The still-hopeful future of sustainability
There are cycles for the effectiveness of global ideas. If an idea has to overwinter politically for a while, that doesn't mean it's over
In today's world, even the most enthusiastic advocates of the idea of sustainability express one fear: we have to discuss whether the era of sustainability, which started in the 1990s and came to a first global peak in 2015 with the release of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is stagnating – or even coming to an end.
This fear is understandable. Opposition is indeed coming in the first months of 2025, both on a large and small scale.
On a large scale, it is the US National Bank's withdrawal from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), as well as Donald Trump's radical break with the Paris Climate Agreement, the US sustainability investment program Inflation Reduction Act of his predecessor Joe Biden, and his own US Environmental Protection Agency and their safeguarding programs.
Trump has announced to turn most sustainability programs down without any compromise and to start to drill in environmentally protected areas, as he put it in his inaugural address on January 20, 2025: 'We will drill, baby, drill!'
More or less simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic big pond, it is the European Union's softening of its announced end of the fossil fuel combustion engine, the declaration of nuclear and gas energy as sustainable energies and the outcry of business associations and enterprises about the declining competitiveness of European companies in international comparison also due to environmental regulations.
Their assertion is that in the neo-conservative to hyper-authoritarian age of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, almost only Europe and some single countries like Canada are seriously implementing them.
On a smaller scale, there are increasing protests from local and regional communities against further regulatory steps to protect the environment and a generally noticeable weariness with the words 'sustainability' and 'participation', which, from the point of view of many citizens, have been used too inflationary over the past few years, being imposed by elites through the instruments of political correctness and wokeness.
This procedure, in the views of many, has set an 'absolute truth' from above on which no dissent was possible anymore, ultimately limiting personal freedom and harming free choice by implicit and explicit pressure.
In addition to these phenomena of satiety, there have been most recently technology offensives from the fossil mobility sector, such as the production of more efficient combustion engines, which are expected to compete with electric mobility in a more tied race over the years to come.
Last but not least, global signature events such as the recent UN Climate Summit COP29 in November 2024 Baku, Azerbaijan, have recently also meant setbacks rather than progress for the global sustainability drive.
For example, regarding the payment of climate compensation between the Global North and South, the core outcome was that Europe should essentially shoulder this alone because, with a few exceptions, no one else declared themselves ready for binding measures to jointly raise the required US$300 billion.
China and South Korea did not, continuing to declare themselves developing countries and not paying a cent; Russia did not, because it finances its wars from the export of fossil raw materials, on which its internal magnate power system is built; the US did not, because under the Trump 2.0 administration it is focusing more than ever on the extraction of fossil raw materials; and the Arab self-declared 'future-oriented states' did not because they also still widely off oil and are less interested in social change than in 'leapfrogging' technologies.
By most of these powers, technology is increasingly seen – rather one-sidedly – as 'the' solution regarding future sustainability and planetary protection, and new technologies are thus increasingly positioned in competition or even as a replacement for sustainability.
The motto in many areas outside Europe and some affiliated nations in 2025 seems to be: We only have to wait until technology no longer causes pollution or even makes everything so clean that it is okay, which will inevitably happen sooner or later due to the inherent laws of auto-evolution of technology. Yet, in the meantime, we don't have to do without anything and certainly not reduce growth.
The consequence: growth stabilization or 'degrowth' discussions, in essence, currently only exist in Europe, home to only 5-7% of the world's population, and hardly anywhere else in serious and systemic ways.
Yet also in the EU, resistance against 'strong' sustainability pathways is growing with the politically conservative shift that is taking place in many European countries. Some progressive observers are therefore worriedly asking themselves: Was the sustainability idea perhaps too ambitious for our time? And is it now coming to an end with Donald Trump – or at least experiencing a historical break from which it could take years to recover?
However, on closer inspection, these fears are due to rather simplistic, linear ideas of development and time – an approach that should actually have been obsolete for a long time. Because we know by now that ideas have risen in history; they then materialized in a certain period up to a certain form and peak, which was always context- and time-dependent.
And sooner or later, after this period, they had to reach a limit, after which they were either relativized, transformed into something else, or indeed displaced or even seemingly destroyed by opposing forces when the pendulum swings to the 'other side', which always did and does in historical cycles.
These cycles, in essence, correspond to those 'hermeneutical circles' that modern philosophy describes as creative spirals consisting of the interplay between opposites.
For some pessimists, within such pendulum movements, ideas appear as a historical phase that only lasts for a while and then disappears to make way for other ideas. In reality, however, the rise and fall of ideas occur in recurring cycles. It is a kind of circular movement of death and rebirth, figuratively speaking.
Many ideas in history that were born out of a high degree of maturity of their time, like sustainability, can have their period in which they have a strong effect. Then they can have to temporarily take a back seat, or even fail indefinitely.
In the first case, these ideas have to 'overwinter,' which they usually do on their own by retreating into niches or below the surface of public debate and prominence. Later, after the overwintering phase, they may return – mostly if they were not superficial but reflected the substance of historical evolution and development.
