Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The term sustainability is flexible as it needs to embody many different contexts and issues. This flexibility at the same time is its weakness making it difficult to be assessed and to be misused. At the same time, the sustainability indicators, used for assessing sustainability, are heavily criticized for not being capable enough to include all societal values, hence increasing the existing inequalities. From this perspective, the flexibility of the term actually brings forward possibilities not only for its misusers but also for local people allowing them to create their own sustainability imaginaries. In other words, this flexibility enables people to judge the desirability of particular sustainable development strategies. We show this through a case study, the Martin Brod village, where, within a few years, the inhabitants changed their opinion about the sustainability of hydropower projects in parallel with their changing external socio-economic conditions and expectations. This, we show, was thanks to the flexibility of the term in order to make it more useful for themselves. We primarily applied qualitative research methods next to a household survey to collect demographic data. Our results suggest that we need to acknowledge that the term sustainability should not be fixed as it is embedded in social aspects of life. By being so, its flexibility enables the disempowered to empower as political actors. Therefore, we create awareness in sustainability science that the more we get strict in terms of definitions, the less chance for inhabitants as political actors we create.