Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future

A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission)

Iris Borowy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135961299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique en matière d'environnement et d'énergie

The UN World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, alerted the world to the urgency of making progress toward economic development that could be sustained without depleting natural resources or harming the environment. Written by an international group of politicians, civil servants and experts on the environment and development, the Brundtland Report changed sustainable development from a physical notion to one based on social, economic and environmental issues.

This book positions the Brundtland Commission as a key event within a longer series of international reactions to pressing problems of global poverty and environmental degradation.It shows that its report, "Our Common Future", published in 1987, covered much more than its definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" for which it became best known. It also addressed a long list of issues which remain unresolved today. The book explores how the work of the Commission juggled contradictory expectations and world views, which existed within the Commission and beyond, and drew on the concept of sustainable development as a way to reconcile profound differences. The result was both an immense success and disappointment. Coining an irresistibly simple definition enabled the Brundtland Commission to place sustainability firmly on the international agenda. This definition gained acceptability for a potentially divisive concept, but it also diverted attention from underlying demands for fundamental political and social changes.

Meanwhile, the central message of the Commission – the need to make inconvenient sustainability considerations a part of global politics as much as of everyday life – has been side-lined. The book thus assesses to what extent the Brundtland Commission represented an immense step forward or a missed opportunity.

1

INTRODUCTION

The difficult elements of sustainable development

‘Sustainable development’ is with us.

At the time of writing, in spring 2013, the term ‘sustainable development’ produces 335 million hits on Google. The European Union, the African Union and the Organization of American States name sustainable development as one of their policy goals. We are living in the United Nations (UN) Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, launched in 2005. Universities in Leipzig, Utrecht, Uppsala, Basel, Berlin, Graz, Stellenbosch, Venice, Linköping, New Delhi, Malmö, Paris, Vienna, Berkeley, London, Sydney, Sevilla and Monaco (and probably others) offer master’s programmes in Sustainable Development. The UN keeps a Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform.¹ The Government of Hong Kong, a Nicaraguan association of small farmers, and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park offer sustainable development funds.² The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has offices in Geneva, Washington DC and Brussels.³ And, as the ultimate sign of having established a place in modern global society, Sustainable Development is a member of Facebook.⁴

This ubiquitous presence contrasts both with the diffuse understandings of what the concept means and with its apparent absence from real life developments.

It is not difficult to see that current developments are unsustainable. At present, the world is using the resources and waste absorption capacities of 1.5 planets per time unit.⁵ Fifteen out of 24 crucial ecosystem services, evaluated by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005, were degraded or being used unsustainably, including fresh water, air and water purification, climate regulation and pest control.⁶ And the world is heading for a four degree temperature rise promising inundated coastal cities, increased food insecurity, frequent high-intensity tropical storms and further irreversible loss of biodiversity.⁷ If current developments continue unchanged, soon there will be no need to define unsustainable development, looking out the window will be enough.

Part of this discrepancy is that while ‘unsustainable development’ is easy enough to recognize for all who wish to see, ‘sustainable development’ is difficult to define since its two core elements, sustainability and development, are not self-evidently compatible.

Sustainability is the comparatively simpler idea, which can be explained in purely descriptive terms as the capacity of any given system to exist and reproduce on a long-term basis.⁸ Development adds a value judgement by implying a desired (i.e. by implication, a desirable) evolution of human society.

Combined, sustainable development refers to a manner of human living, which can exist and reproduce on a long-term basis while providing good living conditions. Inevitably, controversial aspects abound. If, in most basic terms, sustainable development allows people to survive and lead good lives for a long time in the future, what does this mean? Who are ‘the people’? What constitutes ‘survive’? What is a ‘good life’? And what is ‘the future’?

