Siegmar Otto

• Sustainable development has been enriched by notions and views presented by related scientific and political discourses as well as by other actors' implicit views on sustainable development. This plethora of opinions is due to highly diverse parts of society participating in the discourse. The assumption is made that due to its abstractness, the sustainable development concept can overcome strong barriers between social systems like science, economy, politics or education. This leads to a secondary communication problem: once absorbed by the social subsystems, the abstract meaning of sustainable development is adapted to and diluted by the system's specific language. With adaptation, the communication barrier between the systems arises again, due to the different meanings that they attribute to the adjusted versions of sustainable development. This thesis therefore sets out to present a first empirical study on the meaning of sustainable development. In a theoretical discussion, a distinction is made between a denotative and connotative meaning. Scientist, politicians and economists usually discuss the denotation, in other words, the literal meaning of sustainable development. Sustainable development's connotation is, however, important for sustainable development education in general and, even more importantly, in the mass media with its focus on entertainment and on inducing moods and emotions. In this thesis, a content analysis method is used to assess the denotation of sustainable development for the economic and political system. The data obtained support the assumption that sustainable development has different meanings for different actors and systems. Furthermore, a large online survey was conducted by means of the semantic differential technique to determine the connotation of sustainable development. It revealed several interesting results, one of which was that the connotation differs with the degree of familiarity with the concept.