Sustainable development policy: "Competitiveness" in all but name

Abstract

Current approaches analysing EU sustainable Development highlight a number of salient points regarding the relationship between SD and the EU, but they also have serious limitations. In order to provide a richer view that highlights uncertainties and contingency, part one of this chapter revisits the institutionalization of EU policy in this area. It argues that if the 1990s were indeed marked by significant changes, the supposed rigidity of ‘the bureaucratic model’ of regulation, as well as its current obsolescence, must be questioned in the light of this policy’s actual implementation. Similarly, the supposed victory of an unambiguous economic doctrine promoted around SD will also be questioned. The second part of this chapter pursues these claims by examining the implementation of European SD policy within two very different industries, automobiles and aquaculture. Here we argue that this EU policy contains no precise definition of Sustainable Development as a set of values. Instead, it is a repertoire of instruments and ideas which has allowed actors within industries to co-construct its meaning in relatively ad hoc ways. Notwithstanding the diversity of problematizations and instrumentations of Sustainable Development to which this has given rise, we claim it has nevertheless, and increasingly, been subordinated to the norm of competitiveness as enshrined in ‘the Lisbon Strategy’ of 2000. Further, through its recurrent procedures, Sustainable Development has opened up spaces for discussion on the definition of concrete standards which, we claim, has enabled certain NGOs and industrialists to undertake intense political work to set the meaning of Sustainable Development on their terms. The important role of expertise and the production of technical data in its depoliticized spaces has favoured such coalitions, as well as consolidation of the competitiveness paradigm