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1. The four spheres of sustainability
The systems approach to sustainability (as initiated by René Passet) highlights the interdependence of three ‘‘spheres’’ or classes of system: the economic, the social and the environmental. This is an asymmetric interdependence: economic production, exchange, transport and consumption activities are embedded within the social sphere (with its affective, symbolic and material dimensions); human community (including the ‘‘economic’’) is embedded as a component of biophysical processes within the biosphere.
The economic sphere, often the principal focus of development policy discourses and indicators, thus depends for its viability on the vitality of the social and environmental spheres. In economics jargon, environmental assets are now considered ‘‘natural capital’’ that is both limited and fragile.
A similar argument may be made for the social sphere, where cultural forms, symbolic bonds and community infrastructures are identified as ‘‘social capital’’ upon which economic performance completely depends.
To the extent that activity of ‘‘the economy’’ has ‘‘negative impacts’’ on social and environmental systems, it may be that the economic activity is undermining the conditions for long run sustainability. It follows that an essential component of governance for sustainability must be the regulation of the economic sphere in relation to the two other spheres, so as to ensure a respect for conditions of natural and social system integrity upon which long-run economic activity depends. However this is only one facet of the overall governance challenge. Achieving sustainability would mean a process of co-evolution respecting a ‘‘triple bottom line’’, that is, the simultaneous respect for (or satisfaction of) quality/performance goals pertaining to each of the three spheres.
Each sphere being interdependent (one way and another) with the others, a variety of claims will be made about the roles that are, or should be (or should not be) played by one sphere relative to the others. These ‘‘claims’’ (or exactions, or pressures, etc.) may be in conflict and incompatible, and these conflicts must somehow be resolved.
Speaking of choice, conflict resolution and governance implies agency, and so we are led to postulate a fourth category of organisation, the political sphere, which is constituted through the emergence within society of conventions, rules and institutional frameworks for the regulation of the economic and social spheres and, indirectly, the environmental sphere.
This leads to a systems model of ‘‘Four Spheres’’, here named the tetrahedral model of sustainability (see tables and diagrammatic presentation below).