This has always been the case with the more profound zeitgeist ideas. Their representatives, for example, artists, often rose to fame and were traded at high prices, only to be forgotten for decades in the following epoch and fall in price – only to be rediscovered in the subsequent era and rise again.
The most interesting thing about this implicit law of circular decline and resurgence is that ideas disappear or are pushed into the background, but when they come back, they usually have become much stronger than they were, although they often have changed form or phrasing.
When ideas come back, they usually also last longer and have greater stability than during their original rise. That is, after the overwintering phase, the resurrection phase can make ideas even more influential, although often more differentiated and 'wise' than they were in the first place.
It is exactly for these reasons that history must be considered as something superhuman that is made by humans, which is where its creative paradox lies. Those ideas that are historically 'defeated' by superhuman laws of alternation, when they do come back – and nobody knows beforehand if, how and when exactly this occurs – often do so after metamorphoses and are therefore much more difficult to completely defeat again.
Ideas, one could summarize, basically must go through death and resurrection, like nature in the course of the tides, to reach their destiny. It could be assumed that this is exactly what is happening – or will happen – with the sustainability idea.
The good thing about its temporary trimming could be that its ideological appropriation – the transformation of an idea into an ideology that answers everything and that one is no longer allowed to contradict, which was at least temporarily the case in Europe – is reduced.
Then the sustainability idea can restore itself more freely and with more participants: namely as the original power of something right that needs no moralization and no ethical formalization to be right because it is felt, sensed and supported by ordinary people with emphasis simply because it makes sense.
The recent shift in the US towards a – presumably also only temporary – anti-sustainability stance cannot change that fact. And neither can the people who are driving opposition forward, like some currently prominent politicians steering their nations away from the path-breaking sustainability pacts of 2015 (SDGs), 2016 (Paris Agreement) and 2024 (United Nations Pact for the Future).
In our era, politics is always the balance between the individual moral feeling regarding a righteous livelihood and the collective formalization of a compromise between different ideas about it, a social pact called 'democracy.'
If today there are politicians in the White House – and elsewhere – who continue to underscore at any occasion that they are nothing more than just 'dealmakers,' they thereby admit that they have nothing to do with the effort to integrate values with serving the general public, of which democracy consists.
It is humanly foreseeable that such an attitude against the very substance of politics consciously will be replaced by 'pure business logic', as for example Donald Trump displayed in his now (in)famous public White House conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2025, cannot last.
What does all this mean if we try to sum up the teachings? It means ideas can only apply and work cyclically – even if they are right and historically at the time. If we are convinced that the sustainability idea was and remains right to achieve a better world, we should also come to the conviction that this idea will be resurrected with transformed appearance and strength in the coming years, as history never stops but continues to develop, unfold and ramify.
All those who believe in sustainability perhaps may not sleep soundly in the Trump-Putin-Xi era, but should remain optimistic in principle. Because what we have seen over the recent years teaches us mainly four things.
First: Developments always consist of cycles and circuits, not of beginnings and ends.
Second: An idea whose time has come remains right, regardless of ideological appropriations or rejections.
Third: Practical initiatives based on long-termism – such as the 'International Decade 2024-35 of Science for Sustainable Development' – will remain in place against all odds, even if they may require constant new supporters and intellectual and solidarity-based infusions of confidence.
And finally, fourth: Moral courage and intellectual honesty for what is right is needed not so much in easy times, but first and foremost in difficult times: in times of overwintering and metamorphosis.
Eventually, the deeper feeling of many people today, particularly of young people around the world, should give us courage. Because there is hardly a 'normal' person who doubts, in her or his honest feelings and thoughts, that we should not take better care of the planet, pollute it less and lead it into a more 'natural' future protecting its unparalleled beauty, value and dignity.
Who who still feels any connection to her or his living environment in which she or he moves, and to the people who exist in it, would doubt this in the slightest?
In sum and looking forward, the sustainability idea is and remains right in 2025, and far beyond, because it is both consciously and, perhaps more important, instinctively shared by every person who is still connected in any way with her or his natural environment, her or his body and the destiny of both and thus of us all.
Roland Benedikter is an internationally renowned political scientist and sociologist with specialization in global development who co-coined the term 'reglobalization' since 2019 (see Ephrat Livni in The New York Times ). He is co-head of the Center for Advanced Studies of Eurac Research Bolzano, Italy, UNESCO Chair in Interdisciplinary Anticipation and Global-Local Transformation and Full Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
He was a Full Member of the 'Circle for the Future' of the Federal German Ministry of Education and Research Berlin advising the German Federal Government 2019-23, has co-authored two US Government White Papers on Advanced Technologies and one Report to the Club of Rome, is the author and editor of more than 30 books and more than 200 publications and on the advisory and editorial board of Harvard International Review, New Global Studies, Global-e and the Brill book series 'Global Populisms.'
He teaches at Sapienza University Rome I and previously worked at Stanford, Georgetown and UC at Santa Barbara Universities. In 2024-25, he was a consulting member for the Dubai Global 50 Future Opportunities Report 2025 of the Dubai g overnment.
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