The way in which an economic information system is organized, structured and used depends on a mental representation of what value is. In the second half of the 18th Century, physiocrats gave economic value an objective basis, the capacity of the land, at the origin of the agricultural production process that is at the source of all wealth creation. Industry and commerce, which transform the land’s wealth, were only considered as productive activities with the classical economists, who placed a value on the exchange of goods equal to the cost of the labor necessary to produce them. Some of them focused their attention on the usefulness of the good produced. The work, once “spent”, would have disappeared and would be lost forever, no longer having any influence on the future value attributed to the good – which could continue to be exchanged and used and therefore valued. The neoclassicals then took hold of this logic, seeking to optimize the usefulness of the good produced and to factor in the costs of labor through mathematical systematizations, seeking to make economics an exact science.

This shift from an objective and physically anchored foundation to an apparent dematerialization of value, with in particular the abandonment of the gold standard, then the rise of speculative finance and now crypto-currencies, seems to drive the evolution of economic practice. However, the absolute decoupling required by sustainable development implies, if not reversing the trend, ensuring that the search for growth in the value of subjective utilities is carried out without impact on the objective basis of wealth: ecosystems and social groups.

The strategic alignment of information systems must make it possible to account for this decoupling. This is an extremely delicate process. In a world constrained by conflicts of representations and power games, formulating a common horizon is a challenge and is only a first step. It is then a question of comparing different logics, defining their areas of relevance and ensuring the compatibility of the resulting practices. Finally, it is a question of militating for certain representations, of promoting them politically, but without ignoring the existence or even the pre-eminence of others – which would constitute both a denial of reality and a strategic error.

The transition to sustainable development must involve those most reluctant to change alongside the already convinced pioneers. It cannot be carried only by innovators committed to new ideologies, and convinced of the place they could find in a post-transition world. The spread of the concept of sustainable development must also benefit from the impetus and long-term support of those who do not recognize themselves in this alternative way of life as it is presented to them today. In other words, if the value system of some actors evolves before transition and promotes the transformation of economic models, the result of this evolution should allow other actors to consider new profit prospects without immediately changing their value system. On the other hand, a change in everyone’s view of the determinants of the profit creation process is essential in the very short term.

Whether “capitalism” is compatible with sustainable development, and whether market finance is inherently toxic or not, must be discussed. These questions cannot be avoided. Our way of responding to them was not to make a judgment on ethereal paradigms, but to describe a method of valuation compatible with sustainable development, and then to test capitalist and financial practices. To this end, we have expressed the need for a reading framework that can accommodate different, even antagonistic, economic representations, while respecting their specificities and including them in an overall analysis.

The dynamic modeling of cost systems (DMCS) approach proposes an information and valuation system based on the logic of the ecological economy, the social economy and the functional economy. What these three currents have in common is that they approach value by considering both the objective basis of production processes, and the subjective recognition of the utilities that condition the value of the goods produced when they are traded.

More precisely, and this is what interested us, they condition the valuation of utilities on a guarantee of sustainability of the basis of production.

In a way, this approach amounts to making the “big gap” between the physiocrats’ and neoclassics’ points of view, and to considering areas of coexistence of these points of view, without compromising on the need for sustainability. This involves identifying critical thresholds beyond which the valuation of utilities does not respect the basis of a production process, and therefore makes sense only for short-term logics that are incompatible with sustainability. Our approach has been to consider in its entirety what we have described as plural work, and to combine its ecosystem, social, economic, industrial and financial components when analyzing value.

Was not that the subject of eco-development theorized by Sachs since 1978? This systemic approach to the relations between social, ecosystem and economy, but framed by a hierarchy of objectives: “First the social, then the environment, and finally only the search for economic viability, without which nothing is possible. Growth must not become a primary goal but must remain an instrument at the service of solidarity between present and future generations” (Sachs 2002, p.7).

It is also a question of making the “big gap” between the individual point of view of the actors of a territory and the collective perspective necessary to coordinate actions to maintain the sustainability of this territory. This is where our contribution comes in more particularly: a hypothesis that consists of considering that an actor does not mobilize the same representations according to whether he is in the context of his/her profession or in that of a multi-actor deliberation situation. Using the ePLANETe.Blue platform, we described how a new web, both contributory and hermeneutical, makes it possible to evaluate the adequacy of an information system for a communication situation.

Territorial economic communication must not be dissipative. An actor should be capable to interpret the point of view of another actor, his/her judgment on value, even if the latter intervenes in another sector of activity, and if he/she is interested in phenomena that are objectified at other scales of space and time. Our proposal can be described as the coupling of a trans-scalar territorial accounting system (proposing an integrated micro–meso–macro reading) and a mechanism for mapping controversies relating to the adequacy of the analysis methods used by the actors of a territory.

The potential for conflict, or blockage, that can arise when actors are called upon to embody territorial sustainability strategies can be addressed in deliberations. These jointly lead to the identification of methodological controversies and the production of shared representations that can lead to their overcoming, in particular by improving the territorial information system.

The purpose of all this work is to guide investment in the social component of labor, and this as we noted in the introduction, is more delicate than to guide investment the improvement of industrial production. More precisely, it is a question of investing in the formation of a territorial informative and cognitive heritage that we consider to be one of the foundations of the wealth production process. This investment is legitimate: a conflict of representation of the value of productive phenomena leads to minimizing the potential for cooperation, and reduces both the prospects for the sustainability of the territory and the solvency of the entities.

Finally, we proposed to amortize the financial capital with regard to the quality of a territorial informative and cognitive heritage, in order to modulate the valuation by anchoring it in the reality of a collective capacity to represent what matters. This approach is not unlikely: through depreciation, the industrial economy traditionally modulates the valuation according to the quality of the technical and material economic component of the territorial heritage. And the ecological economy invites us to consider this same logic according to the quality of the ecosystem component of this heritage. Our approach simply transposes this logic to the problems of the intangible by opposing cognitive capitalism, which is a neoclassicism of the knowledge economy, an functional economy based on the contributory web and oriented toward the collective management of the knowledge commons, in the sense given by Hess and Ostrom (2010).