Economic Sustainability

Economic sustainability refers to the capacity of an economy to generate prosperity, employment, and wellbeing over the long term without depleting the natural, social, and human resources on which it depends. It is one of the three pillars of sustainable development, alongside environmental and social sustainability, a framework popularized by the Brundtland Report and by John Elkington’s triple bottom line. Herman Daly’s steady-state economics argued that the economy is a subsystem of a finite biosphere and cannot grow indefinitely, while Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen applied the laws of thermodynamics to economic processes. Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics proposes a safe and just space between social foundations and planetary boundaries, and Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth questioned dependence on expansion. Allan Schnaiberg’s treadmill of production explained why capitalist economies tend to intensify resource use, and John Bellamy Foster analyzed the metabolic rift between society and nature. Elinor Ostrom showed that communities can manage shared resources sustainably, and Amartya Sen emphasized fairness across generations and capabilities. Critics argue that sustainable development can be a vague slogan that legitimizes continued growth, as in debates over green growth and degrowth. Economic sustainability remains central to research on development, environment, inequality, and policy.