Routledge International Handbook of Sustainable Development

Michael Redclift, Delyse Springett, Michael Redclift, Delyse Springett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135040710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This Handbook gives a comprehensive, international and cutting-edge overview of Sustainable Development. It integrates the key imperatives of sustainable development, namely institutional, environmental, social and economic, and calls for greater participation, social cohesion, justice and democracy as well as limited throughput of materials and energy. The nature of sustainable development and the book's theorization of the concept underline the need for interdisciplinarity in the discourse as exemplified in each chapter of this volume.

The Handbook employs a critical framework that problematises the concept of sustainable development and the struggle between discursivity and control that has characterised the debate. It provides original contributions from international experts coming from a variety of disciplines and regions, including the Global South.

Comprehensive in scope, it covers, amongst other areas:

• Sustainable architecture and design
• Biodiversity
• Sustainable business
• Climate change
• Conservation
• Sustainable consumption
• De-growth
• Disaster management
• Eco-system services
• Education
• Environmental justice
• Food and sustainable development
• Governance
• Gender
• Health
• Indicators for sustainable development
• Indigenous perspectives
• Urban transport

The Handbook offers researchers and students in the field of sustainable development invaluable insights into a contested concept and the alternative worldviews that it has fostered.

PART I History and evolution of the concept of sustainable development

DOI: 10.4324/9780203785300-1

1 Sustainable Development

History and evolution of the concept

Delyse Springett and Michael Redclift

DOI: 10.4324/9780203785300-2

When the Club of Rome¹ coined the term, ‘The Global Problèmatique’, for the environmental crisis of the early 1970s, it was intended to capture the connections and dynamic interactions between the various aspects of the problem – those linkages and knock-on effects that reverberate throughout the world (Reid 1995; Rockström et al. 2009). The institutional roots of the crisis, with its social, political and economic dimensions and the associated cultural, spiritual and intellectual implications, can be traced back to the emergence of the capitalist economy from the scientific and industrial revolutions in England (Merchant 1980; Capra 1983; Spretnak and Capra 1985; Carley and Christie 1992). Central to the changing world-view was the shift in attitudes towards nature wrought by the ideology of the Enlightenment, leading to nature’s ‘disenchantment’ and the dissipating of its power over physical and spiritual aspects of human life (Merchant 1980; Eckersley 1992).² The new scientific paradigm at the core of the Enlightenment that transformed the human–nature relationship, combined with the capitalist model of production and consumption, produced a degree of change and scale of degradation not previously possible (Merchant 1980). Along with this, the Northern³ process of domination, effected through colonization in pursuit of resources, markets and land – and later extended through the globalization of trade, technological expertise, the money market and communications (The Ecologist 1993) – eventually resulted in global impacts on nature and the lives of people. Two decades ago, Vitousek et al. (1986: 1861) stated: ‘any clear dichotomy between pristine ecosystems and human-altered areas that may have existed in the past has vanished’. Today, the Earth is beyond the point where boundaries can be ascribed to environmental problems and the associated social impacts. However, the sharing of the impacts is not equitable, as the eco-justice movement underlines: the poor disproportionately shoulder the consequences of environmental degradation (Faber and O’Connor 1989; Dobson 1998; Agyeman et al. 2003; Martínez-Alier 2003). These social and environmental impacts and the struggle to deal with them led to the coining of the concept of ‘sustainable development’ and its appearance on the international agenda in the 1970s (Carley and Christie 1992).

There were early precedents for today’s lack of ecological justice. In England, by the mid-nineteenth century, a far-reaching experiment in social engineering had been undertaken through state intervention. This had started with the appropriation of common land, which was presented as an ostensibly public and democratic process controlled by Parliament, while actually driven by big property owners (Gray 1998: 8). The transformation of England to an industrial society through the force of capitalist industrialization provided a microcosm of today’s global money economy and prevailing paradigm of profit and domination.⁴ It signalled how future trade that developed between the colonizers and the colonized would become skewed (Carley and Christie 1992), and how the lives of people in the South would be transformed by powerful and seemingly indomitable Northern interests. The new scientific and industrial revolutions of the twentieth century meant that Northern power would go on to impact on developing nations under the guise of ‘development’ and of ‘aid’.⁵ Adam Smith’s concept of ‘the invisible hand’⁶ was reconstructed to endorse whatever operations the capitalist free market economy called for. The plans of the Allies crafted at Bretton Woods after the Second World War resulted in extended ways of exercising power over people and nature through the globalization of the economy, strengthened by the creation of Northern-dominated global structures such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (Lang and Hines 1993; Esty 1994; Brack 1998).⁷, ⁸ These institutions, set up to run the world in a ‘democratic’ fashion, have proved to be deeply undemocratic (Monbiot 2003). They imposed liberal market structures onto the economic life of societies worldwide, creating what amounts in many ways to a single global, asymmetric ‘free’ market (Gray 1998: 2), which, to the poor and the powerless, has represented an ‘invisible elbow’ (Jacobs 1991: 127). From the early 1990s onwards this neoliberal ascendancy (the ‘Washington Consensus’) used fiscal incentives and sanctions at the international level to ‘roll back’ the state, in both developed and emerging economies, and to give free rein to the market through abolishing government subsidies to producers, combined with the overhaul of external tariffs (‘structural adjustment’). These market reforms eventually paved the way for accelerated economic growth, notably in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) at the expense of growing internal inequality and the plunder of natural resources.

