Sustainable and Sustainable Development form a socio-economic Perspective

The outcome of the Erasmus+ project Responsible Research and Innovation Learning are learning modules to anchor the concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). This required to develop a coherent concept of what sustainability and sustainable development is and which is the linkage to RRI. This discussion paper is not a result of an empirical research, but a revision of selected works consulted as policy documents, technical reports, articles and books on sustainability, sustainable development, social sustainability, economic sustainability and environmental and ecological economics. The purpose of this paper was not to provide new evidences, but to clarify basic concepts for the development of a learning programme. Despite the critics, we advocate for the three-pillar model of sustainable development. We take for grounded the validity of ecological sustainability as the main goal to mitigate the Anthropocene Crisis. We focus on the pillars of social and economic sustainability, underpinning that the social pillar, despite the recent efforts, is the less developed. In the area of economic sustainability, there is an important debate which concerns not only sustainability but also basic assumption of conventional economic approaches. In the background stands the question if the focus lies on economy as an integrated part of the system earth or as a system by its own. In the first case, the question is how economic activities contribute to maintain the earth as an ecosystem in which humanity can live. In the second case, the question is how to maintain economy as a value generation system considering the scarcity of natural resources in the frame of sustainable development. In both fields, social and economic sustainability, we observe a distinction between weak and strong sustainability, as two extremes of the societal implications of sustainability policies. The weak social sustainability approach support strategies without substantial change in society as a social system and the lowest political intervention as possible. The strong social sustainability approach assumed that ‘real’ sustainability strategies to contribute to solve the Anthropocene crisis will imply a fundamental transformation of society. Our starting point was that sustainability must be the reference point of RRI due to the Anthropocene crisis. In the conclusion, we argue that RRI should be an integrated part of sustainability as goals reinforcing the social pillar, but also as means to promote a high participation of society in the transformation to a sustainable world, to achieve a high degree of fairness of the transformation and to provide a sustainable ethical framework for science-based social and technological innovations.