more critically. Although it remains a subaltern current within LCA, SLCA is evidence of how technological change and technopolitics are starting to converge and influence each other—a probe toward a more reflective form of engineering discourse and toward the formation of a new hybrid sustainability ideology.
Conclusions
SLCA, I argue in this article, is an ideological hybrid where there are many spots of dissent and disagreement but also some surprising fundamental alignments between those who see engineering as techniques and those who believe that engineering needs to be socially and politically contextualized. Yet, even as the concepts of sustainable development, CSR, and LCA provide the intellectual and institutional mold within which SLCA becomes conceivable, these concepts may also obscure the historicity of sustainability engineering.
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Notes
For example, a conference entitled “Preparing for a Sustainable Society,” co-sponsored by the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology and IEEE Toronto Section, took place in Canada (Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, June 21–22, 1991). The conference’s Call for Papers read: What is a sustainable society? How will the relationship between technology and society change if a strategy of sustainable development is adopted? Can society control and redirect the technological system it has created or is this system now controlling society? (Burkhardt and Vanderburg 1991: 6–8).
As one European engineer and SLCA practitioner put it, “I know… [that in 2014] several companies…are working on SLCA; trying to define suitable indicators to assess social aspects along…[product] life cycle[s]…to apply the SLCA guidelines…[and] to integrate [SLCA] into existing sustainability reporting.” Groupe AGÉCO, a Canadian consulting group, reported in 2013 that it has conducted 15 SLCAs, while LCA pioneer PRé Consultants—serving 80 % private companies and 20 % government services in 60 countries around the world—explained that more and more clients express interest in SLCAs. Interview data; webinar on “Combined Environmental and Social Life Cycle Assessment in the Food, Beverage and Agricultural Products Sector.” Webinar offered by New Earth on June 26, 2013.
“Generally,” argued the UNEP Guidelines, “practitioners of S-LCA will need to incorporate a large share of qualitative data, since numeric information will be less capable of addressing the issues at hand...” (Life Cycle Initiative 2009: 9). For example, “bypassing data on worker impressions in favor of more ‘objective’ data (such as variability in observed worker arrival times, or other attempted proxies for perceived degree of control) would introduce greater uncertainty in the results, not less” (Life Cycle Initiative 2009: 40).
The method outlined in Andersson et al. (1998) fills a gap between traditional LCA and so-called “Socio-Ecological Principles.”
For example, as a result of discussion within Working Groups of the December 2003 meeting of UNEP/SETAC members in Lausanne, Switzerland, it was decided that a new “Task Force” be created to focus on the inclusion of social issues in LCA. In 2003, an LCA leader wrote that “[t]here seems to be a consensus about these three pillars, but not about the relative weights of these aspects” (Klöpffer 2003: 157–159). Another early instance where SLCA and sustainability were cast in the context of the triple bottom line is the paper by Udo de Haes et al. (2004).
Latin American engineers may also be more socially and politically minded: “Social and economic benefits are not normally considered in a life cycle assessment, but these are significant aspects in the context of developing countries toward sustainable development,” members of the Chilean Research Center for Mining and Metallurgy wrote in a 2011 SLCA study (Rada et al. 2011).
The GRI was founded between 1997 and 1999.
Like the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, Raskin had no doubts about the limitations of scientific materialism—namely, the idea that a materialistic cosmology could provide an accurate account of human nature. But unlike his mentor at Berkeley, Raskin associated self-understanding, the key in mediating between human and non-human nature, with the world of business. The year he founded the Tellus Institute, he published an essay on the “Ecology of Scientific Consciousness” that appeared in Telos, a critical theory journal, following a piece by Theodore Adorno that debated the historical process of understanding the meaning of human existence in the context of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis (Bernow and Raskin 1976). In 2002, Raskin had found an appropriate name for that historical process: Great Transition. His 2002 book featuring that title is an excursion into future global socio-technological scenarios. “New values” have taken root, wrote Raskin, leaving their mark on the global business landscape. Unlike the “unfettered market” (a phrase used also by White), which can only deliver the goods of efficiency, “[e]nvironment, equity and development goals are supra-market issues....” Instead of collapsing social sustainability into the corporate bottom line, the accountability movement is characterized by “forward-looking corporations [that] seize the new reality as a business opportunity and a matter of social responsibility.” In addition, corporate operationalization of transparency would be marked by the “establish[ment] [of] tough standards for sustainable businesses and innovative practices to meet them” (Raskin et al. 2012: 19, 29, 51).
By 2007, there was already many sources of social performance indicators including company CSR rating schemes. Good Guide, for example, founded in 2007 by UC Berkeley professor Dara O′ Rourke had initiated a process of aggregating between different data sources.
Jørgensen also admitted that “this is a kind of snapshot of a situation…[meaning that] of course things can change and different companies may think differently in the future.”
One example of work that actually does address the positive impacts occurring in the use phase is Musaazi M.K. et al. (2013).
The idea here is that corporate willingness to protect brands and profits has entailed a “natural focus on…CSR, and [has] broaden[ed] the focus to sustainability rather than just environment.” This contention embeds the assumption that researching the social aspects of products in value chains is a “natural extension” or “natural next development” to linking life cycle thinking with the triple bottom line of sustainability; but it also assumes that corporate social responsibility is a single-dimensional concept (Hauschild et al. 2008; Andrews et al. 2009; Technical University of Denmark 2010).
The authors note that in “an extensive literature review on sustainability and engineering, life cycle thinking and assessment are not even mentioned” (Sala et al. 2013: 1668). Yet, this assertion was based on reviewing only one article written by an author with an engineering background who himself neglects the—quite extensive—engineering-specific literature on sustainability.
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Sakellariou, N. A historical perspective on the engineering ideologies of sustainability: the case of SLCA. Int J Life Cycle Assess 23, 445–455 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-016-1167-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-016-1167-9