ecological complexity 3 (2006) 285292

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The Four Spheres framework for sustainability

Martin OConnor a,b,*
a b

Universite de Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), France Centre dEconomie et dEthique pour lEnvironnement et le Developpement, C3EDUMR No. 063, UVSQ et IRD, 47 boulevard Vauban, 78047 Guyancourt Cedex, France

article info
Keywords: Complexity Deliberation Economy Environment Ethics Governance Multi-criteria evaluation Politics Social dimension Sustainability Triple bottom line

abstract
This paper presents in a synthetic way, a complex systems perspective on sustainability that highlights systems integrity and ethical integrity as complements. Sustainability is characterised as coevolution of economic, social and environmental systems respecting a dynamic triple bottom linethe simultaneous satisfaction of quality/performance goals pertaining to each of the three spheres. The theme of system regulation and governance leads to demarcation of a fourth fundamental category of organisation, the political sphere whose role is regulation of the economic and social spheres and thus of relations with (and within) the environmental sphere. Perspectives for the application of this Tetrahedral Model in sustainability science and policy analyses are outlined, relating to the four capitals and to the question of monetary evaluation of changes in social and environmental domains. The paper concludes by making a link between the triple bottom line, complexity and deliberation in sustainability politics. # 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V.

1.

Sustainability and the Four Spheres

The systems approach to sustainability (Passet, 1979) 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
* Tel.: +33 1 39 25 53 75; fax: +33 1 39 25 53 00. E-mail address: Martin.O-Connor@c3ed.uvsq.fr. 1476-945X/$ see front matter # 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.ecocom.2007.02.002

argument may be made for the social sphere, where cultural forms, symbolic bonds and community infrastructures are identied 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.

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This triple bottom line as a normative reference point proposed by and for a society, is a complex quality criterion. It afrms that economic activity, while having its specic imperatives (innovation, competitive search for prots, etc.) and a certain organizational autonomy, must be nonetheless in the service of the wider social sphere; it presumes that societys purposes or values include environmental sustainability; nally it presumes that the biophysical environment does hold the potentialities for some meaningful sort of longrun sustaining of economy and society. This means that prospects of and policy norms for sustainability cannot be dened for the three spheres separately. On the contrary, analyses of the challenges of governance for sustainability must propose a characterization not only of principles of performance and quality in each sphere, but also of the basis for regulating the interactions between 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 conict and incompatible, and these conicts must somehow be resolved. Speaking of choice, conict 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). Analyses for sustainability must focus attention on the interfaces, the interactions and the interdependencies between the economic, social and environmental spheres, on the characterization of principles of performance and quality in each sphere, and on the principles of rights, respect or responsibility proposed for one sphere in relation to another. The political sphere has the role of the referee that arbitrates in relation to the different and often incompatible claims made by the actors of the social and economic sphere for themselves and with regard to the other spheres (including the environmental sphere). If we consider interfaces between each pair of spheres (that is, two different types of organization), then with the four spheres there are six pairings. In Fig. 1, these are portrayed as the edges of the tetrahedron. We may also use a simple 4 4 matrix array to present the facets of analysis, as in Table 1, in which the diagonal cells evoke performance concepts and criteria that relate principally to a single organizational form, and the off diagonal cells signal performance concepts and criteria arising as interferences of two organizational forms. The interface aspects can be characterized through investigation of the claims or demands made by each sphere relative to the others. Systems analyses focus on the roles, services or behavior that is needed of, expected of, or sought by one sphere from each of the other spheres, in order to permit its good functioning. This requires not just biophysical and economic modeling but also analyses with explicit anthropological, symbolic and moral dimensions that highlight the reasons, meanings, principles and purposes

Fig. 1 Governance for sustainability: the Four Spheres.

