PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Instead, Baker et al. subsumes these perspectives under the various non-ecology-oriented
elements of the “strong” or the “ideal” sustainability model. Meanwhile, Baker et al.’s
“treadmill” approach at the anthropocentric end of the “Ladder” does not appear in my
typology at all, since I find that an approach which propagates “exponential growth,”
“resource exploitation,” and no policy or institutional change at all, should be more
appropriately be characterized as non-sustainability and thus be categorized as standing
outside any sustainability typology.
3.4.3 The Use of the Term “Frameworks” in the Political Science Literature
My decision to coin and define the term “discursive framework” to describe
policy-relevant differences in socio-political belief systems among scholars and decisionmakers
also has the unfortunate disadvantage that the term “framework” has been
extensively used, and often re-defined, in the political science literature that focuses on
the analysis of policy-processes. Rein and Schön, for example, define the term framing
as a way of selecting, organizing, and interpreting of a complex reality to provide
guideposts for knowing, analyzing, persuading and acting, so that a frame provides a
perspective from which to make sense and act upon an amorphous, ill-defined
problematic situation (see especially Rein and Schön 1994:263; for an article about a
radical “reframing” of transport policy see Dudley and Richardson 1998). Fortunately,
this does not necessarily challenge my use of the term framework. Moreover, Andrew
Moravcsik’s (1999:19) decision to call his intergovernmentalist approach “a rationalist
framework of intergovernmentalist cooperation” is also clearly delineated and thus
should thus not lead to any confusion. He himself clarifies that he employs “the term