Paper short abstract:

Sustainability is a concept deeply entrenched in narrative. The presentation discusses sustainability as narrative from a theoretical perspective, with a focus on articulations, temporalities, potential spaces, shifts and narrative projects.

Paper long abstract:

Sustainability is now firmly established as one of today's most productive and important concepts, a hub and engine for utopias as well as dystopias, in society at large as well as in Academia. Like 'progress' and 'modernity', 'sustainability' and 'sustainable development' are figures of thought that already in themselves beg to be translated into stories, with a beginning, complication, resolution and end, and to that a clear moral point: sustainability is good, therefore sustainability will prevail.

Just like a number of other “grand” concepts, such as peace, democracy, cultural heritage, development and progress, sustainability has become a ‘floating signifier’ (Laclau 1990: 28), filled with many and often conflicting meanings. But at the same time, it is also in many ways a unique and different concept, not least because its moral charge is based on insights about the biosphere as a fixed and non-negotiable external boundary for human living space on earth (Rockström et al 2009, Steffen et al 2015).

In recent years interest in sustainability and narrative has been particularly fueled by a growing "information deficit" (Veland et al. 2018), an increasingly dramatic gap between research and action. Narrative is assigned a crucial role in bridging this gap between science and everyday life.