Building Capacity to Promote Equity within and among Generations: Lessons from scholarship and practice

The foundational vision of sustainable development as fair or equitable advancement of human well-being within and across generations was first articulated by the Brundtland Commission in 1987 and reaffirmed by subsequent local, national and international deliberations (United Nations 2015; WCED 1987). These commitments to equity have been extended to argue that all people (both current and future generations) should have the freedom and ability to pursue their own visions of the good life (Sen 2013). From this perspective, today’s development pathways remain inequitable in the extreme, with the few taking for themselves a disproportionate share of the earth’s resources and the opportunities for enhanced well-being that those resources should offer for all (Chancel et al. 2022; ISSC, IDS, and UNESCO 2016; Piketty 2014). If humanity is to achieve the vision for sustainable development it has repeatedly endorsed, a stronger capacity to promote equity both within and between generations must be built and maintained. Such a capacity will almost certainly require addressing three separate but interrelated challenges: i) strengthening values and norms that support greater intra- and intergenerational equity; ii) reorienting institutions toward more equitable processes and outcomes, and iii) redistributing resources and the flows of benefits from those resources within and between generations. This working paper provides a high-level overview of scholarship on inequality and efforts to promote equity in sustainability science as well as insights from the past several decades of practice in the field.