Steering Sustainability in an Urbanising World

Policy, Practice and Performance

Anitra Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317050070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Urbanisme et développement urbain

Sustainability has become the key challenge for urban planners, housing and infrastructure policy makers. Citizens are increasingly encouraged to live more compactly; in denser urban developments, to use less water and other natural resources and to choose public transport. While councils, government agencies and private business invest in a broad range of promotions offering discounts on sustainable products and services, uptake has been slow and the impacts marginal at a time when environmental stresses suggest that we must act fast. This book examines this pressing problem in a holistic way, discussing broad-scale sustainability policies and programmes for achieving sustainable urban futures. It brings together academics and practitioners to analyze the complexity and interdependence of principles, models, processes and practices of sustainability in a range of integrated sectors as well as the establishment and maintenance of sustainable physical infrastructure in cities.

Chapter 1

Steering Sustainability: What, When and Why

Mike Berry and Anitra Nelson

How does ‘evidence’ speak to ‘power’? (Pawson 2006, 1)

Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics: it is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen. (Stern 2006, Executive summary, i)

Introduction

Although the contributors to this collection write from an Australian perspective, the context within which they discuss urban sustainability – the issues, approaches and challenges – is global. They address two main challenges: understanding the forces leading to unsustainable social and environmental outcomes in advanced capitalist, urbanized nations and encouraging creative ways of moving society onto more sustainable paths. In this latter task, governments have a critical role as major consumers of resources, providers of infrastructure, and through powers to tax and regulate. Hence, one theme running through the book focuses on how researchers and policy makers can ‘speak’ to each other and how timely credible research can inform and improve policy formulation, implementation and evaluation.

The theme of intertwining the dialogues and respective activities of researchers and policy makers guided the practical process of developing this book. Senior policy makers and advisers of the Department of Sustainability and Environment from the State Government of Victoria, Australia, kindly agreed to read and comment on early drafts of chapters and to reflect on how they saw sustainability policy developing and impacting on the environment, economy and society. At a workshop held in mid-2006, departmental officers and authors discussed the issues, methods and implications raised in the various contributions. The aim was to produce a thoroughly practical policy manuscript facilitated by a dialogue in which authors and policy makers challenged one another to articulate what a ‘good’ sustainability policy is and how it is delivered most effectively.

Inevitably, differences of view and values emerged, both between and among the participating researchers and policy makers, resulting in a robust and informative debate that proved to be invaluable. On the day following the workshop the authors met as a group and exhaustively reviewed the insights gleaned from their exchange with the policy makers and worked through the changes suggested. Both workshops were critical in setting the direction for the production of the final chapters that appear in this book. This approach has much to recommend it as a process for getting researchers and policy makers to speak and listen, and therefore understand each other.

Steer What?

The ‘steering’ reference in the title of this book reflects major changes in public policy development and analysis over the past twenty years in advanced capitalist nations. Neo-liberalism has emerged as the dominant policy paradigm, especially in the Anglo-democracies of Australia, Britain, the United States, Canada and New Zealand (Bell 2002). From this viewpoint, the role of government is to ‘steer, not row’, to set the legal and institutional framework within which ‘the market’ operates to allocate productive resources and to distribute the fruits of economic activity across the population and between countries and regions. What is clear, however, is that the challenge of steering economic and social development in productive, benign and above all sustainable ways is more complicated and difficult to achieve than the standard model of neoclassical economics proposes. Myriad ‘market failures’ intervene between rowers and navigators. The most obvious and – as the Stern quote above suggests – serious challenge is the complex, interacting set of effects resulting in long term, accumulating and irreversible climate change. Other failures are generated by negative externalities and distributional inequities associated with resource extraction, polluting activities, the abuse of political and market power and ecosystem breakdown.

Achieving sustainability requires a society to adequately deal with the full range of market failures facing that society, many of which will be cross-border and global in scope. In this context, Dovers (2006, 7) defines sustainability as ‘the ability of human society to persist in the long term in a manner that satisfies human development demands but without threatening the integrity of the natural world’. He characterizes sustainable development as the capacity to deal with threats generated across four domains: diminution and degradation of resources; pollution and waste; ecosystem services; and ‘society and the human condition’ (Dovers 2006, 9). In each domain, deliberate government policy can help or hinder societies seeking sustainable development trajectories. However, due to the nature, scale, timing and scope of the threats posed, policy develops in a highly uncertain environment and, as such, is likely to be iterative, piecemeal and radically incomplete. Many of the processes driving economic, social and environmental change are complex in the technical sense and pertain to the operation of complex adaptive systems (Beinhocker 2006). Therefore it is impossible to accurately forecast their effects on the ground. This fact imparts an open-ended dynamic – a dose of ‘fractal uncertainty’ – to sustainability policy.

Why Steer, and When?

