20
Social Visions of Future Sustainable
Societies
Patricia Benjamin, Jeanne X. Kasperson, Roger E. Kasperson,
Jacque L. Emel and Dianne E. Rocheleau
All manner of social issues receive short shrift in the debates on ‘environment and
development’ and ‘managing the global commons’. Family life, community, strati-
fication and individual dignity and fulfilment all suffer from varying degrees of
neglect, while international security, nature/society relations, economic alterna-
tives and processes of social change are badly in need of new theories. To the extent
that the discussion is couched in terms of sustainability, the emphasis has been on
reconciling ecological sustainability (planetary life support) with economic sus-
tainability (continued economic growth), while social sustainability (creation of
conditions for community and individual well-being) is generally ignored – or
equated with economics, which is almost as bad. Social sustainability, we should
note at the outset, does not mean the continuation of existing social structures but,
rather, creation and maintenance of the conditions for creativity, empowerment,
self-determination and self-actualization.
Research, both past and present, reflects this imbalance. For example, in a 1989
World Future Society publication, most of the items absent from a list of issues
deemed important by a panel of 17 prominent American futurists are social in nature
(Coates and Jarratt, 1989, pp24–25). Current research shows little change: for exam-
ple, global environmental change is widely construed as a serious global problem with
human causes (ICSU, 1987; IFIAS, 1987; IGES, 1999; ISSC, 1989; Jacobson and
Price, 1991), yet the International Human Dimensions Programme has a tiny budget
compared with the science-based International Biosphere-Geosphere Programme, a
dichotomy largely apparent in the national global change research programmes. In
general, little funding is available for collaborative, international, long-term social sci-
ence research, and the funding allocated to policy work is usually for specific policy
problems rather than for understanding more broadly human-induced environmental
Reprinted from Benjamin P, Kasperson J X, Kasperson R E, Emel J L and Rocheleau D E. 2001. Social
visions of future sustainable societies. In Kasperson J X and Kasperson R E (eds) Global Environmental
Risk, Earthscan, London, pp467–507.