Development as Meaning: A Religious Perspective on Sustainable Development Aspirations

In 2015, the United Nations adopted the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030, while asserting that it is “we the peoples” who are to realize them. Nine years later, the world is marked by persisting sustainability challenges and increasing global inequality. This is not due to a lack of awareness of such concerns, nor is it due to a shortage of suggested solutions. Thus the question arises as to what it might take to ensure the actions that are required from all of us, individuals and institutions alike; how we can be motivated and inspired to be the change in global aspirations for a more just, equal and sustainable world. Development as Meaning: A Religious Perspective on Sustainable Development Aspirations explores the potential of a religious perspective, as a source of motivation and inspiration, to broaden our moral concerns while also encouraging us to act on them since such actions are integrated with purpose. To this end, it does not strive to relate features of religion to a sustainable development framework, so as to assess the usefulness of religions to the SDGs, but rather to approach the sustainability quest as in itself religious. It explores how conceptualizations of sustainable development aspirations might alter with a religious perspective applied onto them; the challenges associated with such a perspective and its application; and requirements for its facilitation. It asserts that our proper understanding of the religion-sustainable development nexus, and our full appreciation of a religious potential to enhance sustainability aspirations, presumes our recognition of religion as a potential framework for our understanding of the world. Elaborating on this, it highlights assertions that systemic change presumes our proper understanding of systems, which, in turn, presumes our approaching them from a position beyond them. It also highlights arguments that our value frameworks must be subject to continuous critical scrutiny, so as to prevent them from leading us astray. A religious perspective may enable both. But this will presume our openness to the reality that religion strives to direct us toward, and our preparedness to refer to religion not only as a scientifically approachable phenomenon but also as a potential framework for our knowing. The dissertation consequently links solutions to our sustainability concerns with our attention to religion in a rethinking of the epistemological premises upon which sustainability agendas are founded.