For all we know, humanity has never known a state when all of its members lived the entire span of their potential lifetimes. There have always been people who died prematurely as a result of diseases, accidents and/or hunger and it is difficult to imagine that they would ever stop doing so completely. Even in an ideal world, there will be some diseases, some accidents and some kind of hardship, which will prevent some people from living until old age. Realistically, therefore, even a sustainable world will know some degree of premature death. In a generic, mostly unreflected sense, the concept of sustainability assumes that ‘many’ or ‘most’ or ‘almost all’ people realize their potential of lifetime. But how many is that? How much disease do we accept as normal? How many children, who never reach adolescence, do we regard as an acceptable element of desirable development? 2 per cent? 0.2 per cent? 20 per cent? And what length of life do we accept as qualifying for ‘potential of lifetime’? How many years constitute a full life? Whose life expectancy should be taken as a worldwide norm? That of Japan? Or of the USA? Russia? Bolivia? Morocco? Haiti? With what amount of social security, health and medical care? At whose cost? Should different standards of life expectancies be used for people in different countries? On what grounds should that be morally acceptable? If all people should have a right to the same life expectancy, who should be responsible for bringing this about? And what living standard do we have in mind? What level of resource consumption and waste production do we consider the minimum? Or the maximum? Or the optimum? And again: is it to be the same for everybody? And if not, why not? If yes, how? And what tradeoff do we envisage between living standard, number of people and length of life? Between different groups of people living today as well as between people living today and those living in the future? And what is the ‘future’? Obviously, at some point in time the Earth, the sun and, eventually, the universe will come to an end, so ‘future’ cannot mean indefinitely. Nor can it mean next year. But how long does a development have to be sustained to count as sustainable? 100 years? 1,000? 10,000? Ten million?

One attempt at an accurate definition, which takes these caveats into account, characterizes sustainable development as ‘sustaining at least current levels of human wellbeing over some reasonable but finite time horizon’.⁹ This explanation provides valuable orientation. But its wording indicates an ex post approach, making sustainable development detectable when it has happened and, by implication, guidelines on how to get there are no longer needed. However, to be of tangible use, decision makers in all sectors and on all levels – in other words: we the people – need a normative definition which delineates the direction and range of acceptable policies, laws, investment and private behaviour.

This perceived need formed the background for the UN to establish a World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1983 and to ask it, among other tasks, to propose ‘long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development to the year 2000 and beyond’.¹⁰ This came as close to finding an answer to the core question of humanity as it gets, and the UN provided a mandate and a tight time frame but no funding. The group was soon called the Brundtland Commission after its chairwoman, Gro Harlem Brundtland.¹¹

After three years the Commission presented its answers in a report. It was considered a good report at the time, but today it is generally remembered only for a single phrase in which it defined sustainable development as meeting ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.¹² This phrase was widely endorsed and has remained by far the ‘most widely accepted starting point for scholars and practitioners concerned with environment and development dilemmas’.¹³ In fact, this definition has gained such a status of ‘truth’ that frequently it is cited as fact, without referencing its origin.¹⁴ However, its general and somewhat diffuse nature has led to numerous attempts at more specific explanations. In 1997 Susan Murcott collected 57 existing definitions of ‘sustainable development’, and debate has continued since.¹⁵

The Brundtland Commission did not invent either the expression or the concept of ‘sustainable development’. In 1984, an internal background paper of the World Bank was entitled ‘Carrying Capacity, Population Growth, and Sustainable Development’.¹⁶ A 1980 study of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on a world conservation strategy, published in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), carried the term ‘sustainable development’ in its subtitle and dedicated a chapter to its discussion. It is often named as the first instance of the expression.¹⁷ However, a 1979 study by the International Institute for Environment and Development on the environmental record of eight multilateral agencies included a discussion on the concept of ‘sustainable development’ as an underexplored concept of development literature.¹⁸ And there is a longer line of words which expressed a similar concept. In 1981, Lester Brown wrote an analysis called ‘Building a Sustainable Society’ for the Worldwatch Institute.¹⁹ Discussions at UNEP used various terms including ‘ecodevelopment’, ‘development without destruction’, ‘development without destroying the environment’ and ‘environmentally sound development’.²⁰ Even the definition had predecessors. Around 1974, Luis Sanchez, director of the Division of Economic and Social Programmes, in a memo to UNEP staff members, referred to ‘ecodevelopment’ as:

an approach to development of a given eco-system or locality which harmonizes economic and ecological factors to assure best use of both the human and natural resources of the region to best meet the needs and aspirations of the people on a sustainable basis.²¹

Even earlier, the declaration of the UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) had declared that the ‘natural resources of the earth … must be safeguarded for the benefit of present and future generations’.²² Barbara Ward and René Dubos formulated the need and possible strategies for development which would sustain livelihoods in their book Only One Earth.²³ Probably even the expression of ‘sustainable development’ was first coined by Barbara Ward in discussions, from where it spread into the international environmentalist scene.²⁴ But even before then, in 1966, Kenneth Boulding, in his article on the ‘Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’ argued that the welfare of the individual person depended on his ability to identify with community in space as well as with ‘community extending over time from the past into the future’.²⁵

Thus, by 1983, discussing sustainable development had had a history when it became part of the mandate of the WCED, and the expression for which it would become best known was also probably the least original component of its work. This is not to say that the definition it coined was insignificant, and the phrase is correctly cited as the contribution of the Brundtland Commission to the sustainability discourse.²⁶ But reducing its work to this phrase trivializes both the work of the WCED and the challenges of sustainable development, which are at the bottom of the enormous discrepancy between widespread theoretical endorsement of the concept and the near absence of its implementation.

