This article in Ecological Economics is about the idea of critical natural capital. Critical natural capital is meant to bridge the gap between strong sustainability, which says manufactured capital cannot be substituted for natural capital, and weak sustainability, which says it can. Critical natural capital says that some, but not all, of it can be substituted, because some of it is, well, critical.

The other theme of this paper is the “capability approach”, which is based on the ideas of Amartya Sen. Reading Amartya Sen is on my list of things to do eventually someday, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.

This article is an attempt to conceptually improve the notion of strong sustainability by creating a rapprochement between its core concept, critical natural capital, and the capability approach. We first demonstrate that the capability approach constitutes a relevant framework for analysing the multiple links between human well-being and critical natural capital. Second, we demonstrate that the rapprochement between critical natural capital and the capability approach can form both the normative basis and the informational basis for a deliberative approach to human development which embraces a strong sustainability perspective. This conceptual rapprochement, as illustrated in our case study, opens up avenues of research towards the practical implementation of human development projects from a strong sustainability perspective.