Sustainability and the Currency of Intergenerational Obligations: Norton, Solow, Rawls, Mill, and Sen on Problems of Intergenerational Allocation

Abstract

Concepts of sustainability guide policy and environmental management decisions. But when goals are articulated badly, they provide poor decision guides, and may lead to serious mistakes. This paper reviews and critically evaluates a series of popular conceptions of ‘sustainability,’ with special focus on a conception advocated by Bryan Norton. While no conception of sustainability (not even Norton’s) is problem-free, we gain by understanding the limitations of each. Adaptive management, as I understand it here, is not a conception of sustainability, but a view about how conceptions of sustainability might be used in practical reasoning about policy or management.