Many of the detrimental environmental impacts of human activities interact and form complex feedback mechanisms, with complex and synergistic long-term consequences that render attempts to steer outcomes even more difficult. Thus, sustainability policy must deal with drivers and effects that cut across conventional boundaries of academic disciplines and national boundaries, that have long-term gestation periods and impacts, and that entail chronic uncertainty. This imperative follows from the fact that effects and impacts – such as extreme climate events – display what founders of complexity science call ‘wild randomness’ (Mandelbrot and Hudson 2004). Instead of being normally distributed around a clear median with ‘small tails’ – infrequent extreme events, such effects tend to follow ‘a power law’ – there is a much larger frequency of both very small and very large impacts. Hence, policy makers should expect more ‘one in a hundred year’ events. Although path dependent to a degree, these events cannot be accurately forecasted in advance but contingency response plans will lessen the scale of their impacts when they do eventuate. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans region is a sad reminder of policy failure in this respect.

Policy makers need to recognize the constraints placed on their capacity to influence events by the long time horizons over which effects unfold, the paucity of workable models and relevant data, and the sensitivity of outcomes to the initial conditions prevailing in any specific context. Such constraints are magnified by weaknesses in institutional systems. Most policy systems with which we are familiar are poorly placed to deal with either the lack of knowledge of likely outcomes over the longer term and the ‘back-end loading’ of many of those events. To the extent that the negative consequences of unsustainable current practices are concentrated in the middle-to-distant future, current policies are likely to be inadequate. The way in which advanced industrial countries build their housing systems is a useful example.

Market forces tend to focus the minds of both housing providers and residents on the immediate costs of accessing the dwelling, not on the lifetime costs of living in it. Indeed, a house is a physical asset with a long life, typically servicing a few generations. If the extra cost of building-in energy or water-efficient features and fittings adds significantly to the up-front purchase price, the market will ruthlessly weed out these initiatives, even though they might have repaid the residents in dollars and amenity many times over during the life of the dwelling as well as reducing the overall ‘environmental footprint’. In circumstances of clear market failure, appropriate and well-targeted government interventions can make a positive difference – in this case, by providing positive incentives to house builders and residents to include environmentally sensible features or regulating to achieve the same outcome.

Some environmental impacts are so large and pervasive that they defeat the reach of any one government to address them through targeted, piecemeal policies. Global warming falls into this category. In this case, the appropriate response must be collective, involving contributions from government, industry and community organizations at the local, regional, national and international levels. Because of the cumulative, irreversible nature of the problem and the huge potential costs of getting it wrong, collective action will need to be ‘front-end loaded’. The Executive Summary of the Stern Review (2006, i) has underscored the crucial importance of action, given the inertial build-up of greenhouse gases:

The effects of actions now on future changes in the climate have long lead times. What we do now can have only a limited effect on the climate over the next 40 or 50 years. On the other hand, what we do in the next 10 to 20 years can have a profound impact on the climate in the second half of this century and the next.

Early collective action in such circumstances will not only reduce the eventual costs of greenhouse emissions over the long term but, according to the Stern Review, will also minimize the total costs of mitigation and adaptation entailed. However, the barriers to effective collective action at the various levels are immense. Barriers include the high transaction costs of reaching and implementing collective action, ‘free riders’ and the short policy horizons of governments locked into conventional electoral cycles.

Conversely, the scale and chronic uncertainty of some impacts can provide a strategic case for invoking ‘precautionary principle’ or ‘wait-and-see’ options. This requires policy makers to avoid or delay making decisions where the impacts are unclear until better intelligence is available to assess and manage the risks. Such an injunction runs counter to most approaches to public policy, which tends to implicitly attach a zero value/cost to potential effects that cannot be readily quantified and given a probability measure. Somewhat akin to the precautionary principle, the maxim of ‘minimum regret’ invites policy makers and others in the broader ‘policy community’ to place themselves at some distant time in the future and speculate on levels of regret if particular negative scenarios play out, and then to return to the present and choose a policy path that would give them the lowest cause to regret.

The issue of when governments should intervene in areas that have very long-term impacts is also intimately tied up with concerns over intergenerational equity – questions related to what we owe future generations. The original definition of sustainable development introduced by the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (WCED 1987), explicitly raised this concern. Where the impacts are large, irreversible and long lasting, government policy interventions are required earlier rather than later to protect the rights of unborn generations. This essentially ethical prescription places a heavy burden on current governments, especially in view of the fact that unborn generations do not vote. The latter’s interests are represented (tenuously) in democracies such as Australia only to the extent that today’s voters and governments accept the responsibility for their future welfare and act accordingly.