attached to these demands or expectations. In particular, in explaining the functioning of the political sphere, it is necessary to investigate the justications emanating from the social and economic sphere for this or that principle of need, respect or responsibility for any one sphere in relation to another. In reality, of course, many issues involve cumulative causation with the interference of all four organizational forms. In a fundamental sense, it is meaningless to treat any sphere or interface in isolation from the others (e.g., the economic and political are inseparable from the social, and the economic cannot exist without the environmental, etc.). The restriction to a pair-wise classication of interfaces is didactic but articial. For analytical purposes, it is convenient to highlight as complementary: (1) descriptions centred on the internal functioning of each sphere having a degree of autonomy relative to the other spheres; (2) descriptions of interactions between two spheres. Through following a sequence of binary links, we can build up examples of causal pathways of inuence ramifying through the whole system. In Table 2, we present some of the distinctive features of the four spheres and their six interfaces. The rest of this short paper discusses, with reference to existing themes in the literature, some options and conventions for application of this Tetrahedral Model in sustainability science and policy analyses.

2.

Systems science and societal choices

Since the 1980s, scientic elds such as ecological economics and model-based integrated environmental assessment (IEA) have addressed the interdependencies between the economic and environmental spheres, characterised on the interface by, on the one hand, environmental pressures and, on the other hand, environmental functions/services. Governance on this interface seeks to ensure a double performance criterion: (1) economic welfare through production of economic goods and services as emphasised in traditional economics, and (2) the permanence of an ecological welfare base through assuring

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Table 1 The Four Spheres and their interfaces

maintenance of environmental functions. For integrated analyses of sustainability challenges, societal options can be framed in a comparative scenario context for the exploration of the ecological-economic space of opportunities for society into the future. This means to explore, within the limits of what might be feasible, a range of alternative evolutions that, on various societal grounds, might be judged as more or less desirable, or undesirable. The Tetrahedral Model (Fig. 1) may, in this regard, be construed as the articulation of two complementary axes that together, portray the problem of social choice.  The rst axis, feasibility, is the edge composed of the interdependent ecological and economic spheres. This is the realm of systems science and integrated economy-environment modelling.  The second axis, desirability, is the edge composed by the interference of the political and social spheres. This signies the governance problem of institutional arrangements for coordination of the actors in society with their disparate interests and preoccupations. The advantage of this framing is that it highlights the fundamental complementarity of, on the one hand, systems analyses with natural sciences foundations and, on the other hand, social sciences and humanities for the characterisation of what is good, just and acceptable (including for whom and why). As another illustration of the interference of societal with economic-environmental systems science considerations, we can consider the social demand for respect of the environment as it emergence in principles and practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since the 1970s, in the face of concerns expressed in the social sphere for justice and environmental quality in development, actors in the economic sphere have been subjected to new societal demands to demonstrate respect for the natural environment and for the integrity and viability of communities. In effect, governance concepts have been promulgated from the political sphere

under the heading of CSR that propose a triple bottom line in industrial and commercial practice. For example, in the words of the European Commission (EC, 2001): By expressing their Social Responsibility, companies are afrming their role in social and territorial cohesion, quality and environment. Through production, employment relations, and their investments, companies are able to inuence employment, the quality of jobs and the quality of industrial relations, including respecting fundamental rights, equal opportunities, non-discrimination, the quality of goods and services, health and the environment. This means, substantively, that companies (as actors in the economic sphere) are required to demonstrate that their operations are respectful of environmental and social concerns. It also means, procedurally, that companies are being required, individually and collectively, to develop new forms of dialogue with an enlarged spectrum of stakeholders as a basis for their reporting, strategy denition and decision-making. Actions for CSR address (as the term itself implies) the socialeconomic interface but also, indirectly, the economic environmental and the socialenvironmental interfaces. This happens through the intermediary of the political sphere; and this highlights that there is more often an indirect link between the political and environmental spheres than there is direct governance of the environment. The movement from the political sphere towards the environmental sphere would consist, in a formal sense, of the supply of public policy aiming to inuence the functioning of environmental systems. Environmental management actions may seek, for example, to regulate the conditions of access to natural capital as a factor of production of economic goods and services, to ensure the long-term maintenance (or enhancement) of environmental functions; or in any other way to promote a respect for environment. But, this supply of environmental governance is mediated by economic and societal actors. As regards the movement in the opposite

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Table 2 The tetrahedral model for sustainability studies Component

