Reconciling Value Trade-Offs in Advancing Sustainable Development Goals: Risks and Opportunities

This chapter discusses the centrality of sustainability as a meta-concept shaped by everyday negotiation of the trade-offs between various public values. It uses the political, legal, organizational, and market public values frames to articulate sustainable development as an effort at public value creation. It presents the case studies of Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) for liquified petroleum gas (LPG) and air pollution control through crop residue management in India to debate how sustainability involves a complex trade-off of public values, in which there are risks that may lead to public values failure. The book chapter makes the case for adjudicating competing public values in a way that strikes a balance between the bureaucratic ethos and the democratic ethos, and that is mindful of the limitations of technocratic rationality.