Development and Sustainability

The Challenge of Social Change

Alberto Cimadamore, Maurice Mittelmark, Gro Therese Lie, Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller, Alberto Cimadamore, Maurice Mittelmark, Gro Therese Lie, Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783606245
• eBook ISBN: 9781783606269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

While the need for effective action toward a greener and socially inclusive economy has long been evident, health promotion in the context of sustainable development has faltered. Arguing that human health is the key factor to sustainable development, Development and Sustainability promotes a fresh, transdisciplinary approach to the eradication of extreme poverty. This ground-breaking book calls for new forms of cooperation which cross the traditional boundaries between social activism and science, and which are capable of harnessing the complex knowledge that such radical change requires. The contributions bridge the gap between those working for health and those working for sustainability science and the green economy, through developing the methodological and scientific means to deal with some of the most critical issues faced by humanity in the twenty-first century.

1 | DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY SCIENCE: TRANSDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE FOR POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE

Alberto D. Cimadamore, Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller, Gro Therese Lie and Maurice B. Mittelmark

Introduction

This book interlinks four concepts: development, sustainability science and transdisciplinarity, all in the quest for positive social change. The editors have been working for years, mostly separately, with different notions of development. Our exposure to sustainability science and transdisciplinarity is of more recent vintage. Some of us approach development with a focus on poverty and international relations in order to understand the way in which development changes lives and societies; others have been more focused on health promotion in the global South.

We are all attracted by the addition of ‘sustainable’ to development, because the needs of present and future generations force us to have a long-term systemic view of the interactions between nature and society and the implications for the global system. Still, we appreciate the quandaries of perceived views on development, and the appeal of post-development alternative approaches and the critique of Western-initiated programmes aiming for sustainable development and poverty eradication1 (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997; Escobar 2012; Rist 2014; Pogge et al. 2013; Cimadamore et al. 2013). The mainstream approach to sustainable development seems rightfully characterized as being more ‘about sustaining [economic] development … than developing sustainability in the ecological sense’ (Castro 2004: 220). Yet what approach to development will satisfy the critics, and the counter-critics, and still deliver on people’s urgent need for schools, healthcare, sanitation and other essential components of a decent life?

It is no wonder that tensions and conflicts are components of any kind of development discussion. Our journey as social scientists is influenced by diverse theoretical and methodological experiences, and we feel the need to take others’ perspectives as a strategy for our individual and collective scientific growth. We are keenly aware of the limitations to our understanding resulting from the disciplinary perspectives of our respective educational paths. We do our modest best within our disciplinary territories, and strive to experience the richness of transdisciplinarity. In our understanding, transdisciplinarity is qualitatively different from multidisciplinarity (and interdisciplinarity). It denotes research conducted by investigators from different disciplines working jointly with relevant society actors to create conceptual, methodological and practical innovations that integrate and move beyond discipline-specific approaches to confront vital social problems. This is why we embraced a transdisciplinary ethic in developing the project leading to this book. Indeed, we could hardly have chosen otherwise, as transdisciplinarity seems so interlinked to sustainability science that it is almost impossible to contemplate the latter without referring to the former.

This chapter provides readers with the roadmap we use to move from our disciplinary and interdisciplinary activities towards transdisciplinarity and sustainability science. It introduces readers to the work of colleagues who participated in the journey, which started with a call for papers on ‘Development and Sustainability Science – the Challenge of Transdisciplinary Knowledge for Social Change’2 and continues with this book project. The book closes with the following question: How do the contributions in the foregoing chapters fit into the project as represented in the call for papers and how do they deal with development, sustainability science and transdisciplinarity?

Further setting the stage for the main set of chapters, we will continue to discuss how we have defined and understood development, sustainability science and transdisciplinarity. The material on development includes a description of development scholarship at the University of Bergen. This provides an important context, since all the editors are at the University of Bergen. This introductory chapter is logically linked to the concluding chapter, where we discuss how the following chapters address the original intention set in the call for papers. The book concludes by considering some of the challenges ahead, and how this book will add to our foundation for future progress in Bergen.

Development and the search for sustainability

This book has its genesis in a workshop conceived as a practical step to forge a new international collaboration on sustainable development between the University of Bergen (UiB) and other national and international institutions. Poverty and health were at the core of our preoccupations, whereby the goal was to work towards connecting social and environmental sciences for a definite purpose in an emerging collaborative effort: enhancing the well-being of people and their environments where it is most needed, namely the places where severe poverty stubbornly continues to hamper sustainable human development.

The concept ‘development’ is controversial and disputed. Development has been defined in different ways in different disciplines and has varied over time. We do not want to concentrate here on a theoretical discussion about this, but we are conscious of how certain interpretations of development have had hegemony in academic communities as well as in international agencies. Depending on how we understand development, different possibilities arise for integrating disciplinary views into transdisciplinary collaboration.

Historically, theories on development have roots in sociology, anthropology, economics and political science, but are not limited to these disciplines. Before the Second World War and in the years following the war, the so-called modernization theory dominated and created the intellectual roots of the field. Modernization theory looked at which aspects of countries were beneficial and which constituted obstacles for economic development with a distinct idea of progress. One of the main ideas that emerged from this was that development assistance targeted to overcome obstacles for economic growth could lead to the modernization of ‘traditional’ or ‘backward’ societies in the sense marked by the evolution of developed Western societies. The modernization and other mainstream approaches to development have been heavily criticized by scholars of diverse theoretical orientations (Peet and Hartwick 2009) and geopolitical contexts (Villareal 1979), ranging from structuralism (e.g. Raul Prebisch – see Love 1980; Furtado 1990), neo-Marxism (Amin 1978), dependency theory (Cardoso and Faletto 1979) to feminist approaches (Boserup 1970; Saunders 2002). In the 1980s and 1990s, post-development theory arose and questioned the idea of national economic development altogether. According to post-development scholars, the goal of improving living standards leans on arbitrary claims as to the desirability and possibility of that goal. Wolfgang Sachs claims that development thinking has been dominated by the West in an ethnocentric (contra an eco-centric) fashion, and he and other authors argue that ‘the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape’ (Sachs 1992: 1). The Western lifestyle may be neither a realistic nor a desirable goal for many (we can even say the majority) of the world’s population. Given the current global challenges (social, environmental, ethical) faced by humankind, alternative conceptions of development that go beyond modernization need to be considered by an emerging transdisciplinary field such as sustainable science.

Sustainable development is being seen by post-development scholars as a rubric for Western-style development, with loss of a country’s own culture, people’s perception of themselves and modes of life.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• About CROP
• Series titles
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 | Development and sustainability science: transdisciplinary knowledge for positive social change
• 2 | Seeking wisdom: a transdisciplinary perspective on Australian Indigenous practices and planetary management
• 3 | Policies for poverty reduction in a Transformative Green Economy
• 4 | Health promotion and sustainable development in Kazakhstan
• 5 | Children’s literacy in health and sustainability
• 6 | Participatory research as a tool for change in ecosystem approaches to health and social equity
• 7 | Connecting development and sustainability: empowering people to effective international cooperation
• 8 | Sustainability and transdisciplinary knowledge: experience gained and challenges ahead
• Notes on contributors
• Index