Sustainability

Life Chances and Livelihoods

Michael Redclift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134644520
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The concept of sustainability is traditionally viewed in exclusively environmental terms. Sustainability: Life Chances and Livelihoods links peoples livelihoods and life chances to the concept of sustainability by examining the way in which social and economic processes complement and compound environmental change. Looking at the main ingredients of sustainable development - health, economic policy, land use, ethics and education, in both the north and south, this book demonstrates the way in which the life chances of individuals both effect and are affected by, their environments. Sustainability: Life Chances and Livelihoods shows that the scope of sustainability thinking needs to be widened to embrace public policies and experiences in both developed and developing countries.By providing a comparative focus, both spatially and temporally, the contributors demonstrate how the environmental concerns of the northern developed world are culturally translated into the south, often into immediate survival questions.

1 Introduction

Michael Redclift

Introduction

The concept of sustainability has often been used in a rather cavalier fashion: for example, to demonstrate philosophical points about all societies, without grounding the observations in historical time, or to contrast other societies with our own, thereby urging a political agenda through implied comparison. The concept of sustainability has rarely been advanced by such sweeping, and ahistorical, comparisons. In particular, there has been a woeful neglect of what sustainability might mean for other people, in other cultures, or in other times.

In this book we want to illuminate practices, as well as analytical understanding; and to locate sustainability (and its absence) in everyday life. We begin by examining the use to which sustainability is put in the public policy discourses that surround us in the developed countries. This becomes our point of departure, but these experiences need to be linked to two other dimensions of sustainability. The first is the temporal dimension—the historical context in which communities maintain, or defend, their cultural and economic integrity. The second concerns livelihoods in developing countries today—where sustainability is often not a prescription for ‘alternative’ Green values, but a defence of existing values, tied to specific forms of reproduction and behaviour, under threat from external economic forces, or the collapse of a delicate natural resource balance.

The interest in sustainability in the developed world is linked to two currents which have come to characterise the interface between human aspirations and the mastery of nature. The first process involves finding economic values or indicators for economic and social phenomena—the economisation of society. Human activities are translated into economic terms, and removed from both their environmental and cultural contexts. The second process involves a revaluation of nature—nature becomes ‘socialised’—and transformed into something which can be managed and controlled, which can be evaluated through quantitative indices. Both currents are represented in the term ‘sustainable development’, which embodies the contradiction between human aspirations for domination over nature, and our ultimate dependence on natural systems and ecological constraints. Modernism has been characterised as a discourse predicated upon the dualism of nature and culture, and as such a denial of the essentially ‘social’ character of nature (Braun and Castree 1998). As we shall see later, both processes, the economisation of society and the socialisation of nature, raise ethical, distributive and ‘rights’ issues. The discussion of both processes leads us towards a redefinition of citizenship itself.

Sustainable development

Each scientific ‘problem’ that is resolved by human intervention, using fossil fuels or new materials and technologies, is often viewed as a triumph of management, and a contribution to economic good, when its ‘solution’ might also represent a future threat to sustainability. Having jettisoned the fear that resources themselves were limited, in the 1970s, we are today faced by the prospect that the means we have used to overcome resource scarcity, resource substitution and increased levels of industrial metabolism, themselves contribute to the next generation of problems that are associated with the global environment. This realisation provides an enormous challenge to conventional social science thinking, a challenge encapsulated in the term ‘sustainable development’.

Sustainable development was defined by the Brundtland Commission in the following way: ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Brundtland 1987). This definition has been brought into service in the absence of agreement about a process which almost everybody thinks is desirable. However, the simplicity of this approach obscures underlying complexities and contradictions. Before exploring, later in this volume, whether we can establish indicators of sustainability, it is worth pausing to examine the apparent consensus that reigns over sustainable development.

First, following the Brundtland definition, it is clear that ‘needs’ themselves change, so it is unlikely (as the definition implies) that those of future generations will be the same as those of the present generation. The question then is, where does ‘development’ come into the picture? Obviously development itself contributes to ‘needs’, helping to define them differently for each generation, and for different cultures. This focus on what distinguishes the needs of different societies is represented in Part 2 and 3 of this book.

There is another, second, question, not covered by this definition of sustainable development, which concerns the way in which needs are defined in different cultures. Most of the ‘consensus’ surrounding sustainable development has involved a syllogism: sustainable development is necessary for all of us, but it may be defined differently in terms of each and every culture. This is superficially convenient, until we begin to ask how these different definitions match up. If in one society it is agreed that fresh air and open spaces are necessary before development can be sustainable, it will be increasingly difficult to marry this definition of ‘needs’ with those of other societies seeking more material wealth, even at the cost of increased pollution. And how do we establish which course of action is more sustainable? Recourse to the view that societies must decide for themselves is not very helpful. (Who decides? And in whose interests? On what basis are the decisions made?) At the same time there are problems in ignoring culturally specific definitions in the interest of a more inclusive ontology.

