Sustainable Development
Perhaps the most widely used concept for thinking about the relation between society and the rest of nature is ‘sustainable development’. This idea has been so degraded of content and so misused that for many people it has become discredited and dismissed.
However, in its earlier formulations it made important advances, and so it is worth beginning with the earlier context within which the idea was formulated. From the 1960s onwards there emerged a global debate about what many had come to see as an impending environmental catastrophe. Perhaps the most influential contribution to this debate was a report, produced by ‘the Club of Rome, an association of business people, technocrats and computer scientists.Entitled The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972, 1974), the report presented a computer model of the ‘earth system', mapping growth trends in agricultural and industrial production and population growth in relation to demands on the environment - the use of renewable and non-renewable resources, and the output of pollution into land, sea and air. The findings were presented by statistics and graphs, giving an air of scientific authority, so the report’s conclusions - that, if continued, exponential growth in the demands made on nature would lead to ‘overshoot’ and collapse of the world economy within one hundred years - were hard to ignore. Of course, the model, and, especially, the accuracy of the data used to yield its dire warnings, were open to intense controversy. Nevertheless, the recognition that ecological problems on a global scale constituted a major challenge was inescapable. Subsequently biodiversity loss and climate change came to be seen as high priorities for international action and there emerged what came to be seen as a ‘Northern agenda’ to protect key features of the earth's life-support systems, to check deforestation, reduce carbon emissions and so on.
This was widely seen in the Global South as a new form of imperialism, with the rich nations seeking to preserve their own advantages by restricting the development opportunities of the poor. Since many of the economically poor countries were nevertheless rich in biodiversity and other ‘assets' to which northern-based business desired access, the possibility of a ‘deal' emerged: a new model of development which would address the problems of the poor while, at the same time, protecting the global environment.The United Nations hosted a series of conferences and meetings from the early 1970s onwards, culminating in a major report by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987). This document introduced to the wider world a new way of thinking about the apparently conflicting demands for alleviation of poverty and protection of the environment. The standard assumption had been that economic growth was necessary to bring people out of poverty. But it was becoming increasingly clear that this would lead to disaster for all if it were to be conducted on the basis of ‘business as usual'. The alternative proposed by the WCED would be ‘sustainable development'. This was to be development that met the needs of today without undermining the conditions for future generations to meet their needs.
There were three significant conceptual innovations in this definition. The first was to focus development on the meeting of need, not meeting ‘demand', or increasing consumption. The clear implication was a model of development focused directly on alleviating the condition of the poor. The second innovation was recognition of the conservation of nature not as a restraint on economic growth, but, rather, as an essential condition for people to meet their needs (most obvious in the case of many people in the poor countries who depend in very direct ways on their local environments for their lives and livelihoods). The third was the requirement that investment decisions taken today must take into account justice for future generations.
Each of these features ran directly against prevailing economic common sense as well as globally dominant interests. Nevertheless, aided by massive mobilizations of environmental and development social movements, the UN managed to bring together most of the world's nations for an ‘Earth Summit' in 1992, intended to secure binding international agreements to implement the idea of sustainable development. The summit did secure some major agreements. Though they seemed disappointing at the time, in retrospect we can see them as a high- water mark in the struggle for a liveable relation between humans and the rest of nature. Legally enforceable agreements were reached on a ‘framework convention on climate change' and a convention on biodiversity. Non-binding principles for forestry were agreed, and a huge, comprehensive document, ‘Agenda 21', set out to map in detail the route to achieve sustainability by the twenty-first century (see Grubb et al. 1993).The framework convention on climate change committed parties to take steps to limit emission of greenhouse gases, and to protect and enhance carbon sinks and reservoirs, to report on progress, and, for ‘developed' country signatories, to transfer both resources and technology to developing countries to enable them to fulfil their commitments. The biodiversity convention involved a comparable ‘deal': the species-rich ecosystems of developing countries would be seen, not, as formerly, as a common inheritance of humankind, but as a set of resources with an economic value, over which there would be national sovereignty. Prospecting for resources, research and value-added by northernbased corporations would be allowed, but paid for.
This was, of course, much too good to be true. It required an international trading and investment regime which made a priority of helping the poor (as against those who had the ability to pay), required companies to accept increased costs and reduced profits by avoiding environmental damage, and required very long-term consideration of the interests of future populations, as against seeking profit now (no ‘discounting’ the future).
The Earth Summit took place at the time of the Uruguay round of trade negotiations, through which the World Bank, IMF and WTO were set to radically deregulate trade and investment on a global scale. A ‘neo-liberal’ agenda would pull back governmental, social and environmental restrictions on the flow of capital, and this, it was claimed, would address problems of poverty as a by-product of greatly increased stimuli to economic growth (the ‘trickle down’ effect). Under this regime many of the requirements of sustainability would be defined as restraints of trade and rendered illegal. Subsequent recall conferences of the Earth Summit, and the parties to the conventions, were increasingly dominated by corporate interests, and the concept of sustainability was raided by a new brand of neo-liberal ‘environmental economics’ - about which more later.