This paper argues that an approach based on the concept of sustainability is more promising than an approach based on the assignment of (resource) rights to generations.
In the theory on intergenerational equity (Brown Weiss 1989), rights that resemble resource rights (for an overview, see Schuppert 2012) play a central role: both present and future generations are supposed to have ‘planetary rights’ to use the natural resources of the earth. However, these planetary rights imply duties of other parties to fulfil these rights. The enforcement of duties of present generations towards future generations is problematic: future generations either need the use of a fiction in regulation, or they need to be represented. The so-called ‘rights-discourse’, which traditionally is regarded a strong discourse to regulate relations between individuals or groups, might therefore not be suitable to govern the mutual obligations between generations with regard to resource management.
An alternative to the rights-discourse is the sustainability-discourse. The sustainability-discourse meets the request for ‘just or equitable ways of sharing access to natural resources’ by means of balancing the claims of different generations without assigning rights to generations. Instead of assigning rights, it prescribes the achievement of goals through goal regulation (Westerman 2010; Black 2008). Regulation that is focussed on goals instead of rights has the benefit of avoiding philosophical and practical problems with rights; moreover, because sustainability not only benefits present, but also future generations, ‘presentism’ (Thomson, 2010) is avoided.
This paper therefore argues that one of the demands of sustainability is the use of goal regulation; although the distribution of resources rights might be intuitively just, goal regulation offers the more practical solution.
