Sustainability and Social Justice

Applying DPSIR to Sustainable Development

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The DPSIR framework was devised in the late 1990s as a tool for the reporting and analysis of environmental problems, ranging in scale from global systems to localized watersheds. Since then, international organizations have begun to apply this framework to the evaluation of sustainable development initiatives, to better understand and overcome barriers to sustainability. While this may seem a logical application for an integrated environmental assessment tool, the use of DPSIR in sustainable development will likely perpetuate the least satisfactory outcomes of development. DPSIR cannot address the impact of aggregated, informal responses on the drivers and pressures related to environmental problems and sustainability challenges. This problem is not merely an oversight of the framework, but an issue that emerges within the structure of DPSIR itself through the unexamined, unacknowledged hierarchy of actors that this framework implicitly creates with its typology. Therefore, a DPSIR-centered approach is not a new direction for development within international organizations, but instead, a reproduction of existing inequalities between actors and stakeholders within current approaches. © 2007 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Publication Title

International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology

Publication Date

12-1-2007

Volume

14

Issue

6

First Page

543

Last Page

555

ISSN

1350-4509

DOI

10.1080/13504500709469753

Keywords

actors, Dpsir, stakeholders, sustainable development

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