Sustainability and Wellbeing

Human-Scale Development in Practice

Mònica Guillen-Royo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317647263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The idea that we can meet human needs and simultaneously conserve and even enhance the natural environment is an attractive one. Since the Brundtland report popularised a definition of sustainable development based on the concept of needs, there has been a widespread belief that it should be possible to achieve a good quality of life without compromising natural ecosystems.

Sustainability and Wellbeing fills a gap in sustainable development studies by drawing on a range of case-studies to discuss the challenges and opportunities of using Max-Neef's Human Scale Development (HSD) framework in practice. The first section presents the theory and the methodology of HSD in the context of related literature on sustainable development and wellbeing. The second section discusses applications of the HSD methodology with three different purposes: the design of sustainable development interventions; the engagement of researchers with communities or groups of people in sustainability processes and the consolidation of sustainable community initiatives. Finally, the third reflects on challenges and limitations of using the HSD approach to define strategies for sustainable development and concludes.

This is an invaluable resource for researchers and postgraduate students in wellbeing, sustainability, sustainable development, and human development.

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315762135-1

Purpose

The purpose of this book is to contribute to a reflection around the relevance of Human Scale Development (HSD) as a framework for the analysis and encouragement of sustainable development processes. The HSD proposal was developed by Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef and his collaborators in the 1980s with the goal of supporting grassroots movements and communities in the design and implementation of their own development processes. It was articulated around three interdependent pillars concerning the promotion of self-reliance, balanced relationships among people, institutions and governance dimensions, and the satisfaction of fundamental human needs. The latter was based on a theory of needs that stressed the difference between universal needs and culturally relative satisfiers (among them values, attitudes, laws, institutions, actions, spaces and environments) and provided a practical tool to support communities and local movements to identify their own strategies to meet needs.

The methodology suggested in the HSD proposal, as described in Max-Neef's book Human-Scale Development – Conception, Applications and Further Reflections (1991), revolved around a series of participatory workshops aiming to stimulate collective reflection around the satisfiers that hampered or promoted needs fulfilment in a specific society. Since its publication, the HSD methodology has been adapted to address different socio-economic and environmental challenges by local communities, development practitioners and researchers alike. The fact that HSD focusses on meeting needs establishes a direct parallel between the proposal and the main goal of sustainable development (SD) understood following the definition of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987: 43). Meeting fundamental human needs requires, following the tenets of HSD, arriving at satisfiers that are both efficient at meeting one or more needs and environmentally sustainable, so that their generation does not reduce the possibilities of other needs being met now and in the future.

This book has been inspired by the learnings from my own studies using the HSD methodology, and by the increasing reference to HSD by proponents of alternative approaches to sustainable development that highlight the impossibility of achieving sustainability with the current understanding of SD based on economic growth. I have aimed to provide a text which:

1. offers a reflection on the insertion of the HSD proposal within current debates on the green economy-interpretation of SD, and within alternative discourses around SD that are not centred on economic growth;
2. discusses some of the possible uses of the methodology to support needs-based sustainable development, namely those concerning: a) the identification of sustainable development measures or policies through exploratory workshops, b) the understanding of human-nature interdependencies through the involvement with local communities, and c) the strengthening of ongoing local sustainability projects by encouraging a deep reflection on human needs; and
3. draws on the practical applications of the HSD methodology with communities or groups of people to propose a conceptual link between the system of satisfiers that contribute to needs fulfilment at the local level and the interdependent personal, social, economic and environmental features that constitute a sustainable society.

Thus, the book touches on contextual, conceptual and empirical aspects of the HSD proposal with regards to its relevance for sustainable development practice.

Background

The idea that we can meet human needs and simultaneously conserve and even enhance the natural environment is an attractive one. Since the Brundtland report (WCED 1987) popularised a definition of sustainable development based on the concept of needs, there has been a widespread belief that it should be possible to achieve a good quality of life without compromising natural ecosystems. Despite an equal weight given to economic efficiency, social equity and environmental protection in the outcome documents of the influential United Nations conferences on sustainable development in Rio in 1992 and 2012 (UN 1992, 2012), the main mechanisms put in place at the national and international levels to progress towards sustainable development have been based on economic efficiency. This has been materialised through stressing sustainability policies on investments in technological innovations that enable the production of increasing amounts of goods and services while reducing the environmental impact of production. Despite the WCED emphasis on the quality of economic growth, what has guided SD policy has been the ‘quantity’ of economic growth, as policymakers around the world have continued to buy into the tenets of neoclassical economics, associating human wellbeing with the expansion of material production and consumption (Guillén-Royo and Wilhite 2015).

Investments in resource efficiency, renewable energy and recycling facilities have not challenged trade liberalisation and the geographical expansion of industrialised consumption and production patterns that have characterised the neoliberal approach to international development since the 1970s (Jackson 2006, 2009; McNeill and Wilhite 2015). Sustainable development interventions that could threaten the expansion of the global economy – such as binding agreements on CO₂ emission reductions, or policies for low-carbon lifestyles – have not been given a top priority. As a result, we are witnessing increasing damages to ecosystems and biodiversity, a progressive warming up of earth climate systems and rising inequalities within and across countries (Martínez-Alier et al. 2010; Wilkinson and Pickett 2010). The limited contribution to environmental conservation and enhancement of the current sustainability policies suggests that in order to place societies in a sustainable development path, a more radical transformation of our socio-economic and political structures is needed.

