Title: Intellectual treatment of the normative notion 'sustainability'

Authors: A.M.M. Maruf Hossain

Addresses: Center for Integrated Knowledge Invention, Laverton, VIC, 3028, Australia

Abstract: While the prevailing conceptualisations on sustainability exhibit fragmentary, selective nature of the concepts, an appropriate intellectual treatment of sustainability would instead require an integrated, non-reductionist nature of enquiry that can produce understandings on the entirety of reality as the problems of sustainability exist only on the totality of reality. Despite the selective nature of the reductionist, fragmented nature of enquiries appears to be unproblematic for addressing particular fragments of reality, this approach becomes inadequate and normative - regardless of how analytical or operative it could be - when there is a need to study the entirety of reality. Drawing on the difference between a normative essence and a fundamental intellectual perspective on sustainability, this research establishes the necessity of discovering the knowledge avenue of the scholarship of sustainability instead of imaginatively describing a normative-speculation-based treatment of it. It, thus, creates the intellectual basis for the discovery of the scholarship of sustainability.

Keywords: sustainability; intellectual treatment of sustainability; the scholarship of sustainability; epistemology of sustainability; sustainable development; fundamental research.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISD.2021.111548

International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 2021 Vol.15 No.1, pp.35 - 49

Received: 08 May 2018
Accepted: 16 Mar 2019
Published online: 01 Dec 2020 *

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