Sustainability standards, multicriteria maximin, and viability

This paper deals with sustainability criteria and standards. The maximin criterion, as the highest performance that can be sustained over time, promotes intergenerational equity, a pivotal issue for sustainability. The viable control approach, by investigating trajectories and actions complying over time with various standards and constraints, provides major insights into strong sustainability. The present paper addresses the links between maximin and viability approaches in a multicriteria context. It first shows how “Pareto maximin” can be characterized through viability kernels. Such a result makes it possible to determine the trade-offs and/or synergies between nonsubstitutable economic and ecological standards underlying strong sustainability. The second main result of the paper is to propose algorithms derived from the viability version of dynamic programming to approximate numerically Pareto maximin values, controls, and sustainability standards. Two examples relying on renewable resource management illustrate these analytic and numerical findings. In particular, synergies between sustainability standards of resource conservation, production or profitability are identified for overexploited stocks.