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Sustainability, Sustainability Assessment, and the Place of Fiscal Sustainability

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Abstract

Although the societal discourse on sustainable development has become more and more prominent and agenda setting, the scholarly work on it is still highly diverse. This is why the chapter steps back first to position the topic within the broader scientific discourse on sustainable development. An outline of the most influential sustainability conceptions is given to get options for discussing fiscal sustainability. As “sustainable” is understood as an evaluative term for development, the chapter takes account of methodological foundations for sustainability assessment as a second step. The chapter finally argues that fiscal sustainability should be treated as a part of the broader sustainability discourse as it is about “ensuring the state’s action and reaction potential”. However, it deals with an instrumental, not an intrinsic, good.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is not within the scope of this chapter to distinguish between sustainable development and sustainability.

  2. 2.

    In an enquiry on existing research on SD at universities and other research institutions in the tri-national Upper Rhine Region (Burger et al. 2014), we distinguished 18 different topic fields ranging from energy to water issues to household consumption to governance and transition. We also included the field of fiscal sustainability.

  3. 3.

    The famous woodcutter rule of not harvesting more wood from a forest than will grow again was first written down by Hans Carl von Carlowitz in 1713 (von Carlowitz 2012). Its roots go back to the mediaeval period as Ulrich Grober (2010) reveals. However, it is standard in today’s scientific reasoning on SD that the woodcutter rule is much too simple to serve as a foundation for conceptualising SD.

  4. 4.

    The WCED’s definition of sustainable development uses the term “needs” (satisfaction of needs) to address quality of life. For reasons beyond the scope of this chapter, “needs” will not be considered; instead, the chapter will refer in general to a good or decent life, leaving aside the question of an appropriate metric for wellbeing.

  5. 5.

    Among other things, this includes environmental risks.

  6. 6.

    Neither scarcity of resources nor intergenerational issues are really new topics, cf. for example Solow (1974). However, I follow Pearce and Atkinson (1998) and many others in saying that SD along the lines of the WCED report brings in new aspects.

  7. 7.

    The famous controversy about weak and strong sustainability, that is, about substitution of especially natural resources (capital) by economic or social capital often builds on such a capital stock approach.

  8. 8.

    One could add the famous three-pillar approach to this list. However, I do not look upon it as a theoretical approach to SD but rather as a pragmatic management rule: consider at least societal, environmental, and economic issues when dealing with the consequences of our decisions.

  9. 9.

    Cf. the nice metaphor in Pearce et al. (1991, p. 3): SD could be looked upon as something you simply have to like just like motherhood or apple pie.

  10. 10.

    Meyer deals with intergenerational justice in general, not specifically SD.

  11. 11.

    There are further distinguishing elements such as how to conceptualise future generations (e.g. Partridge 2001) or how to cope with the related non-identity problem (Parfit 1984). Discussing these would, however, go beyond the scope of this chapter.

  12. 12.

    Instead of using the unclearly defined notion of a “failed state”, Call 2011 discusses three fundamental functions a state has to fulfil: providing its population with basic goods; infrastructure security; and a legitimacy of political elites.

  13. 13.

    Additionally, there is a vast body of literature on ecosystem services and on environmental management.

  14. 14.

    To give an example: if you include an indicator such as “number of deaths per KWh produced”, nuclear power will be rated top since there are few (direct) casualties (e.g. Chernobyl). If you take an indicator such as “number of persons evacuated per KWh produced”, the rating will be inverted, given the numbers from Chernobyl and Fukushima.

  15. 15.

    Further elaborating this argument would be the topic of another chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Paul Burger

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  1. Paul Burger
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy

    Debora Valentina Malito

  2. Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy

    Gaby Umbach

  3. Law Department, European University Institute, Firenze, Italy

    Nehal Bhuta

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Burger, P. (2018). Sustainability, Sustainability Assessment, and the Place of Fiscal Sustainability. In: Malito, D., Umbach, G., Bhuta, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62707-6_6

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