Mainstream conceptualizations of sustainable development (SD) tend to focus on urban areas or the national or global scale—most recently through the Sustainable Development Goals. This focus often overlooks rural and natural resource-based communities, particularly those dependent on renewable resources like fisheries or forestry. Drawing from a comprehensive review, we propose an alternative approach for interpreting and measuring SD in these contexts. We integrate two seemingly contradictory approaches: sustainability indicators (SIs), whose evolution reflects competing views of the nature of knowledge and action in pursuit of SD, and the use of storytelling in policy and planning, highlighting how actors tell stories to garner support for proposed developments, influence public understanding, and mobilize stakeholders. Examining the opposing epistemologies often underlying these two approaches, we posit that they can be brought together through a transdisciplinary lens for sustainable rural development. We illustrate these potentials in Newfoundland and Labrador, a highly resource-based region in which rural communities are often characterized by deficiencies based narratives. In such contexts, storytelling can allow rural stakeholders to interpret SD while potentially enlisting SIs in telling their own sustainability stories.

中文翻译：

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农村社区可持续发展的讲故事：另一种方法

可持续发展 (SD) 的主流概念往往侧重于城市地区或国家或全球范围——最近通过可持续发展目标。这种关注往往忽视了农村和自然资源社区，特别是那些依赖渔业或林业等可再生资源的社区。根据全面审查，我们提出了一种在这些情况下解释和衡量 SD 的替代方法。我们整合了两种看似矛盾的方法：可持续性指标 (SI)，其演变反映了追求可持续发展的知识和行动的性质的竞争观点，以及在政策和规划中使用讲故事，强调参与者如何讲故事以获得对提议的支持发展，影响公众的理解，并动员利益相关者。通过检查这两种方法通常背后的对立认识论，我们假设可以通过跨学科的视角将它们结合在一起，以实现可持续农村发展。我们在纽芬兰和拉布拉多展示了这些潜力，这是一个高度依赖资源的地区，其中农村社区通常以基于缺陷的叙述为特征。在这种情况下，讲故事可以让农村利益相关者解释可持续发展，同时可能让 SI 讲述他们自己的可持续发展故事。