The neo-Marxian contribution to the environmental debate that emerged in the late twentieth century helped to expose the effects of earlier domination, and tipped the discourse on ‘sustainability’ from a Northern-dominated focus on ‘nature conservation’, based on a scientific paradigm, to one which examined the inextricability of environmental and social responsibility, and exposed how power and knowledge are used to dominate the environment and people.⁹ The root causes of the global problematic were deemed to be the capitalist means of production and consumption, the institutions set in place to support this, and the asymmetric power that those institutions represent. However, this analysis, with hindsight, was only partially accurate and seriously over-deterministic.

The global problematic today mirrors the intensified outcomes of the capitalist political economy and its historical colonization of much of the globe, encompassing both ‘liberal democracies’ and authoritarian capitalist economies, notably Russia. Moreover, in China, a hybrid economy developed in the period from 1990 that combined elements of state socialism with a highly dynamic market-based system. Massive increases in world trade, and especially the rise of China, have continued to benefit the developed world, not least from reducing living costs for its domestic populations,¹⁰ while the broad secular trends of Northern capitalism have taken root in newly industrializing countries (NICs). Inequalities between rich and poor countries have forced the poor countries to adopt ‘market-friendly’ policies and to embrace a liberal market version of capitalism (Carley and Christie 1992). Developing countries have emulated Northern consumerist aspirations, with Southern elites enjoying new-found life-styles while basic levels of health, welfare and education for the majority fail to be attained (George 1976; 1988). The process of globalization, exercised through both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media and consumption patterns, has ensured the continuing hegemony of market-based values, notably through the dissemination of the Internet. This global reach of information technology and the new media might even be seen as a refinement of earlier processes such as the capture of the commons and the drive for imperialism (Newby 1980; The Ecologist 1993; Diani 2000; Van Aelst and Walgrave 2007; Van Laer 2010). However, today’s ‘imperialist’ powers are likely to be transnational corporations, often richer and more powerful than individual governments (Korten 1995; Madeley 2007; Bonanno and Constance 2008), whose policies include at least token reference to ‘corporate social responsibility’. They are also more elusive, and able to shift wealth and physical plant around the globe. The crisis provoked by economic and cultural globalization also has a physical parallel in the problem of anthropogenic climate change, which presents a challenge to international policy that is both enormously complex, and has created a new site for political contestation. Compliance with the requirements of climate change policy demands a serious reduction of the environmental impacts of industry, which in turn calls for fundamental changes in economic structures and processes which conventional economic analysis ignores, and which is denied and resisted at industry and institutional levels.

The essential character of production and consumption patterns is the basis of the most serious environmental problems (Jacobs 1996), as is the issue of values. Redclift (1996) points out that we have confused the ‘standard of living’ with the quality of life, making the consumer society that underpins the capitalist goals of business easier to manipulate (see also Marcuse 1964; Robertson 1990; Durning 1992), and destroying Marx’s vision of the proletariat as agents of change. This legitimates corporate control over expectations and behaviour, where individual acquisition of the status symbols of the capitalist version of ‘the good life’ outpaces concern for ‘the common good’ (Daly and Cobb 1989). A corollary of this has been the emergence of social movements which, despite their epistemological and political differences, are linked by their concern for environmental, social and equity issues. These may represent a potential force for change which could provide a powerful alternative paradigm to that of the capitalist political economy (O’Connor, J. 1998; Doherty and Doyle, 2008).

The environmental backlash

The counter-attack against the power of globalization and market capitalism is observed in the outcry against their impact on the environment (if not against other institutional forms of hegemony). This was initiated with Rachel Carson’s¹¹ exposé of the chemicals industry (1962), and is well documented, needing only a brief summary of key points here. The environmental discourses of the 1960s and 1970s were grounded in a perspective that was broader and more ‘political’ than the earlier ‘conservation’ discourse.¹² They exposed the outcomes of capitalist industry and economics and cast doubt on the dominant political conception that economic growth itself, left unfettered, would resolve environmental as well as social problems. The energy of that early movement, with its emphasis upon environmental and public virtues, may be reflected today in new social trends, such as the protests against genetically engineered food, globalization and the destruction of ‘nature’. For its part, the ‘environmental’ movement itself has to a large extent become engulfed in the predominating environmental management paradigm and has relinquished some of the moral leadership it once represented (Sachs 1993). A Blueprint for Survival (The Ecologist, 1972) forecast the irreversible destruction of life-support systems and the breakdown of society. The establishment of the Club of Rome and the publication of Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972)¹³ re-launched a neo-Malthusian¹⁴ discourse, expounding the problèmatique as arising essentially from exponential population growth and reinforcing Hardin’s argument (1968) that people are incapable of putting ‘collective’ interests before ‘individual’ ones. As neo-Marxists joined the debate (for example, Redclift 1987), the Limits to Growth focus on ‘scarcity’ was exposed as ignoring the discourse of ‘distribution’.¹⁵ The contestation had already become a struggle as to who should define and construct the discourse, based on the nexus between power and knowledge. Detractors of the enviro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Part I History and evolution of the concept of sustainable development
• Part II Institutional dimensions of sustainable development
• Part III Environmental dimensions of sustainable development
• Part IV Social dimensions of sustainable development
• Part V Economic dimensions of sustainable development
• Part VI Sustainable development: future challenges
• Index