There is also considerable confusion surrounding what is to be sustained. One of the reasons why there are so many contradictory approaches to sustainable development (although not the only reason) is that different people identify the objects of sustainability differently.

For those whose primary interest is in ecological systems and the conservation of natural resources, it is the natural resource base which needs to be sustained. The key question that is usually posed is the following: how can development activities be designed which help to maintain ecological processes, such as soil fertility, the assimilation of wastes, and water and nutrient recycling? Another, related, issue is the conservation of genetic materials, both in themselves and (perhaps more importantly) as part of complex, and vulnerable systems of biodiversity. The natural resource base needs to be conserved because of its intrinsic value.

There are other approaches, however. Some environmental economists argue that the natural stock of resources, or ‘critical natural capital’, needs to be given priority over the flows of income which depend upon it. They make the point that human-made capital cannot be an effective substitute for natural capital, the claim of so-called ‘weak’ sustainability (Pearce 1993:15–17). If our objective is the sustainable yield of renewable resources, then sustainable development implies the management of these resources in the interest of the natural capital stock. This raises a number of issues which are both political and distributive: who owns and controls genetic materials, and manages the environment? At what point does the conservation of natural capital unnecessarily inhibit the sustainable flows of resources? Second, according to what principles are the social institutions governing the use of resources, organised? What systems of tenure dictate the ownership and management of the natural resource base? What institutions do we bequeath, together with the environment, to future generations? Far from taking us away from issues of distributive politics, and political economy, a concern with sustainable development inevitably raises such issues more forcefully than ever.

The question ‘what is to be sustained?’ can also be answered in another way. Some writers argue that it is present (or future) levels of production (or consumption) that need to be sustained. The argument is that the growth of global population will lead to increased demands on the environment, and our definition of sustainable development should incorporate this fact. At the same time, the consumption practices of individuals will change too. Given the choice, most people in India or China might want a television or an automobile of their own, like most households in the industrialised North.

What prevents them from acquiring one is their poverty, their inability to consume, to exert their influence on the market, as well as the relatively ‘underdeveloped’ infrastructure of poor countries.

Is there anything inherently unsustainable in broadening the market for computers, TV sets or cars? If the answer is ‘yes’, then those of us who possess these goods need to be clear about why we consume goods unavailable to others. The response is usually that it is difficult, or even impossible, to function in our society without information or private motorised mobility. But, this is to evade the question of what I would call ‘underlying social commitments’: the taken for granted aspects of everyday social life (Redclift 1996). We may define our needs in ways which effectively exclude others meeting theirs, and in the process increase the long-term risks for the sustainability of their livelihoods. Most importantly, however, the implications of the processes through which we enlarge our choices, and reduce those of others, is largely invisible to us, it may take place at several removes from us, in other countries, or in the future.

If we concentrate our attention on our own society, we can begin by identifying aspects of our management of the environment that are unsustainable. It is a short step, as we shall see, to the development of sustainability indicators. The growth of interest in sustainability indicators has followed that of sustainable development. Again, the importance of this issue is matched by the difficulty in addressing it convincingly, as Paul Ekins argues in Chapter 3. There are numerous indicators of unsustainability, but it has proved much more difficult to find those for sustainability.

The reasons for these difficulties are not hard to find. Economics developed, historically, around the idea of scarcity; it was the ‘dismal science’. The role of technology was principally that of raising output from scarce resources. Among other benefits of economic growth was the political legitimacy it conferred, within a dynamic economy, on those who could successfully overcome the obstacles to more spending. Wealth was regarded as a good thing, in itself. This proposition, which underlines the difficulty in reconciling ‘development’ with ‘sustainability’, strikes at the legitimisation of only one form of ‘value’ within capitalist, industrial societies. Habermas expressed his criticism of this view forcefully, in the following way:

can civilisation afford to surrender itself entirely to the…driving force of just one of its subsystems—namely, the pull of a dynamic…recursively closed, economic system which can only function and remain stable by taking all relevant information, translating it into, and processing it in, the language of economic value.

(Habermas 1991)

This issue, of how we value the environment, and the implications of our valuation for planning sustainability, is addressed at several points in this book, but particularly in the chapters by Paul Ekins and Caroline Sullivan.