The three spheres Economic

Elements of characterization
The three spheres . . . Economic self-organisation, e.g., markets, performance imperatives such as efciency, growth (K. Marx: accumulate, accumulate, its the law and the prophets, etc.) governing production, transport and consumption activities Social self-organisation, notably forms of collective identity and the frameworks of meaning (symbols, culture, etc.) and of relationships (networks, memberships, etc.) through which people situate themselves in human communities and within the biophysical world Environmental self-organisation, e.g., the dynamic structures of physical and biological activity including atmosphere and ocean circulation, water and nutrient cycles, living organisms from the virus up to the scale of the biosphere . . . and the institutional arrangements for their governance . . . The governance dimension of organisation is constituted through the emergence of conventions and procedures for the regulation of each sphere in relation to the others, in order to assure the simultaneous respect for (or satisfaction of) quality/performance goals pertaining to all three spheres. This is the sphere of arbitrage amongst diverse principles and claims of interest, achieved de facto or by design through force and institutional arrangements ranging from town and county councils through national government structures to international agencies of the United Nations The three domains of governance/regulation Pol to Econ: supply of economic policy or governance of the economic domain Econ to Pol: demands (with accompanying arguments, reasons, principles) made on government by economic actors concerning the economy and with regard to the social and environmental spheres Pol to Env: supply of environmental policy. Environmental management for sustainability may seek: rst, the contribution of natural capital to economic welfare as a factor of production of economic goods and services; second, the permanence of the ecological welfare base through maintenance of environmental functions; and third, respect for environment [The Env-to-Pol linkage is presumed to be mute because non-human nature does not voice demands directly in any political forum.] Pol to Soci: supply of social policy which may seek, in various ways, to mobilise society for the needs of the economic and/or to promote and ensure respect for specied forms of community (etc.) Soci to Pol: demands (with accompanying arguments, reasons, principles) made on government concerning civil society, the community (etc.) and with regard to economic and environmental spheres Characterisation of the interfaces of the three spheres The economic sphere seeks the services of natural capital to economic welfare as a factor of production; this engenders environmental pressures and impacts on environmental functioning and (future) services, including (sometimes disruptive) feedback effects on economy and community The economic sphere seeks the services of human capital (and also of social capital) to economic welfare; this signies, on the one hand (sought-after) opportunities for wealth, revenues, goods and services but, on the other hand, exploitation and perturbation of existing community forms. For the Social sphere, the economic is a means and not an end, and the question is whether opportunities provided by the economic are nourishing or perturbing of the afrmed values and forms of community This is the domain of environmental values and the matrix of culture that determines the meanings of nature or the spectrum of environmental functions identied by/for a society, e.g., nature as a cosmology, roles as a source of well being or wealth, perceived quality of landscape. This is therefore the material-symbolic space of meanings that (among other things) permits members of society to articulate risks and to afrm values: sustainability of what, why and for whom (e.g., productive land uses, biodiversity conservation, reverence for nature; rights and duties of the current generation to consume natural capital relative to rights/duties of respect towards future generations . . .)

Social

Environmental

The fourth sphere Political

Policy domains Political , economic

Political ) environmental

Political , social

Systems interfaces Environmental , economic

Economic , social

Social , environmental

sense, from the environmental sphere towards the political sphere, non-human nature does not voice demands directly in political forums. Rather, societal demands on behalf of the environment are relayed through other interfaces, notably via the environmentalsocial then socialpolitical interfaces, or the environmentaleconomic then economicpolitical interfaces.

3.

