Sustainability

The term ‘sustainability’, as used in policy and common contemporary parlance, has a very European heritage, but its meanings and implications defy easy definition. While perhaps most famously the term is used in the UN’s ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, the term has roots in seventeenth century German forestry, where it was used to characterise optimal efficiency in tree planting. Since then, it has come to be strongly associated with questions of how the world’s resources might be better managed to ensure equality, prosperity, and health for future generations in an era of climate change. Anthropologists, however, have identified several intertwining issues with dominant approaches to sustainability that centre around questions of inclusion and exclusion from policies, metrics, and perceived global futures. Whose sustainability gets to count on the global stage? And what, exactly, is being sustained? This entry identifies four main themes cross-cutting anthropological studies of how sustainability is imagined, enacted, and debated from the lab to the boardroom to the forest and the ocean. First, studies explore plurality in sustainable development, exploring conflicting ontologies and epistemologies of sustainability in diverse milieus. Second, studies address the problem of commensurability: as sustainability is measured and counted, compared and priced, how are diverse beings, contexts, people, and values made to stand in for one another? This leads to the third theme—moralities. Studies have addressed the conflicting moral projects brought about by sustainable development, as people grapple with what should be sustained and why. Finally, anthropologists have explored the kinds of futures that are imagined and made material by discourses on sustainability. Together, these studies form a body of work that refuses to take high-level discourses on sustainability for granted. They push anthropologists to ask how attention to on-the-ground realities might pose alternatives to dominant sustainable futures that remain defined by growth, extraction, and profit.