Abstract: The field of sustainability is facing challenges of conceptual openness, functional complexity, and operational ambiguity. A lack of consensus on these fronts is dividing intellect and resource bases, and it is failing to counter the sustainability challenges we face today and tomorrow. Sustainability management can be approached through normative, functional, and operational perspectives. Sustainability, being an integrated subject, will always bring in multidisciplinary aspects to address development challenges. On the other hand, the management perspective demands more operational discussion that may not be understood without its theoretical and conceptual base in a context. Similarly, in its normative terms, sustainability advocates ethical concerns based on the principle of fairness and justice towards nature, society, and future generations. However, the heterogeneity of the concept makes the normative objective of sustainability difficult to operationalize. Further to the normative heterogeneity, amalgamated remedial measures need to engage diverse stakeholders, perspectives, technology advancement, governance, and scale that render sustainable development even more complex and harder to operationalize. African countries’ prevailing socioeconomic structure is important to study for its sustainability management’s functional and normative approaches. Taking on a philosophical approach, we have discussed the prevailing theoretical and practical concepts in sustainability from a normative, functional, and contextual approach.
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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