The environment and public policy

It is clear that once we begin to prise behind surface appearances ‘sustainability’ means different things to different people. To some the ‘environment’ is linked indelibly with their livelihoods, with the way they make a living. To others the environment suggests a place, or an activity, which is associated with the time they spend on recreation—it is essentially non-vocational. These different kinds of emphasis are sometimes, wrongly in our judgement, associated with poverty and affluence, respectively. The industrialised North, it is said, is characterised by a concern with lifestyles, implying the importance of taste, fashion and personal consumption, all expressed through the ability to exercise choice in the marketplace. This is sometimes compared, often in sweeping terms, with the livelihoods that are depicted in the poorer countries of the South, where people eke out a bare living, against a background of resource degradation and poverty.

This way of dividing up the globe is both inaccurate and confusing. The pursuit of goods, of personal identity, even of fashion, is not confined to the rich, or to the rich worlds. It is also exhibited in squatter settlements and popular culture, in urban barrios and rural villages throughout the developing world (as well as in ethnic minority communities in the North). In the same way, the effect of the environment in underpinning peoples’ life chances, in helping to determine their health or financial security, is not confined to the poor, or to the industrialised world, as Keith Mason argues in this volume, where you live, even in developed countries, is quite a good indicator of the quality of your health, and your life chances in general. In reality we are subject to pressures—in livelihoods and lifestyles—wherever we live, and whatever our relationship to the environment.

The direction that environmental policy is taking, particularly in the North, is linked to the ‘balance’ that societies achieve in seeking both economic growth and environmental protection. In Chapter 4 Philip Kivell examines the demands of space—especially urban space—on limited physical resources, and apparendy irreconcilable planning objectives. To fully appreciate the different ways in which environmental risks and benefits are manifested, we need to identify different spheres of activity, in all of which sustainability is a key organising principle. As argued in several of the chapters in this volume (perhaps most notably by Mason and Kivell) sustainability is most usefully employed as an integrative concept, serving to integrate important policy domains, such as health and land use planning, within the wider compass of public policy.

One way of conceptualising these distinctions, and to integrate sustainability as a concept, is to identify different spheres of environmental activity. These different spheres of activity in which sustainability can be analysed are as follows.

Spheres of environmental activity

1. The sphere of production
   
   • the individual’s immediate work environment (industrial risks, plant pollution)
   • work-related risks
   • indirect consequences of production activities: waste, toxins, pollution
2. The sphere of consumption the
   
   • individual’s consumption practices and choices: health risks, food risks
   • indirect consequences of consumption: food miles, ghost acres, ecological footprints
   • socially generated consumption: energy, waste
3. The sphere of social capital/infrastructure
   
   • the built environment, urban space, public utilities, transport infrastructures
   • spatial structures and access to services with distributional consequences (collective consumption)
4. The sphere of ‘nature’
   
   • amenity and the countryside
   • positional goods and landscape
   • access to wilderness
   • animal rights and welfare
5. The sphere of physical sustainability
   
   • air pollution, climate change
   • ozone depletion
   • stability of coastlines, watershed forests, human management of ‘natural disasters’

Environmental policy assumes a series of background activities. It follows that we need to consider the wider relationship between society and nature, within which policies and technologies are developed. As the diagram above shows, we can identify five different spheres of environmental activities, all of which carry associated benefits and costs, and risks associated with environmental uses.

The first sphere is that of production. The environmental effects of production are identifiable in a numbers of ways: through the immediate work environment, such as productive plant; through the effects of employment on health and welfare, and in meeting the risks associated with industrial activity. There are also important indirect effects of production activities, that are not so geographically confined, and may contribute to other spheres—such as transnational pollution, waste disposal or nuclear radiation.

Another sphere of environmental activity is that of consumption. This corresponds to the individual’s consumption of goods and services, and the risks associated with these consumption activities. As in the case of production, there are also indirect dimensions of consumption to be considered: the effect of consumption in one part of the planet on other areas, often distant in geographical terms. This concept of displaced consumption is captured in terms like food miles (the transport miles associated with delivering food to the consumer) and ecological footprints (the impact on the environment of geographically remote areas of colonial or post-colonial trade and exchange) as materials and natural resources are sourced from far away. Finally, the sphere of consumption includes socially generated consumption—the generation of energy to meet consumer demand, and the disposal of waste and packaging to meet these demands.

The sphere of social capital and infrastructure provides the physical context against which the individual works and plays: the built environment, urban space, utilities such as energy, water and waste disposal, and the transport systems that link these activities. Under this heading we should also consider public services which are provided on a collective basis—such as public parks, recreational services and open areas.

The fourth sphere of environmental activity is represented by ‘nature’, in the sense of life-forms and biological systems external to human being, the countryside, forests and landscape. This sphere does not only inc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Sustainability
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• 1: Introduction
• Part 1: The environment and public policy
• Part 2: Historical perspectives on sustainable livelihoods
• Part 3: Geographical perspectives—the view from the South