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Sustainable development as a power/knowledge system: the problem of ‘governmentality’

In: Greening Environmental Policy

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  • Timothy W. Luke

    (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Abstract

This chapter questions the ideas and actions of one of the most unquestioned environmental movements now operating all over the world, namely, groups supporting the goal of ‘sustainable development’. One must wonder about concepts like sustainable development. Some will take sustainable development to mean ecologically sustainable.1 Others can just as rightly see it as economically sustainable, technologically sustainable or politically sustainable.2 Consequently, chambers of commerce and ministries of industry in the 1990s glibly appropriate sustainable development discourse as their own: this dam, that factory, these highways, those powerlines must be built to sustain, not nature, but job creation, population growth, industrial output or service delivery, because such elements improve human life and enhance its ecosystems’ carrying capacities. This construction, however, clashes with more ecological interpretations of sustainability in which humans allegedly are seeking ‘social and material progress within the constraints of sustainable resource use and environmental management’ and, as a result, renewable resources (plants, trees, animals and soil) will be used no faster than they are generated; non-renewable resources (such as fossil fuels and metals) will be used no faster than acceptable substitutes can be found; and pollutants will be generated no faster than can be absorbed and neutralized by the environment.3

Suggested Citation

  • Timothy W. Luke, 1995. "Sustainable development as a power/knowledge system: the problem of ‘governmentality’," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Frank Fischer & Michael Black (ed.), Greening Environmental Policy, chapter 2, pages 21-32, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-08357-9_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-08357-9_2
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    Cited by:

    1. Tony Sandset & Eivind Engebretsen, 2022. "Sustainable Healthcare Education as a Practice of Governmentality?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(22), pages 1-15, November.

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