Abstract

Sustainability has, from its earliest formal articulations, been grounded in the notion of needs: development is sustainable insofar as it meets present needs without undermining future generations’ capacity to meet their own. Yet, the constructs of needs, needs satisfiers, and needs satisfaction remain conceptually elusive and epistemologically contested. This paper develops a needs-based position on digital sustainability. It argues that digital sustainability cannot be coherently theorized or evaluated without an explicit engagement with needs and the conditions of needs satisfaction in digital contexts, including “digital needs” as an analytical category—needs emerging from, mediated by, or dependent on digital infrastructures and practices. Using a theory-development strategy of conceptual decomposition and building on needs-based sustainability theory and recent work on needs-aware AI, the paper articulates nine epistemological dimensions that delineate central uncertainties of digital sustainability research. These dimensions focus on defining and relating needs and satisfiers, assessing need–satisfier relations, understanding decision processes, temporality, heterogeneity, context, systems-of-systems complexity, and cross-stakeholder communication, the elicitation and management of disagreements, negotiation, and [collective] decision-making. The contribution is a reflexively critical theory-development agenda that positions needs satisfaction as a unifying unit of analysis for digital sustainability in IS.

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