Sustainability beyond Environmentalism : the Missing Dimensions

The socio-economic and political dimensions of sustainable development have most often been neglected when developing future scenarios. At best, the social dimension has been dealt with as a framework condition for successful environmental sustainability strategies. The institutional one has been discussed regarding integrating the environment into other policies, but hardly as a dimension of sustainability in its own right (despite the fact that no sustainable development program goes without discussing institutional aspects). For the economic one, the predominance of growth and deregulation has been taken as a given in most cases, instead of developing criteria for economic sustainability. This paper gives a brief sketch of what these dimensions mean for sustainable development. To operationalise them, criteria from all four dimensions must be developed. They have to be incorporated into policy design from the very beginning and on equal footing, if a bias of the results violating the basic concept of sustainable development is to be avoided. For any more general approach it is necessary to integrate criteria of different quality, and to pay due respect to the importance attributed to them by various stakeholders. Standard evaluation methodologies are not capable of handling this situation, in particular the need to simultaneously take a variety of objectives into account (no comparability), and the lack of a common numeraire (no commensurability). A particular challenge to economically educated experts is the fact that no unambiguous optimum exists in multi-dimensional optimisation, but only a range of acceptable solutions can be defined. Multicriteria evaluation provides an alternative in these cases.