Sustainability concerns everyone. On the one hand, because everybody is somehow confronted with the impacts of non-sustainability, as is obviously the case with climate change for example. On the other hand, because a transformation towards a more sustainable world necessarily in-volves alterations: Whether mobility, energy or food - sustainability implies to eventually change traditional patterns of consumption, to reconfigure societal infrastructures and last but not least pay for all of this. Discussions around sustainability thus often evolve around the question of who shall finance necessary reconfigurations or eventually abstain from something. As such questions can be and obviously are answered differently and in favour of different social groups, sustaina-bility concerns everyone – but perhaps not in the same degree. If we further regard that different social groups, generations and global areas profited and profit (respectively: suffered and suffer) from non-sustainability in different degrees, the social justice dimension of sustainability becomes all the more obvious.
In his book “Unsustainable Inequalities. Social Justice and the Environment“, Lucas Chancel discusses this relationship between issues of sustainability and social justice. His key hypothesis is, that economic inequality contributes decisively to a non-sustainable development. Therefore, sustainability requires to regard issues of social justice. A sustainable society equally is a socially just society – and the other way round. In his discussion, Chancel combines own analyses in the area of income- and wealth distributions with a partly critical incorporation of social sciences liter-ature, including sociology.
This seminar is primarily dedicated to the discussion of the relationship between sustainability and social justice on the basis of Chancel’s book “Unsustainable Inequality”. Along with that we will go a bit deeper into some issues by having a closer look into sociological aspects of sustain-ability with additional literature.