Page 31 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

14 K. Ott et al.

compromise between the needs for nature conservation and aspirations for economic
growth. While a broad framing of the sustainability concept allows for a diversified
and wide-ranging participation of stakeholders in the implementation of sustain-
ability, this vagueness also leaves it open to being misused by power groups who
want to press their business-as-usual attitude into a new trendy setting, following
the maxim ‘If you can’t beat them, join them!’
A more precise definition of the concept of sustainable development is needed,
and one that offers a flexible and non-arbitrary orientation for action.
In the transdisciplinary field of sustainability discourse with its essentially
communicative structure, the philosophical perspective has a number of important
contributions to make. Crucial aspects of this contribution are:

• First, philosophy can play the role of a mediator or messenger by creating a
bridge between the different ‘voices’ participating in the process – it can be a
semantic bridge not only among different disciplinary languages, but also, and
more especially, between non-formalized knowledge, intuitions, everyday
assumptions as well as more formalized forms of knowledge (Muraca 2010).
Moreover, philosophy can render accessible and subject to critique implicit intu-
itions about inter- and intragenerational justice, about duties towards the non-
human world, about attributions of value emerging in different cultural and
societal settings (economic, cultural valuation, livelihood values, preferences,
spiritual and aesthetic valuations, etc.).
• Second, philosophy can play the role of the gate-keeper in discourse, by continu-
ously verifying which voices have a stake and a place, who is permitted to talk
and who is excluded from the communicative process. Moreover, philosophy has
a critical role to play by making transparent the implicit and unquestioned
assumptions behind arguments and demonstrating how powerful, mainstream
lines of thought lead to the silencing of alternative perspectives on the question
at issue (Muraca 2010).
• Furthermore, practical philosophy can act as a participant in discourse, rather
than playing an observational role with regard to the different meanings, defini-
tions and attributions of sustainability that are factually and often strategically
employed in communicative processes within society. In this function philoso-
phy introduces its own methodologies and theoretical frameworks into the com-
municative process.
This chapter focuses on this third role of practical philosophy, or more
precisely, on how practical philosophy can frame the theoretical setting of sustain-
ability discourse by developing a normative theory of sustainability, taking a clear
1
stance in the scientific debate between weak and strong sustainability. The theory

1 In the international discourse on sustainability there are only a few approaches that attempt a philo-
sophical and normative analysis from the point of view of inter- and intragenerational justice (see
among others, Dobson 2003; Norton 2005). A thorough presentation of these approaches, involving
a comparison with the theory of strong sustainability, would go beyond the scope of this chapter.