Page 204 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

Chapter 16
Participation: Empowerment

for Sustainable Development

Harald Heinrichs

Abstract The current discussion about participation and sustainability shows the
relevance of participative elements in modern societies for coping with social, eco-
logical and technological complexity. Especially in the 1990s participative pro-
cesses for cooperative planning and decision-making procedures were developed
and tested. Faced with the challenges confronting society as it moves towards a
more sustainable development, both the opportunities and the limits of a culture of
participation and sustainability will become more and more noticeable.
Keywords Participation • Cultural evolution • Cooperation • Participation methods
• Sustainability communication

Participation and Sustainable Development

Since the 1990s two terms have had an impressive career in national and international
discourses about the viability of (global) society: participation and sustainability.
Since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992, participation and sustainability have become commonplace topics
in academic articles, journalistic commentaries and political discussions. In the wake
of the financial and economic crisis following 2008, there has been an increase – at
least rhetorically – in attention paid to the social, ecological and economic dimen-
sions of the problems facing society, as well as the importance of intra – and
intergenerational justice and the role of heterogeneous groups of actors in solving
these problems.

H. Heinrichs (*)
Institute for Environmental and Sustainability Communication, Leuphana
University Lueneburg, Lueneburg, Germany
e-mail: harald.heinrichs@uni.leuphana.de

J. Godemann and G. Michelsen (eds.), Sustainability Communication: Interdisciplinary 187
Perspectives and Theoretical Foundations, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-1697-1_16,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011