Dr Tadhg O'Mahony

In the debate on economic growth, including the classic Simon–Ehrlich wager, some have argued that science and technology will enable sustained growth of consumption without harmful growth in the use of natural resources by doing more with less. Others propose that this is not possible, emphasising absolute limits in the carrying capacity of the Earth, concluding that there are limits to either population growth or to material consumption in the rich world, with a necessity to reduce demand and by rapidly scaling up system change alongside technological innovation.

By applying the SuWi analysis, this article can be described as providing a general theory for the place of economic growth in sustainable development, as it can be applied to all possible environmental and social outcomes, all possible paths of economic growth, and all possible combinations of environmental and social productivity of GDP.

The article offers answers to a key theoretical question in contemporary economics, can economic growth or degrowth be sustainable? Using the Sustainability Window or ‘SuWi’ approach developed chiefly by Prof. Jyrki Luukkanen at the Finland Futures Research Centre, this theoretical study explore all possible future scenarios of economic growth and economic degrowth. This enables the determination of the theoretical sustainable window of economies, as upper and lower bounds of change in GDP, that could be deemed in line with environmental and social sustainability. Of the 24 logically possible development paths, only four of them could be considered sustainable under sustainability criteria. Two of these involve cases of economic growth and two of economic degrowth.

The sustainability of outcomes depends on the emergence of specific paths in terms of absolute change in GDP and in environmental and social productivity. Once the environmental and social criteria are set, the development path must emerge according to clearly defined quantitative trends, establishing the strict conditions within which economic development must emerge if either economic growth or degrowth are to be considered sustainable. The article defines and illuminates the considerable policy challenge now faced globally, in that for pollutants such as GHG the popular policy prescription of continued economic growth is likely to lead to catastrophic outcomes, while degrowth is attractive from an environmental perspective but creates social challenges.

The SuWi offers a means to resolve these challenges and can be applied to a variety of environmental and social priorities. The specifics of whether an outcome could be deemed “sustainable” are dependent on the specific environmental and social themes and the relevant criteria applied to define sustainability. The SuWi approach can be used in strategic forward planning to inform about real development options globally, nationally or regionally and could assist in holistic analysis and policy development for achieving the UN SDGs and sustainable development in general. The article published in Sustainability is available Open Access.

Luukkanen, Jyrki, Jarmo Vehmas, Jari Kaivo-oja, and Tadhg O’Mahony. 2024. “Towards a General Theory of Sustainable Development: Using a Sustainability Window Approach to Explore All Possible Scenario Paths of Economic Growth and Degrowth” Sustainability 16, no. 13: 5326. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16135326