Savoirs, risques globaux et développement durable

As a project, sustainable development is not thinkable without a huge increase of scientific knowledge and technological innovation. Meanwhile, it calls for several changes: usual space and time benchmarks of economic endeavours have to be broadened; maintaining natural public assets such as climate and biodiversity, and meeting basic needs of unsolvable segments of population have to be fully integrated in development strategies. This will not be achieved spontaneously in a knowledge society that may generate new types of inequalities and exclusions, and calls for new regulations of the science, technology and society interface. Modern scientific and technical research has to be taken without disregarding its deep ambivalence: it brings both new progress and new collective risks and threats. Technological achievements have systematically to be screened on the basis of the very goals of sustainable development. This cannot be done without developing a thinking and foresight of limits of nature within the strategic thinking about development. To this regard, the very concept of limits has to be reconsidered as framed by both hetero and self-reference. And last, the precautionary principle has to be given a key position to the extent it is appropriately understood as a general obligation to take early action in the face of potential risks, without waiting for full certainty. This principle will then tighten links between collective management of risks and attention given to scientific life, in order to adapt precautionary measures to the course of knowledge development. Beyond, the way to organise scientific research cannot avoid to be touched by the concern for sustainable development. It may answer at various levels of deepness: firstly, new questions will be raised and new objects should be studied -for example: through which processes is the integration of various key dimensions of development achieved in practice? - New practices of research would look desirable in order to produce a kind of knowledge more integrative and open to social actors who walk the talk of sustainable development at various stages of research and technical development. This orientation implies that new partnerships will be developed in the direction of actors having relevant views to share about economic and social development, without limiting openness to just business organisations.