Mortgaging our common future: The temporality of sustainable development

In 1987, the UN report Our Common Future , also known as the Brundtland report, was published by a group led by its namesake Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Norwegian prime minister and chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The group had been tasked with solving an increasingly difficult and contradictory problem. As knowledge about anthropogenic impact on the global environment was mounting—James Hansen would testify to the U.S. congress about the reality of anthropogenic climate change the following year—these insights needed to be integrated into the trajectory of global development that had been pushed since the early postwar era by Western nations. At the heart of this process was the clash of different temporalities; the political, social, and human historical on the one hand and the temporalities of the Earth and its systems on the other hand. In this article, I ask how these clashing environmental and social temporalities were made commensurable with each other through the concept of sustainable development that engendered certain energy futures. Through which conceptual tools, quantitative measurements, predictive models, and projections were the planetary limits which supplied the framework for life on Earth made to appear possible to overcome with a certain form of economic development? The article starts with a broad outlook over the political ecology of sustainable development in the global policy context in the early years of implementation, and then moves into the empirical case of the Swedish forestry which became a key asset in the country's journey toward net zero emissions over the decades from the 1990s onwards.