Title:	A Living Countryside? The Politics of Sustainable Development in Rural Ireland
Authors:	JOhN MCDONaGh TONY VaRlEY SallY ShORTa
Keywords:	Rural development Ireland
Issue Date:	2009
Publisher:	Ashgate
Description:	What is most striking about the concept of ‘sustainable development’ today is how ubiquitous it has become and consequently how various and potentially contestable its meanings have proved to be. Certainly there is no shortage of critics of the concept. Michael Redclift’s (2005) review article carries the revealing title: ‘Sustainable Development (1987–2005): An Oxymoron Comes of Age’. What impresses Timothy Luke (2005, p. 228) is how ‘the intellectual emptiness of sustainable development has clung to it from the moment of its official articulation by the World Commission on the Environment and Development’. Despite its complexity and potential contestability, it is nonetheless possible to find in the concept of sustainable development some useful general features (see Baker 2006, pp. 212–3). The broad normative ideal of sustainability that it inscribes may be a difficult one to live up to in practice (some would even see the task as utopian), but it can be argued that as a general ideal it is morally commendable and that it can potentially provide a standard of sorts by reference to which actors in the real world (and those who study them) can position themselves. As soon as we move from the rather lofty general level, however, matters begin to become more complicated. At the lower altitudes the normative ideal of sustainable development inevitably encounters the question of ‘whose sustainability?’ or ‘sustainable for whom?’ Such a question implies two things: that different interests (or at least those who speak for them) must at some point decide what is ‘sustainable’ and ‘unsustainable’ for them in light of their own specific circumstances; and that what different interests take to be ‘sustainable’ and ‘unsustainable’ may throw up a number of possibilities as regards how they choose to deal with one another. They may, for instance, agree and co-operate, disagree and come into conflict or perhaps both agree and disagree in ways that mix co-operation and contention in varying proportions.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/46719
ISBN:	978-0-7546-8908-9
Appears in Collections:	Rural Development Studies

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