Project Team:
Claudia Empacher (till end of 2003)
Doris Hayn
Diana Hummel
Alexandra Lux
Immanuel Stieß
Funding:
self
Duration:
since January 2001
Field of research
about the Institute
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Sustainability, as it is normally understood, is marked by three
dimensions: the ecological, the economic and the social. For many years
now sustainability’s social dimension has been ignored. Recently, however,
social sustainability has achieved undreamed of popularity as a due to,
above all, a more new understanding of the social in terms of the social
tolerability of ecological measures .
The social dimension has suddenly received a good deal of attention from
both policy makers and researchers; even companies now take social
indicators into account in their ecology reports. Despite this growing
interest, however, it is still the case that a theoretical foundation for
social sustainability is lacking. The points of access to the social
dimension that have been looked at so far have often been of a subject and
heuristic nature, and they have been generalizable only to a very limited
degree. These points of access, moreover, are strongly oriented toward the
normative element of the sustainability model; analytically oriented or
theory driven concepts are still rare.
ISOE has made a name for itself within social sciences dealing with
environmental research precisely because of its approach to
social-ecological problem complexes; as a result, ISOE is in high demand
when specialists for the social dimension of sustainability are needed.
Several years ago ISOE had already produced, under contract from the
Institute for Technology Assessment and System Analysis, a theoretical
paper on the operationalizing of the social dimension of sustainability in
which the key elements, models and indicators of social sustainability
were made more precise.
The recently established task force will pick up where the existing
scientific discussion on social sustainability leaves off. The Task Force
on Social Sustainability’s aim is to further this discussion by using it
to develop its own basic approach further. The task force was set up at
the beginning of 2001, at first as an internal discussion forum with the
aim of examining theoretical approaches to social sustainability.
The inclusion of the social dimension within various concepts of
sustainability was a priority in this regard. An intensive analysis and
critique of social capital approaches, systems theoretic functionalism and
theories of justice, and an evaluation of the fruitfulness of all these
approaches for a theoretically sound concept of social sustainability was
also a central part of the task force’s work.
A collection of papers reflecting the state of the task force’s discussion
will be published this year as part of ISOE’s series of discussion papers.
Empacher, C / P. Wehling, Indicators of Social Sustainability; Foundations
and Refinements. ISOE-DP 13, Frankfurt am Main (1999)
Empacher, C./P. Wehling,
Social Dimensions of Sustainability: Theoretical
Foundations and Indicators. ISOE Study Text 11. Frankfurt am Main (2002)
available in german |