The True Meaning of “Taking Ownership” in the Pursuit of “Sustainable Development”: From Global to Local, from Macro to Micro, from Public to Private

The widespread idea of “sustainable development” may look either like a truism, at a first glance (development is hardly acceptable in both mundane and erudite talk as a spasmodic move, with steep push-ups and sudden downfalls), or like a pleonasm, on a second thought (despite humans’ time preference for immediateness over remoteness or only for own life-long horizons, no sane person aims for dead-ends). Still, the main concern with this economic syntagma is not its eventual conceptual redundancies, but its translations into practice/policy. Sustainable development is being preached as the so longed triumph of public/societal spirit over private/individual short-sightedness, of coordinated macro- instruments over disarrayed micro- tools, of global frameworks for managing spill-over effects over ineffective local setups. The present papers aims to do justice to a scientific principle (and societal purpose) that risks to become “sustainably unsustainable”, arguing that the only meaningful way for its processing and professing is to reconcile it with some basic features of human cooperation: property rights and free markets, sound money and low taxes, unhampered research, education and culture, solid family and community bonds. The main argument of this plea is that properly defined, disposed and defended ownership rights in scarce resources are the crux of the issue. Only in a society where (property) rights are assigned according to non-contradictory and nondiscretionary rules, individuals beget the responsibility to “take ownership” with respect to the harmonious betterment of their own lives as well as those of their fellows and descendants.