New Policy Drivers

It is clear that climate change, and the issues surrounding it, will be a dominant factor in public policy in the coming decade. In addition to the specific problem of dealing with the effects of climate change, the following drivers, mostly mutually reinforcing, will concentrate the minds of policy communities around the world:

1. Energy. ‘Peak oil’, the point at which the known world supply of oil reserves has peaked and begins to decline, will pose increasing economic pressures on industrial and industrializing countries. The task of finding alternative energy sources and technologies will become more pressing. The nuclear energy option has been raised as a means of combating greenhouse gas emissions, which raises massive problems for institutional systems, particularly national governments, concerning the storage of nuclear waste and threats of nuclear weapons proliferation and terrorism. The heavy dependence of many countries on relatively plentiful supplies of coal to generate the rapidly increasing global demand for electricity makes it difficult to bend policy in favour of more environmentally benign alternatives, especially in major coal-exporting countries, such as Australia. Debate over policy developments tends to oscillate between encouraging the exploitation of alternative energy sources and developing ‘clean coal’ technologies.

2. Water. In many countries the adequate and secure supply of water for agriculture, industry and dwellings is increasingly at risk. Water access, within and between countries, threatens to be a major cause of conflict. Water scarcity may force mass intra- and international migrations and require very large infrastructure investments for solutions such as long distance delivery and desalination. Policy systems will be massively challenged to respond in such conflicts. Overstressed river ecosystems are likely to collapse if adequate water flows are not maintained or regained, affecting other environmental and economic assets. Australia, as a dry, ‘old’ continent, is at the forefront of this particular challenge.

3. Pollution. Rapid industrialization continues to generate escalating volumes of pollution, given current technological trajectories traversed by the developed world and fast-growing econom, especially China and India. Instances include air pollution from motor vehicles, water pollution from industrial discharges and residential waste disposal.

4. Population Growth and Ageing. Population growth, particularly in the less developed countries, places increasing stress on fragile environmental and resource bases. The global population shows weak signs of stabilizing, a major hope being that increasing living standards in China and India will result in continuing falls in birth rates. Ageing populations in countries such as Australia place increasing and expensive demands on governments to meet the needs of older citizens – appropriate housing, mobility and leisure services but, above all, access to adequate health care.

5. Health. Besides aged care, governments will be faced with major challenges posed by current and possible future pandemics. AIDS and bird flu prefigure the potential scale and cost of such challenges and the difficulties of achieving effective international responses. Other diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis and chronic eye diseases, are savage suppressors of economic and social development in underdeveloped regions.

6. Poverty and Insecurity. Widespread poverty in underdeveloped countries can deny such societies economic resources to engage in sustainable practices. Continued loss of forests, overexploitation of fishing stocks and pollution generated by overurbanization result partially from poverty. Successful efforts by countries like China to break out of poverty place different stressors on the environment, especially to the extent that they follow the natural resource-dependent technological path of advanced industrial nations. Increasing insecurity in strategic areas threatens access to key resources, notably the Middle East and oil. It is difficult to see major advances in sustainability globally unless and until governments respond collectively to the problems of extreme poverty and insecurity.

7. Financial Markets. As the cost of unsustainable development rises exponentially, world financial markets are factoring in environmental risk when valuing the worth of businesses, reflected in cost and availability of insurance, the rapid growth of ‘socially responsible investment’, and shifts by investors towards companies that ‘screen’ positively on social and environmental grounds. As monitoring techniques, data bases and financial asset allocation become more sophisticated, companies that fail to move beyond ‘greenwash’ activities will bear higher costs of finance than more environmentally responsible competitors and bear increasing damage to their reputation (affecting sales).

The Urban Question

Many of the drivers and impacts noted above are associated with remorseless global processes of urban growth and concentration. For the first time in history, most people live in urban centres. There are more than twenty city-regions with more than twenty million inhabitants, most located in Asia. Current urbanization patterns impose unsustainable lifestyles on urban residents and unsustainable systems of resource use, transportation and waste disposal. ‘Steering sustainability’ really means dealing with the unwanted consequences of urban growth. This imperative calls for governments to improve the rate of urban metabolism, increasing ‘good’ life-sustaining outputs while reducing ‘bad’ outputs (such as pollution) and resource inputs. As in the Chinese example, this might entail government controls on immigration rates to the largest and most congested urban centres in favour of smaller centres.

Contributors to this book adopt a deliberate urban focus. More specifically, the focus is on the lived experiences of people in urban and suburban settings. They deal with a range of issues and approaches to improving sustainability ‘on the ground’ and argue for policy makers to steer people towards the mass adoption of more sustainable practices. Central themes running through the book include environmental democracy and the lifestyle (behavioural) changes necessary to achieve sustainable outcomes and holistic social learning. Each contributor identifies key sustainability principles and practices, frameworks, approaches and concepts for achieving sustainable housing and urban development outcomes. All the authors ask, in a constructive way: What policies and practices are most effective in enabling and forcing desirable social change, and what are the barriers that must be overcome to do so?

Transforming Cities

The book is divided into four sections. In Part 1 Transforming Cities, the contributors offer four overarching approaches to understanding the challenge of shifting urban growth trajectories to more sustainable paths. Each contributor operates from a distinct perspective,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Steering Sustainability: What, When and Why
• Part I Transforming Cities
• Part II Collective Practices
• Part III Community and Civil Society
• Part IV Transforming Suburbs
• Index