Future challenges

The central question addressed by the papers in this special feature lies at the core of the emerging science of sustainability. What is the decision-science needed to address sustainability issues, and how does it differ from existing decision-science? The answer is not at all obvious. Many, if not the majority, of decision scientists still take the view that sustainability changes nothing but the label placed on long-standing research questions. After all, the field of resource economics has focused on the sustainable use of renewable resources since the mid-1950s (1) and on sustainable development based on the extraction of nonrenewable resources since the mid-1970s (2). The basic insights that support both foci were developed even earlier (3), while concern over the sustainability of mineral extraction has been a recurrent theme since Jevons's 19th-century speculations on the coal question (4). Others argue, however, that we are seeing the beginning of a major change in the way the science of human use and impacts on the environment is being done. The focus on panaceas provides Ostrom and colleagues with a hook to explore these arguments.

Of course no one is going to argue the case for panaceas in the original sense of the word. No matter how good Panacea's own medical genes,^† the application of a single cure for all diseases has long since been abandoned. The real issue is not so much that there are literal one-size-fits-all solutions being applied to the science of the environment as that the way sciences are structured encourages solutions that are insufficiently sensitive to the properties of the system or the problem being analyzed (5). There are three related points at issue, which I discuss below. The first concerns the link between sustainability science and existing disciplines. Although the development of discipline-based science has been …

E-mail: charles.perrings{at}asu.edu