The Spinning Top Model of Sustainability

A systems-theoretic interpretation as dynamic coherence

Abstract

Sustainability remains one of the most contested concepts in contemporary scholarship, with definitional proliferation impeding cumulative theory-building and policy coherence. This study employs Conceptual Framework Analysis (CFA) to systematically examine 161 sustainability definitions drawn from a multi-source corpus, extracting 712 sustainability-related concepts subsequently synthesized into 30 Integrated Concepts (ICs). Thematic distribution analysis reveals that ethical and social domains dominate sustainability discourse, appearing in 107 and 103 definitions respectively, while political, cultural, and legal dimensions remain critically underrepresented. Epistemic deconstruction identifies a pronounced asymmetry, 521 epistemological concepts against 107 ontological and 84 methodological, reflecting a field preoccupied with evaluative criteria at the expense of systemic understanding and operational pathways. Concept integration produces the Triadic Negotiation Framework for Sustainability (TNFS), a three-layer epistemic architecture comprising an ontological condition space, an epistemological value space, and a methodological negotiation space, connected through recursive inter-layer feedback and six irreducible structural tensions. Building on the TNFS, the study proposes the Spinning Top Model of Sustainability (STMS), which interprets sustainability as dynamic coherence, the emergent property of a self-generating system whose vertical axis (normative orientation), spinning body (material conditions), and contact point (methodological negotiation) interact through recursive feedback to sustain coherent motion against socio-ecological resistance. The STMS reframes sustainability assessment from output measurement to functional evaluation of axial alignment, body momentum, and contact point recalibration capacity, offering a diagnostic vocabulary for identifying systemic failure modes invisible to conventional indicator frameworks.