Introduction:

The perspective of Vorsorgendes Wirtschaften has been developed against the backcloth of globally dispersed environmental hazards and sustainability as an approach to combat these and their temporally extended effects. Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 it has been recognized that society, environment and the economy had to be brought together to ensure that none of these elements work at the expense of the others since, on their own, they tend to operate in contradictory and often mutually detrimental ways. Sustaining the economy, for example, tends to have negative effects on the environment while sustaining the environment does not necessarily enhance the sustainability of society. Moving from the idea of sustaining one element of society at the expense of others to sustainability across those elements entailed that opposing trends were harnessed together for a common goal. Making common cause of elements with widely divergent and opposing tendencies, however, is a complex task that requires innovation at the level of theory and practice. Accordingly, efforts to work effectively towards a sustainability that operates fairly, over time, across the elements of environment, economy and society, require pioneering praxis.

Members of the network Netzwerk Vorsorgens Wirtschaften have achieved such pioneering praxis by a variety of means: they have theorized the move from a growth to a wellness and care oriented economy, from an emphasis on production to one that encompasses (re)-productivity and from a positivist science perspective to an approach that encompasses norms, values and ethics. In all these approaches it is acknowledged that sustainability cannot merely be added to conventional economics but changes the ontology, the epistemology and the methodology, that is, the subject matter, our knowledge of it and the way we study it. Each of these approaches encompasses a strong, if mostly implicit, temporal orientation, which I want to open up for discussion in this chapter.