Dialectics of Sustainability: Contrasting Mainstream Neoliberal and Critical Ecosocialist Perspectives on Sustainable Development

Abstract

The current geological period of Anthropocene is defined by qualitatively new manifestations of negative planetary human impact and environmental crisis. Finally, it is increasingly acknowledged as crucial to contain the self-destructive tendencies of capitalism to preserve conditions for life on earth. Yet, there seems little agreement as to how the necessary transition towards sustainability can be realized. This narrative review explores the respective social science literature. Reflecting the meta-theoretical distinction between sociology of regulation and radical change, dialectic analysis contrasts mainstream functional-normative neoliberal and critical structuralist-antagonistic ecosocialist perspectives. The later deconstruct conventional approaches, such as the United Nations Agenda 2030, as ideological projects of capitalist expansion and legitimization, rejecting claims of green growth, environmental decoupling, and market-solutions of corporate social responsibility. Instead, paradigms of critical sustainability advocate for degrowth and redistribution, de-carbonization, decommodification, and democratization, challenging the exploitative growth logic of capitalism itself. On the organizational level, structural pathologies of corporate social responsibility are contrasted with propositions of democratic socialization. Further, attention is called to sustainability discourses in organizational scholarship, demanding paradigm shifts from managerialist to critical ontologies, realist to relational epistemologies, discipline-focused to interdisciplinary, and from value-neutrality to scholarly activism. Analyzing the sustainability discourse from a critical-theoretical perspective presents opportunities to re-appropriate ecological ideas against degeneration into economistic ideology, counterproductive to the objective of saving the planet from profitable destruction. With seriousness and urgency of the situation providing momentum for social transformation, sustainable development goals and related mainstream concepts need to be reconceived for more radical social and ecological critique, transcending system-justifying neoliberal ideology.