Social Visions of Future Sustainable Societies 401Bell, 1969) and the International Peace Research Institute (Jungk and Galtung,
1969), and reports addressing the specific issues taken up by modellers [e.g. MIT’s
Study of Critical Environmental Problems (SCEP, 1971) and the Ward and Dubos
(1972) report for the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stock-
holm] – yet the models, not the rich variety of research, were adopted as the defin-
ing voice of global environment and development issues. The discussion that
follows centres on the models, partly because a new generation of global models is
now being created [e.g. the various efforts at integrated assessment; the PoleStar
project of the Stockholm Environment Institute, reported in Raskin et al (1998);
and the Hammond (1998) analysis of the 21st-century scenarios].
In the early 1990s, Gordon Goodman, Director of the Stockholm Environ-
ment Institute, discussed with members of a Clark University group his plans for
PoleStar, an analytic process for systematically exploring alternative futures to
inform international efforts for coping with global environmental change. The
centrepiece of this process as it has developed is an accounting device – the PoleStar
computer-based tool, building upon the first generations of global models – that
allows an ongoing exploration of global environmental change. The Clark group
argued that a process such as PoleStar should include a component missing from
the earlier modelling efforts – an explicit exploration of the social nature of future
sustainable societies. Such an inquiry would begin with the desired human condi-
tions and social structures, with processes aimed at fulfilling human development
and dignity, and would proceed to elicit diverse social visions from a heterogene-
ous sample of creative thinkers. The outcomes would have tremendous value in
their own right, but the process would also complement modelling of economic
and physical phenomena, interacting with them by setting up a dialectic (missing
from earlier models) in which diverse social arrangements would drive, be explic-
itly incorporated in, or be compared with, the models. The process would test not
only model feasibility but also the modellers’ assumptions and implicit world
visions (at least, those aspects of the visions capable of being modelled would be
tested, thereby enriching the modelling process).
The Clark group undertook an initial experiment, involving a review of the
social content of the first generation of global models. As an aid in comparing the
social content of the models, we constructed a set of attributes that (arguably)
might be used to characterize a sustainable society. We sought to create a frame of
analysis by which very different social visions could be compared (see below). This
frame included some components typically treated (e.g. population) as well as
some less-obvious attributes (e.g. equity, views of nature). A striking lesson of this
process was the difficulty of creating an analytical approach that does not lose the
richness of texture and interconnections among attributes or components.
Previous listings of important qualities of social visions include everything
from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1959) to transportation systems, from
political change to individual spiritual fulfilment. Such a wide range of factors
might help to begin to address questions such as those posed above – what it would
be like to live in such a society, and whether anyone would want to do so. For the