Sustainable Technoscientific Development and the Innovator Citizen

Sustainable development could provide a critical foil for individual <br/>and especially collective reflection on the normative <br/>direction, ends and means employed by societies, particularly <br/>around the economy, its technology and resource-intensive <br/>orientation and configuration with ecosystems. However, <br/>although sustainable development is a constitutional objective <br/>of the EU, its implementation in strategies and policies reveals <br/>a much narrower meaning. By framing sustainable development <br/>as ecological modernisation on the basis of technoscientific <br/>innovation, and by imagining citizens as entrepreneurs in a <br/>knowledge-based European economy, openings for democratic <br/>experimentation and social innovation are limited and even <br/>forestalled. In addition, the disruptive and transformational <br/>potential of citizenship is stymied. Still, sustainable development <br/>has resonance within citizenship and human rights <br/>discourses that provide important resources for the fashioning <br/>of common understanding. These are valuable supplements to <br/>the repertoire of European citizenship that could help to embed <br/>sustainable development in the social fabric and generate <br/>alternative imaginaries and futures of a sustainable Europe.