To begin with, the WCED was not created as an academic entity designed to enrich intellectual discourse but as an agent of tangible policy. This purpose affected its work throughout, ranging from the selection of Commission members and issues, to its conclusions and its efforts to publicize its findings. Thus, viewing the Commission merely as an exercise in issue conceptualization misses its central point. Instead, it should more accurately be perceived as an integral component of international policy efforts.

This perspective is important because it makes visible its substantial agenda of change, which WCED members clearly considered the centrepiece of their work. The Commission named its terms of reference ‘A Mandate for Change’, and included an ‘Agenda for Change’ into its work programme.²⁷ This calling for change was not a sudden or arbitrary inspiration. It was rooted in earlier movements and strands of thought which had voiced doubts about the wisdom of ongoing environmental and economic development and in which most Commission members had had active roles. In as much as these movements differed in their interpretations of reality and of what was going wrong with it, Commissioners arrived with different, sometimes contradictory, preconceived ideas about what type of changes were needed. For instance, to what extent, if at all, should future policies consider the historical responsibility of colonialism? Was development primarily an economic term or, if not, what else should it refer to? Were there limits to growth, locally, regionally, globally or not at all? Should production and consumption be universally discouraged? Or encouraged? Or reduced in the North but encouraged in the South?

Given their different views on these issues, how did Commission members find agreement? Which calls for change did they adopt, which did they modify, and which did they reject? What vision of society did this amount to? And how did they negotiate consensus and compromise?

These questions point to a second neglected dimension of the Commission as a negotiating process, both within the members and between the Commission and numerous outside actors. This is a central aspect in view of the profound conflicts of world view and interests which erupt as soon as the implications of ‘sustainable development’ are seriously considered. WCED discussions can be viewed as ersatz debates, acting out global controversies in the nutshell of a Commission. In reality, the WCED went far beyond a delegated discussion. By listening to people in hearings and by actively soliciting and receiving contributions from different parts of the world and also by arousing support and criticism later, the WCED went out of its way to launch the real global debate, connecting people who would never meet intellectually, politically or geographically. But the process was anything but easy and anything but perfect. Like any negotiation, it involved compromises and trade-offs when ideal reconciliations of contradictory views and interests were out of reach or simply impossible.

Gradually, it became clear that reaching their aim would require difficult reconciliations in at least four dimensions, involving tensions between:

a	present versus future generations;
b	economic versus environmental perspectives;
c	North versus South;
d	scientific accuracy versus political acceptability.

Present versus future generations

This dimension was expressed in the widely cited definition. It may owe its easy acceptance to the combined impact of a. its reference to the archetypical human desire to provide for one’s children, and b. its undemanding, low-conflict implications, since future generations do not pick fights with those living in the present about the consequences of (in-)action. As a result, the definition has been widely endorsed in principle without being translated into tangible policy or behaviour.

Both reactions are rooted in human history, whose record is ambivalent in the way humans have or have not sought to maximize current benefit at the expense of future generations. In a long-term perspective, humans have mostly acted with little knowledge about or regard for the long-term consequences of their actions. When early man spread around the world and populated all continents except Antarctica, he and she were presumably looking for food, and in the process they almost certainly drove a series of animals of attractive hunting size such as the mammoths, mastodons or moas to extinction.²⁸ As a result, they deprived coming generations of valuable hunting prey, who then had to find other ways to feed their families. Throughout the millennia, men and women frequently found they had exploited a resource beyond its regenerative capacity so that they were short of food, water, wood, huntable species or other necessities, and much of human history can be seen as efforts to find substitutes. Options were few but effective: humans could leave the area to find new territories whose resources were not (yet) depleted. They could develop and refine agricultural techniques, which enabled them to get more food out of existing territory and gradually transformed ever-increasing stretches of nature into ever-more productive farmland. Humans could wage wars against neighbours and take away their food and land. Or they could reduce their food requirements by allowing parts of their societies to starve and die, usually the very young, the very old and those of low social status.²⁹

The overall record is positive. The very fact that we exist today indicates success. Though settlements and civilizations have repeatedly collapsed and countless people have suffered hunger and premature death throughout the ages, humanity as a whole has thrived to the extent that today its activities shape the face of the Earth, that it ...