Politicizing sustainable development: the co-production of globalized evidence-based policy

Sustainable development is fundamentally depoliticized by the interrelated discourses of globalization (as a way of conceptualizing environmental problems) and evidence-based policy (as a key global response to global environmental problems). This depoliticization has overlooked key issues of control over resources and decision-making, disparate experiences of environmental problems, and hierarchies of knowledge relevant to environmental policy. If sustainable development is to be salvaged as a useful and meaningful concept, it needs to be politicized, requiring two things. The first is to establish a global, evidence-based discourse of sustainable development as one legitimate discourse of many, but as co-produced–embedded in power politics that both reflect and create the broad social order. The second is to assert the need for deliberative governance as a basis for an environmental decision-making that is not exclusively controlled by privilege within this social order. Ultimately, the politicization of sustainable development legitimates a call for deliberative governance to supplant evidence-based policy as the ‘gold-standard’ for environmental decision-making.