The four capitals

Up to this point, the argument has been developed as if the distinction between economic, social and environmental spheres is plain and clear. It is not as simple as that. The

economic, social, political and environmental dimensions of human activity are inter-penetrating and the boundaries between them are fuzzy (in the sense of belonging in fuzzy set theory). Reasoning in terms of governance activity (the political sphere) addressing a triple bottom line (of sustainability for the social, environmental and economic spheres) requires us to specify conventions for making the distinctions between the economic and the social spheres, between the economic and environmental spheres, between the social and the political spheres, and so on. These questions have long histories in metaphysics, philosophy and the social sciences. Two specic strands of the question will be considered here, relating to the concept of capital in sustainability analysis and to the uses of

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monetary evaluation of changes in social and environmental domains. Economic analysis since the 1970s, responding to poverty and environmental concerns, proposed the framing of sustainability requirements in terms of the maintenance of four capitalsthe economic, natural, social and human capitals. Because this four capitals model has widespread currency as a sort of halfway house between economics and systems science, it is useful to determine how it can be related to the four spheres of our Tetrahedral Model. In effect, three of the capitals are, in the economists jargon, funds corresponding to the three spheresthe economic (built capital), the environmental (natural capital: land, water and the biosphere) and the social (social capital as communities and networks of meaning and shared identity). Human capital, by contrast, is not associated with any single organisational type. Rather it is a constituent within each of the four spheres, that is, a building block for each of the four organisational forms. It mediates between the economic, environmental and social spheres (see Fig. 2) and is also a constitutive element of the fourth (political) sphere: the individual as political actor (voter, citizen, stakeholder, etc.). The political sphere which has the role of referee that arbitrates on claims made by the actors of the social and economic sphere for themselves and with regard to the environment has no fund or class of capital specically associated with it. The terms strong sustainability and strong criterion of sustainability refer, since the 1980s, to the guideline of maintenance (non-negative change) in the stock of natural capital and, by generalisation, of the other funds (social and human capitals). A simple formulation of strong sustainability refers to natural capital in aggregate terms, separate from manufactured capital, and requires non-negative change in the natural capital stock through time. However, there is no meaningful way of aggregating the grand diversity of natural resources, environmental services and ecosystems (etc.) so as to quantify this rule. A more operational approach can be obtained through introducing the concept of critical natural capital referring to specic environmental resources or system capacities that perform important welfare support (or other) functions and for which no substitute in terms of manufactured, human and social capital exist. Strong sustainability is then framed in terms of the requirement for maintenance of these environmental capacities or functions, meaning maintenance of the integrity of the environment

(which, in this sense, is considered loosely as a fund or a capital stock in the economists sense, without however presuming being able to make an aggregate valuation of this stock). Policy applications will then proceed by specifying of environmental standards or thresholds below which the environmental function is not maintained, or there is a signicant risk of it being lost or impaired (etc.). Once targets are set, cost-effectiveness analyses can be elaborated by exploring the least-economic-cost way of achieving the dened norm. This gives an operational meaning to the notion of economic costs for respecting the integrity of the environment on the interface of the economic and environmental spheres (Faucheux and OConnor, 2001, 2003). Returning to our wider Four Spheres framework, a generalisation of the strong sustainability criterion to require maintenance of social capital can be proposed formally as a matter of analogy with this treatment of natural capital. And, as in the case of natural capital, it rapidly becomes clear that it is hardly meaningful to quantify an absolute value for the fund of social capital. Rather, what is important is to identify signicant changes in the capacities of communities and societies, and to explore the costs or constraints on economic activity associated with assuring their integrity through time. In this way, the framework is established for evaluating economic costs for respecting the integrity of social capital, on the interface of the economic and social spheres.

4. Values, evaluation and the frontiers of monetization

The language of costs recalls the ongoing debates, whose precursors go back more than a century, about the role and limits of monetary valuation techniques in such domains as human health, education and environmental quality and, more specically, for estimating the impacts of activities in the economic sphere on social and environmental systems. We may introduce the concept of a Monetization Frontier whose role is to signal thresholds or limits beyond which assessing trade-offs, choices or the consequences of choices on the basis of monetary measures alone is of questionable pertinence. These limits or thresholds may exist for two main reasons: either the estimation is scientically very difcult (due to uncertainties, complexities, non-linearities, etc.), or the implication of a trade-off is deemed morally inappropriate (Faucheux and OConnor, 2001). This concept of a Monetization Frontier (or, more exactly, a set of frontiers) functions as a demarcation line separating phenomena attributed to the economic sphere from phenomena attributed to, respectively, the environmental and social spheres. In the language of the four capitals, it allows the demarcation between distinct zones of wealth and communities of interest considered as non-substitutable and complementary:  In the case of natural capital we identify, on one side of the Monetization Frontier, resources and assets that are valued within the conventional logic of the economic sphere, that is, from the point of view of their potential conversion into commercially priced goods and services (trees into wood

Fig. 2 Human capital in the four capital model. The four capitals are the FUNDS of the three spheres plus human capital which is the go-between of the three.

