Views of Sustainable Development : A Typology of Stakeholders' Conflicting Perspectives

Companies encounter environmental conflicts with stakeholders who hold differing views about what constitutes sustainable development. This is a particular problem for corporations whose operations span the developed and developing worlds. In this chapter, three socio-economic and political conditions, the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern, are associated with three different sets of societal values and views of the relationship between humans and the natural environment. The transitions between each pair are the processes of modernization, postmodernization, and neotribalization. The three societal values types and three processes correspond to six views of sustainable development that are associated with six categories of environmental groups. The categories of groups are defense-of-own-space locals, responsible commons harvesters, conservationists, green parties and ecological modernizationists, save-the-plant activists, and counter-culture deep ecologists. Companies can use this typology to anticipate, understand, and help resolve, dilemmas created by stakeholders advocating sharply divergent programs for sustainable development