“Sustainability”: A Discourse of Winners and Losers

Written by: Adam Assimakopoulos

Edited by: Sunny Bell

What is sustainability? The conversation about climate change and environmental destruction has recently been coloured by a contest for who can map “sustainability” most effectively. It is one of those words informed by a shared understanding about its connotations: green energy, plants, decarbonization, etc. As is the case with many social and political issues, scholars aim to define, categorize, and mobilize on key environmental definitions. After all, if we do not know what sustainability is, how can it be implemented?

This article interrogates why key words that charge environmental discourse (and ultimately, policy) lack substance or meaning. More importantly, I argue that these “empty signifiers” nourish hegemonic power structures, to the advantage of the very systems responsible for climate change and environmental degradation in the first place. Empty signifiers also contribute to recent underwhelming, stagnant, and apolitical celebrations of “sustainable development.” To be sure, this article does not aim to downplay or undermine the persistent initiatives of environment-forward people and organizations. Rather, it advocates for more transparent, activating, and accountable language within environmental projects.

Power is central across languages. Words, as linguistic “building blocks,” comprise tidy and examinable units of agency and influence. Accordingly, their power provokes accountability. Brown (2016), using a framework coined by psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, unpacks sustainability’s three dimensions. First, sustainability has an imaginary component: it allows us to imagine the future through a so-called “sustainable lens.” Second, the word possesses symbolic faculty: it allows us to gesture toward a more sustainable system. Finally, sustainability has real consequences: “its discursive dependence on the exclusion of the future” (Brown, 2026, p. 130). Brown’s analysis provides ample insight on how the word is dispatched within modern discourse. However, he fails to situate the term amid a broader relationship between agency and accountability. Indeed, when words lack a coherent or explicit meaning (so-called empty signifiers), ambiguity tends to favour existing powerful groups. Indeed, the privileges afforded to private corporations, white people, men, and able-bodied individuals allow them to be stewards of meaning for contestable terms. Put simply, empty signifiers are both a cause and effect of hegemonic norms. Their meaning is created, then deployed. Consequently, empty language absolves users of accountability.

Continually, sustainability tends to eclipse more substantive and stimulating terms: “social justice,” and “public good,” among others (Brown, 2016, p. 116). Empty signifiers are a handy tool for private corporations, who both possess the power to give meaning to words as well as detach themselves from potentially controversial or political discourse. If sustainability is contestable for what it means, social justice and public goods are contestable for what they are. This, per Brown, is the empty signifier’s purpose: “in simply being named, it retroactively groups together diverse and ambiguous instances of concern” (Brown, 2016, p. 116).

Per Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci, ideology operates most effectively when it presents itself as self-evident, taken for granted, or common sense (Tulloch & Neilson, 2014, p. 28). Sustainability insists upon itself. It couches corporate interests in ideas such as universality and shared benefit. Though, tactfully, sustainability tends to evade any vernacular in the camp of “public.” The term in its most notable form emerged following decades of criticism toward private entities’ effect on the natural environment; or, what Tulloch & Neilson call “the declining quality of the material lifeworld” (Tulloch & Neilson, 2014, p. 35). To be sure, the aim of sustainability – and its insidious twin, “sustainable development” – was to neutralize these critiques by reimagining the tension between economy and ecology as part of a mutually enhancing relationship (Tulloch & Neilson, 2014, p. 35). This so-called “mutual interdependence” neutralizes the oppressive forces that the economic realm wields over the ecological. It also holds the two realms on equal footing – as if both are inherently natural. Moreover, this notion of mutual interdependence advances the idea that capitalism and the environment are mutually constraining, and in perfect equilibrium. This argument, in itself, is deeply reflective of neoliberal thinking. Neoliberal scholars continue to perpetuate the idea that markets and capitalism are functions of perfect harmony: the marketplace will operate like a self-regulating organism if left untouched by government regulation.

Of course, the case is often made that sustainability is harmless because it is largely aspirational, a north star for government and business principles: If we imagine the world we wish to live in, our actions in the present should be defined by our ideal future. I put forward two criticisms to this end. First, Brown (2016) shows how sustainability discourse has shifted its environmental focus toward more general aspirations for social change (Brown, 2016, p. 122). In doing so, sustainability seeks to bridge the present with the future, the real with the abstract, and need with desire. Of course, conceptualizing an ideal future is a reasonable and often necessary exercise for bettering the lives of people and for the natural environment. Many feats of social justice began as ambitions for a safer, more equitable, and more inclusive future. However, sustainability acts less like an ideal, and more like a constraint (Marcuse, 1998, p. 104). Indeed, sustainability is not pursued in its own right, but rather acts as a coefficient for environmentally-harmful projects. Second, Marcuse (1998) highlights that sustainability’s aim to be universal ignores a relevant caveat: for most of the world’s poorest people, the problem is not that their conditions cannot be sustained, but that they should not be sustained (Marcuse, 1998, p. 106).

Evidently, advocates for the environment ought not to propagate sweeping, essentialized claims about the ubiquitous benefits of sustainability. Brown (2016) contributes a vital insight about sustainability’s aspiration to save the world from environmental calamity. Citing political scientist Erik Swyngedouw, Brown writes, a “focus on apocalyptic futures reinforces post-politics by articulating a world in which everyone is equally a victim, in which there is no clear opponent and in which everyone must accept the authority of technocratic regulators or else risk imminent disaster” (Brown, 2016, p. 125). On a micro-level, technology companies have an imperative to insist upon their solutions and, ultimately, their existence. On a macro-level, the economy at large only functions if people believe they need what it has to offer. Thus, citizens should take caution before relinquishing control of the planet to private actors, and away from publicly accountable governments.

The contrast between private and public ownership over words, practices, and futures has been discussed at length. Critical to understanding the dynamic nature of this tension is a deeper exploration of how sustainability has permeated understandings of public governance. In the United States and European Union, local government was devised to encourage political autonomy and better governance over public services. However, these “laboratories of democracy” are ill-equipped to address the global problem that is decarbonization (Fremstad & Paul, 2022, p. 4). This has left many people disillusioned with public governance entirely, instead of critical toward a system at large that sets local government up for failure.

Overall, the politeness embedded in sustainability discourse has sanitized the term from all cultural and social meaning. As this article has demonstrated, empty signifiers release words of their accountability and turn over the authority of language to society’s most powerful.

References

Brown, T. (2016). Sustainability as empty signifier: Its rise, fall, and radical potential. Antipode, 48, 115–133. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti/12164.

Fremstad, A., & Paul, M. (2022). Neoliberalism and climate change: How the free-market myth has prevented climate action. Ecological Economics, 197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107353

Marcuse, P. (1998). Sustainability is not enough. Environment & Urbanization, 10(2), 103-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/095624789801000201 (Original work published 1998)

Tulloch, L., & Neilson, D. (2014). The Neoliberalisation of sustainability. Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, 13(1), 26-38. https://doi.org/10.2304/csee.2014.13.1.26 (Original work published 2014)