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products, for example); and, on the other side, assets that are valued from the point of view of their permanent roles in the bio/natural sphere as in situ services as sites, scenery, scientic interest and ecological life-support in complement to economic sphere activity.  In the case of social capital we may consider, on one side, the potential of societal assets as factors of production for economic wealth creation; but, on the other side, we designate the contours of the social sphere by specifying the classes of community spanning (present humanity, future humanity and non-human communities) meriting to be sustained. The demarcations between economic and, respectively, natural and social capitals are thus directly correlated with the two main axes along which a frontier of monetization may be identied, as suggested in Fig. 3:  The rst relates to physical system complexity and, prima facie with reference to the environmental sphere, concerns matters of scale and aggregation. Physical and ecological systems have an autonomy and existence in large measure independent of human actions. Although vulnerable to modication under human inuence, they are partly exogenous and pre-existing. This has as one corollary, in particular where the physical and temporal scales of the systems under scrutiny are very large (e.g., climate and marine ecosystems, irreversible genetic and toxic chemical transformations), the scientic uncertainties about system dynamics, process interdependencies and (hence) what may come to pass in the longer term are inevitably high. The denition of relative opportunity costs, as required for monetary valuation estimates, becomes difcult and sometimes arbitrary.  The second relates to ethical appropriateness and, with primary reference to the social sphere, concerns the kinds of value involved. All technology choice, land use, infrastructure investment and territorial governance (etc.) decisions have ethical components. These are seen, in some cases, in questions of present-day fairness (as in northsouth redistribution) and in the equity issues relating to future generations (the opportunities afforded to them and to

the dangers and burdens we have imposed), and also in debates about the moral acceptability and social justications for intervening in the genetic integrity of organisms, destroying habitats of endangered species (and so on). Where cultural or ethical convictions are fundamental, and where the values of nature in question involve notions of respect (for self and for others), of justice and honour, cultural identity (and so on), then assessment problems take the form more of arbitration between different principles, forms of life, forms of community (etc.) to sustain or respect, than of a comparison of monetary values as in economic optimisation. This didactic concept of a Monetization Frontier allows us to approach questions of policy evaluation and of the social demand for sustainability expressed as principles of respect for economic, environmental and social/cultural values, in a rigorous way with a multiple criteria perspective integrating systems function and ethical commitment aspects. Private and public policy, investment and stewardship decisions respond to the various demands made by actors from the social and the economic spheres, towards the political sphere:  claims about what should be respected and sustained (in the economic, social and environmental spheres),  accompanied by propositions of reasons why these things should be respected and sustained. Proposals for environmental protection or the maintenance of critical natural capital will often be justied by systems-type arguments of the need for these environmental functions as a pre-condition for economic (and social) sustainability. But they will also, very often, be justied in terms of ethical or environmentalist attitudes that afrm a duty or desire for respect of the existence of the environmental features in question, and/or of the forms of community (human and otherwise) supported by these environments. In other words, the ethical appropriateness considerations (signalled along the horizontal axis of Fig. 3), which relate to moral and cultural determinants of the pertinence of monetary valuations, are as much pertinent for the environmental as for the social sphere.

Fig. 3 The Monetization Frontier.