Alternatives to the efficiency-based approach to sustainable development are manifold and are often linked to post-growth or post-development paradigms (Daly 1974; Martínez-Alier 2009; Muraca 2012). These are characterised by rejecting a direct positive association between economic growth and human wellbeing, and by allocating a subsidiary role to the economic system in relation to the biophysical and social systems. Thus, economic growth becomes a byproduct of measures to reduce environmental degradation and social injustice (van der Bergh 2010). Or, as the proponents of sustainable degrowth maintain, economic growth becomes something that should be reversed in order to achieve a ‘socially sustainable and equitable reduction (and eventually stabilisation) of society's throughput’¹ (Kallis 2011: 874). In line with these alternative perspectives, Max-Neef emphasises the need to give the economy an instrumental role, as its ultimate goal is to serve the people, not the opposite. Serving people, in Max-Neef's view, is about providing the economic, socio-technical, cultural and environmental resources that will help humans meet their fundamental needs. This, he argues, should be the goal of any development policy. Any such policy should also be guided by the twin-premises that no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services, and that the economy is a sub-system of a larger and finite system, the biosphere. In Max-Neef's view, these premises fully negate the possibility of permanent growth (Smith and Max-Neef 2011: 154).

In addition to theoretical approaches arguing for removing economic growth from the conceptualisation and practice of sustainable development, research and grassroots initiatives demonstrate through empirical research and real-life practice that environmental sustainability and human needs fulfilment can be reconciled through a set of interdependent satisfiers, addressing technological, organisational, cultural, political and personal factors that do not depend on a more voluminous global economy. Recent research shows that economic growth and wellbeing are not necessarily linked. Examples include research on measures of welfare that account for environmental and social costs not included in the calculation of GDP (Costanza et al. 2014), the research on wellbeing determinants (Easterlin 2015; Frey and Stutzer 2002), and the experience of people in sustainable communities already experiencing a low-impact lifestyle (Hopkins 2013; Phillips et al. 2013). Though they do acknowledge the importance of technological efficiency, these approaches have a stronger focus on strategies such as lower consumption levels, shorter working hours, progressive taxation and carbon quotas that are ‘disruptive’ to business-as-usual, as they question accumulation and growth, the main goals in capitalist societies.

Linking to the abovementioned evidence, and drawing on his own research which indicated a lack of association between quality of life and economic growth (Max-Neef 1995), Manfred Max-Neef and his collaborators developed a proposal for Human Scale Development (HSD) in the late 1980s. Their proposal was based on popular participation, and it was articulated around three interdependent pillars. The first of these pillars increasing levels of self-reliance, placing the local community at the core of the development process. The second pillar focussed on the balanced interdependence of people with nature and technologies, of global and local processes, of personal and social goals, of planning and autonomy, and of civil society and the state (Max-Neef 1991: 8). Finally, the third pillar concerned the achievement of high levels of quality of life through actualising fundamental human needs.

The HSD proposal considers fundamental human needs to be universal and changing at the slow pace of human evolution. These needs concern the following nine axiological categories: Subsistence, Protection, Affection, Understanding, Participation, Idleness, Creation, Identity and Freedom. Each of those nine categories can be expressed according to four existential categories: Being, Having, Doing and Interacting. Crossing fundamental human needs and existential categories produces a matrix with 36 empty cells that represent satisfiers (values, attitudes, institutions, regulations, actions, customs, forms of organisation, spaces, etc.). Satisfiers characterise the ways needs are pursued in a society and could be categorised depending on their positive or negative impact on needs. Thus, the goal becomes for local communities and societies to identify those synergic satisfiers which promote more than one human need and are not detrimental to any need, and to engage in endogenous and/or exogenous strategies to make them available in their society. Satisfiers that are harmful to the natural environment will reduce the capacity to meet needs in the short, mid or long run and will not be appraised as synergic.

Max-Neef and his collaborators suggested drawing on the approach to needs and satisfiers in participatory workshops that engage local communities or grassroots groups in finding solutions to their socio-economic and environmental challenges. The methodology proposed has been applied since the 1980s in different countries around the world and with different purposes. Topics that have been addressed using the HSD framework and tools include: racial discrimination, HIV prevention, sustainable housing, health promotion, rural development, end-of-life care and sustainable consumption (Buscaglia 2013; Cuthill 2003; García Norato 2006; Guillén-Royo 2010; Jorge 2010; Mitchell 2001; Peroni 2009). Some of this work has been research-oriented and some practice-oriented. Some has followed the methodology as suggested by Max-Neef and collaborators, and some has adapted the methodology or parts of it to suit the goals of a project or to meet the requirements of a funding body. There are also some researchers who have used the HSD perspective on needs and satisfiers for the development of indicators and the assessment of economic or social trends in society (Cruz e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Index