Five Approaches to Social Sustainability and an Integrated Way Forward

Sustainable development is often viewed through the Three Pillar Model as a balancing act between economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Exactly how the balancing act is performed varies greatly between applications in both academia and industry. Unfortunately, the social pillar is frequently neglected in favor of the other two pillars, which leads to less impactful and suboptimal sustainable development. The authors argue that the neglect of the social pillar stems from the fact that social priorities are inherently vague and context-dependent, making social sustainability difficult to understand and therefore difficult to apply. To increase the understanding of social sustainability, the authors propose a typology of five different ways in which social sustainability is applied in academia and industry. The typology is derived through a literature review and illustrated through case studies.

In their typology, consisting of five approaches, social sustainability takes on a progressively more active and practical role until it is fully integrated with economic and environmental sustainability in the fifth approach. The differences between the approaches lie in how social sustainability is framed in relation to economic and environmental sustainability. In the first approach, each pillar embodies an independent value, with development often focused solely on the economic pillar. Sustainable development then prioritizes economic growth at the expense of environmental and social decline. The second, third, and fourth approaches frame social sustainability as a constraint on, a precondition of, and a stimulant for economic and environmental change, respectively. In the second approach, only the social impacts of economic and environmental efforts are considered, i.e. social sustainability is defined purely in terms of economic and environmental priorities. As a result, development tends to only tackle small social sustainability problems that improve public image without any actual impact. In the third approach, social sustainability becomes a “social capital” that supports economic health or even compensates for a lack of it, and similarly social aspects are regarded as critical to upholding environmental sustainability. This view incentivizes investment into social capital. In the fourth approach, economic and environmental problems are viewed as inherently social issues, and solutions for those therefore require successful social change.

While sustainability approaches two, three, and four are more integrated than the first, they still treat sustainability as a set of separate dimensions, which reduces sustainability issues into economic, environmental, or social concerns. In reality, sustainable development involves complex, multi-faceted issues that cannot be easily categorized into one pillar. Different communities or even individuals may experience the same issue as economic, environmental, or social depending on the context. As a result, these issues are best solved with the fully integrated fifth approach, which challenges the idea of a one-size-fits-all perspective and attempts to forego judgments on the relative worth of the traditional pillars. For sustainable development to be more effective, practitioners should adopt a more holistic view of sustainability. To achieve this, more diverse and local stakeholders should be included in the decision-making process and particular attention should be paid to local experiences.