Paradigm Evolution and Sustainability Thinking: Using a Sustainability Inversegram to State Paradigm Death and Shift Expectations under Win-Win and No Win-Win Situations

The history of science is one based on revolutions and discourse where a new paradigm arrives challenging the status quo with the promise of progress and if the evidence is there to justify paradigm shift on the basis of that promise the consensus will be to shift paradigms. Apparently the shift from Adam Smith’s traditional market paradigm to the eco-economic or green market paradigm formalized in 2012/RIO conference meets all the requirements for paradigm shift listed above, but it was based on the accumulated environmental evidence for change only (e.g. pollution and degradation) leaving out the accumulated social evidence for change (e.g. poverty and inequality), but a progress towards sustainability none the less.

Not much seems to be written from the point of view of sustainability about paradigm changes such as paradigm death, paradigm shift and paradigm mergers. General goals of this paper are a) to introduce a sustainability inversegram that can be used to state paradigm death and shift expectations under win-win and under no win-win situations; and b) to use this expectation framework to show the structure before and after the paradigm shift from the traditional market to the green market under win-win eco-economic conditions.