Description: Sustainable development, Arrow’s theorem and a sustainable preference order

This title appears in the Scientific Report : 2015

Sustainable development, Arrow’s theorem and a sustainable preference order – Sustainable Development Pentagon

Since the 1970s, science and society have been discussing the worldwide ecological, economic, and social problems caused by industrialization and globalization. Sustainable development is perceived as a strategy for coping with these problems.With its sustainability strategy, Germany established a n...

Personal Name(s):	Schlör, Holger (Corresponding author)
	Hake, Jürgen-Fr.
Contributing Institute:	Systemforschung und Technologische Entwicklung; IEK-STE
Imprint:	2015
Conference:	10th Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment System, Dubrovnik (Kroatien), 2015-09-27 - 2015-10-02
Document Type:	Conference Presentation
Research Program:	Assessment of Energy Systems – Addressing Issues of Energy Efficiency and Energy Security
	Publikationsportal JuSER

Since the 1970s, science and society have been discussing the worldwide ecological, economic, and social problems caused by industrialization and globalization. Sustainable development is perceived as a strategy for coping with these problems.With its sustainability strategy, Germany established a normatively defined sustainability order which can be interpreted as an ordinal sustainable preference order for Germany. This preference order arises from the implicit weighting of the indicators in the strategy. This implicit weighting of the indicators then forms the ordinal ranking in the preference order of the government.We will show in our paper that this ordinal sustainable preference order represented by the sustainability strategy cannot be consistent – i.e., free of contradiction - because of Arrow’s impossibility theorem [4]. Hence, to obtain information on the current status of sustainable development, sustainability measurement is necessary. Sustainability measurement therefore means comparing the preference order of the government (normative order) with the derived sustainable preference order of the members of society. In other words, we measure the difference between two sustainable preference orders.