Author(s)

C. Bogliotti & J. H. Spangenberg

Abstract

The exclusive use of sustainability criteria does not seem sufficient to orient sustainable development towards the complexity of the societal requirements and to cope with them. The paper provides a heuristic device to determine sustainable development with a more comprehensive vision. The device represents an explicit and transferable back-to-basis approach based on 3 functions: -) sustainability (S), a field of macro-variables underlying normative criteria; -) governance (G), a field of macro-variables pertinent to the organisation of the society in which sustainability is plunged; -) Ethics (Є ), a field of principles used to explicitly orient sustainability towards a higher level of individual values. The interlinkages among S, G and Є are explored to enable comprehensive planning and evaluation of sustainability accounting the fair balance among sustainability criteria, governance variables and explicit ethical principles. Keywords: sustainability, governance, Ethics, orientation of sustainability. 1 Introduction Criteria of sustainability alone do not seem able to comprehensively frame sustainable development in project development. The term project is used here to cover a large range of human actions, from programmes, master plans, strategies to decision making and policies. Neither traditional impact assessment approaches nor applied sustainability seem able to cope adequately with the dynamic character of our modern society, which seeks balancing between material and non-material values [1, 2]. The purpose of the paper is to present a

Keywords

sustainability, governance, Ethics, orientation of sustainability.