The green economy and sustainable development: an uneasy balance?

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (or Rio+20) was conceived at a time of great concern for the health of the world economy. In this atmosphere ‘green economy’ was chosen as one of two central themes for the conference, building on a burgeoning body of literature on the green economy and growth. This research examines the relationship and influence between the double crisis and the rise of ‘greening’ as part of the solution. The aim is to understand what defines and distinguishes the proposals contained in twenty-four sources on the green economy (including policy documents by international agencies and think tanks, and research papers), and what is the meaning and implication of the rising greening agenda for sustainable development as it enters the 21st century. Through a systematic qualitative analysis of textual material, three categories of discourse that can illuminate the meaning and implication of greening are identified: ‘almost business as usual’, ‘greening’, and ‘all change’. An analysis of their relationship with Dryzek's classification of environmental discourse leads to the identification of three interrelated patterns: (1) scarcity and limits, (2) means and ends, and (3) reductionism and unity—which deepen our understanding of the tensions between emerging propositions. The patterns help explain the meaning and implications of greening for sustainable development, revealing an economisation and polarisation of discourses, the persisting weak interpretation of sustainable development, and a tension between the fixing or shifting of dominant socioeconomic paradigms that underpin its conceptualisation.

As dicotomias peso/leveza e forma/ideia na escultura : a desmaterialização progressiva do objecto artístico

The dichotomies Weight/Lightness and Form/Idea formed the theory and the practice of Art, existing a correspondence between them. The weight exists thanks to the existence of a form that is made of matter; in the other hand, the lightness comes from the idea that is always present when the creation exists. This dichotomies were always interconnected during the centuries, and there are variations in relevancy of form and/or idea. In sculpture´s tradition, the physical weight was a essential reality, and the idea of sculpture, without the immaterial side was underlined to the form. During the centuries, new artistic approaches were born and re-born focused on the frailty, lightness and idea of the artistic object, fact that came to cancel the classic notion of work of art. The concept of image became the focus of the esthetical experience of the subject, which alone, tended to substantiate the artistic object itself. In the same way that lightness, when taken to the extreme, and despite the tridimensionality materiality of the object, begun to relate the art with the own action of the body, the gesture of the artist, rising both to the status of art