Mortgaging our common future: The temporality of sustainable development

Abstract

This article argues that the concept of sustainable development, as institutionalized through the 1987 Brundtland report and the governance frameworks that followed, can be understood as a temporal fix: an attempt to reconcile the fundamentally incommensurable temporalities of Earth systems and capitalist economic growth by displacing ecological costs into a future where technological development and market forces were assumed to resolve them. The article traces how a particular economic temporality—oriented towards future efficiency, discounting, and market self-regulation—came to overwrite the temporality of the Earth system in international environmental governance from the late 1980s onwards. Empirically, the article examines the influence of neoliberal and neoclassical economic thought on the Brundtland Commission and its corporate reinterpretation by the International Chamber of Commerce in the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the defeat of direct regulatory instruments such as the European carbon tax in favor of market-based mechanisms, and the role of backstop technology, integrated assessment models, and cost-benefit analysis in embedding temporal deferral into the institutional architecture of climate governance from the UNFCCC to the IPCC. The article shows that what sustainable development sustained was not the environment but the trajectory of economic growth, by mortgaging the future to maintain accumulation in the present.