A historical perspective on the engineering ideologies of sustainability: the case of SLCA

摘要

The 1990s produced two distinct engineering ideologies of sustainability-one emphasizing engineering innovation and the other emphasizing socio-cultural change. The technological change ideology of sustainability refers to engineering reform controlled and directed by engineers themselves-in other words, technological practices can be improved through the application of expertise. The technopolitics' ideology of sustainability is about engineering challenge; it places more emphasis on the devolution of expertise from the existing model of engineering and society, and it questions the dominant values of engineering practice. In this article, I present a historico-philosophical perspective on the development of social life cycle assessment (SLCA) to highlight how the dialectic between sustainability and engineering has been defined largely by the ideology of technological change.