Sustainability in the Age of Digitalization
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The WBGU views digitalization from a sustainability perspective that e xplicitly draws on a foundation of critically reflected enlightenment and respect for human dignity. It proposes a ‘normative compass’, the dimensions of which include, first, sustaining natural life-support systems, second inclusion, and third Eigenart (a German word meaning ‘character’). Human dignity is both the explicit starting point and the target vision of the normative compass, since it is of particular importance in the Digital Age, and protecting it is a key priority in shaping digitalization.
2.1 A comprehensive understanding of transformation must take the megatrend of digitalization into account In 2015, two major world conferences paved the way for the Great Transformation towards Sustainability. In New York, the 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; Box 2.1-1) was agreed and in Paris a binding target was set to limit global warming to well below 2°C. Both agreements, the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement, define a clear system of objectives and create the basis for a global transformation process. Based on the need to sustain the natural life-support systems, the WBGU regards the Great Transformation towards Sustainability as a global modernization process integrating both target systems and moving towards a low-carbon society (WBGU, 2011; WBGU, 2016b). In the WBGU’s view, the goals of any transformation are the basis for further in-depth societal debates. Change takes place as a learning and search process for society as a whole, shaped by actors from business, politics and civil society, as well as citizens and consumers. The WBGU regards societal participation and broad discourse among all actors as prerequisites for a democratically legitimized transformation. The Great Transfor-
mation cannot be shaped without an agreement on normative principles and without jointly developed or enhanced guiding concepts that describe the future in a new way (WBGU, 2011). To provide orientation in the complex transformation processes, the WBGU has suggested a normative compass as a guiding concept for the Great Transformation towards Sustainability (WBGU, 2016a). Along with inclusion and the need to sustain the natural life-support systems, this compass takes into account diversity and formative freedom as fundamental prerequisites for a transformation process, captured in the German term Eigenart (Section 2.2). This normative basis can be greatly influenced by fast technological and socio-cultural changes in the course of digitalization. Digital solutions are already fundamentally changing societal systems such as work or the dissemination of information and knowledge. Yet digitalization is hardly taken into account in the context of the Great Transformation and features only marginally in the SDGs. In this report the WBGU examines not only the impact of digitalization on ‘sustaining the natural life-support systems’, but also the challenges for ‘inclusion’ and ‘Eigenart’ (Section 2.2). Both as a starting point and as a goal, the WBGU furthermore refers to the containment of technical and societal developments in order to protect human dignity. 31