The Future We Want To Want : Temporal Equity Within Sustainable Development Discourse

Abstract: This study explores the contradiction between the ways the institutional field of sustainable development has for decades been defined conceptually by a temporal sense of equity, or the aim of meeting the needs of both present and future generations, and the glaring lack of definition for the concept. Through discursive analysis, this study finds sustainable development discourse to precariously conceptualize equity according to multiple, incompatible institutional logics, and to conceptualize time in highly ambiguous ways. Further, the ambiguity of time appears to have corrosive effects on the meaningfulness of equity as a concept, and to provide a mechanism by which institutional actors within the field of sustainable development can evade accountability. These dynamics suggest power and preferential outcomes will be retained by the people of the present, and inherently harm generations to come. In this way, this study questions whether sustainable development defined according to temporal equity is truly “the future we want,” or rather just the future we want to want, but are unwilling to bring about.