'Sustainable Technoscientific Development and the Innovator Citizen - Way Out or Deeper into the Crisis

Pfister, Thomas, Flear, Mark L.

'Sustainable Technoscientific Development and the Innovator Citizen - Way Out or Deeper into the Crisis

Pfister, Thomas, Flear, Mark L.: 'Sustainable Technoscientific Development and the Innovator Citizen - Way Out or Deeper into the Crisis, Open Citizenship, 2014; Jg. 5 (1): 20-31.

Originalarbeiten in wissenschaftlichen Fachzeitschriften

Sustainable development could provide a critical foil for individual and especially collective reflection on the normative direction, ends and means employed by societies, particularly around the economy, its technology and resource-intensive orientation, and configuration with ecosystems. However, although sustainable development is a constitutional objective of the EU, its implementation in strategies and policies reveals a much narrower meaning. By framing sustainable development as ecological modernisation on the basis of technoscientific innovation, and by imagining citizens as entrepreneurs in a European knowledge-based economy, openings for democratic experimentation and social innovation are limited and even forestalled. In addition, the disruptive and transformational potential of citizenship is stymied. Still, sustainable development has resonances with citizenship and human rights discourse that provide important resources for the fashioning of common understanding and shared discourse. These are valuable supplements to the repertoire of European citizenship that could help to embed sustainable development in the social fabric and generate alternative imaginaries and futures of a sustainable Europe.

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