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5. Conclusions: the passage from analysis to deliberation

Within a sustainability framework, any strategic assessment therefore needs to make reference to two sets of principles systems integrity and ethical integrity. The systems integrity concern can be translated, in general terms, as the principle of maintenance of the four capitals. A necessary complement is added by considerations along ethical planes, namely the application of a principle of respect for multiple classes of community. This social dimension of sustainability performance assessment is given operational denition through a sort of ethical appropriateness test, epitomised by expressions such as save the whales or you dont sell your own grandmotherdeclarations that point to something other than a purely economic/utilitarian motive for the respect of systems integrity, whether in the environmental or social domain. But principles of respect are not panaceas. On the contrary, there arise, in every sustainability policy domain, difcult questions of fairness in the distribution of opportunities, benets, costs and risks within each community of interest. This suggests a two-tiered framework for the articulation of performance goals or criteria with reference to diverse stakeholder communities.  The primary level of analysis would specify obligations of respect for the stakeholder classes or communities given standingin other words, identication of the classes of community meriting respect and of the forms or norms for expression of that respect. (Given the monopoly presence of the present generation, it is up to todays policymakers and citizens to afrm duties towards or, by proxy, the entitlements of future generations, endangered species and ecosystems, vulnerable peoples, etc.)  The second level of analysis would address fairness or unfairness in access to services, distribution of opportunities, vulnerability, stresses and risks (etc.) within each class. Questions of which principles, values or classes of community are to be sustained, or of what criterion of fairness or justice to apply, are often controversial and difcult to resolve. Social and environmental dimensions of evaluation analysis are always interlinked, because there are always asymmetries of need and of access to environmental benets (and of exposure to harms or risks) between different classes of stakeholders. Very often, a plurality of reasonable considerations can be put forward, which cannot all simultaneously be respected. This is the meaning of the question that might have been made this short papers title: Sustainability of what, for whom and why? In some situations, qualitative considerations such as non-violence and poverty alleviation can provide benchmarks for respect of specic classes of system or community, or sectors within any given community. Indicators may be selected that signal when a community (human or non-human) is in danger, and directions to move away from danger (viz., reduce the communitys vulnerability). But, very often, there is not a societal consensus on the distribution of sustainability.

In such conditions of controversy, more information (in the systems science and even social science modes) does not necessarily lead closer to resolution of what should be done?. On the contrary, sustainability policy must often address situations characterised by complexity, which, for our purposes, can be evoked through three considerations that reinforce and interfere with each other:  Scientic knowledge advising of irreducible uncertainties and/or irreversibilities associated with courses of action.  Plurality of value systems, political and moral convictions, and justication criteria within society.  High decision stakes including economic interests and strategic security concerns for nations or ethnic minorities (etc.), and also consequences of environmental change for public health, organism integrity and future economic possibilities. These features characteristic of what Funtowicz and Ravetz (1990, 1994) call post-normal situations, or what Rittel (1982) and others have termed wicked problems, of what OConnor (2002) refers to as impossible social choice dilemmas make it difcult to formulate and justify simple rules of action. Apparently simple desiderata such as maximum net benet (with monetary cost-benet analysis) or avoid risks (with the precautionary principle) fall down because, either they do not adequately address the decision issues (viz., they do not furnish a clear counsel about what to do), or the way that they do this does not have plausibility or acceptability to key stakeholders. There is no clear bridge between knowledge and right action. This does not mean that a reasoned use of a scientic knowledge base for policy is impossible. What it means is that, if reasoned basis for action is to be established for postnormal, wicked or impossible problems, then knowledge and reasoning must be employed in a deliberative way. In the Four Spheres model, a deliberative political process is very fundamentally necessary as the process of exploring and building a future together. Sustainability politics are about mobilising resources in perspectives of respect and reconciliation across several axes and over the long term (OConnor, 1995; Martinez-Alier et al., 1999). In addressing the multiple bottom lines, the challenge is to work with a permanent argumentation between the several contradictory positions. In the words of Rittel (1982), an analyst needs to be like a midwife of problems, helping to raise into visibility, questions and issues towards which you can assume different positions, and with the evidence gathered and arguments built for and against these different positions. Collective action is like the decision to build a boat in order, as Rittel puts it, to embark on the risk together. By accepting the dilemmas of evaluating performance against multiple bottom lines of systems integrity and ethical engagement, explored across economic, social and environmental spheres that are coevolving through time, we admit the complexities both scientic and moral of sustainability questions, at the same time as dening clear roles for science, human science, economics, and political process.

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