Green Development

Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World

Bill Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781136734694
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política medioambiental y energética

The concept of sustainability lies at the core of the challenge of environment and development, and the way governments, business and environmental groups respond to it. Green Development provides a clear and coherent analysis of sustainable development in both theory and practice.

Green Development explores the origins and evolution of mainstream thinking about sustainable development and offers a critique of the ideas behind them. It draws a link between theory and practice by discussing the nature of the environmental degradation and the impacts of development. It argues that, ultimately, 'green' development has to be about political economy, about the distribution of power, and not about environmental quality. Its focus is strongly on the developing world.

The fourth edition retains the broad structure of previous editions, but has been updated to reflect advances in ideas and changes in international policy. Greater attention has been given to the political ecology of development, market-based and neoliberal environmentalism, and degrowth. This fully revised edition discusses:

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• the origins of thinking about sustainability and sustainable development, and its evolution to the present day;

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• the ideas that dominate mainstream sustainable development (including natural capital, the green economy, market environmentalism and ecological modernisation);

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• critiques of mainstream ideas and of neoliberal framings of sustainability, and alternative ideas about sustainability that challenge 'business as usual' thinking, such as arguments about limits to growth and calls for degrowth;

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• the dilemmas of sustainability in the context of forests, desertification, food and farming, biodiversity conservation and dam construction;

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• the challenge of policy choices about sustainability, particularly between reformist and radical responses to the contemporary global dilemmas.

Green Development offers clear insights into the challenges of environmental sustainability, and social and economic development. It is unique in offering a synthesis of theoretical ideas on sustainability and in its coverage of the extensive literature on environment and development around the world. The book has proved its value to generations of students as an authoritative, thought-provoking and readable guide to the field of sustainable development.

CHAPTER ONE

The dilemma of sustainability

1.1 ARE WE ALL ENVIRONMENTALISTS NOW?

In 2000, Kader Asmal, Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry in the first post-apartheid government of South Africa, wrote the Preface to the report of the World Commission on Dams, which he had chaired. He wrote

telling me, a harried public official who must answer to 48 million restless, hungry and thirsty people, to ‘Ensure development is sustainable and humane’ is like warning me ‘Operate, but don’t inflict new wounds’. I know that. What I don’t know is how to do it.

(Asmal 2000)

This wry comment perfectly captures the dilemma of sustainable development – the big idea may be obvious, but the path to achieving it is not.

Jeffrey Sachs (2015, p. 1) calls sustainable development ‘a central concept for our age’. It has been growing steadily into that prominent position over the last 40 years, but what is in his mind is the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit, held in New York in September 2015. In the glare of the global media, graced by the presence of celebrities and serenaded by a panoply of global pop stars, 193 countries voted to adopt a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These placed within a single document (called Transforming our World) a commitment to ending global poverty and limiting environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change (Ford 2015, UN 2015d). The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said

we recognize the need to reduce inequalities and to protect our common home by changing unsustainable patterns of consumption and production. And, we identify the overwhelming need to address the politics of division, corruption and irresponsibility that fuel conflict and hold back development.

(UN 2019)

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN 2015d) described itself as ‘a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity’ (UN 2015d, p. 3).The SDGs (soon renamed The Global Goals for Sustainable Development) consisted of 17 interlinked goals, with 169 identified targets (Table 1.1). Their scope was vast. Their aspiration was no less than to set out a framework for ending poverty and hunger by 2030 everywhere on earth. They proposed to ensure health (3) and gender equality (5), to ensure water and sanitation (6) and sustainable energy (7). They promised to reduce inequality (10), make cities safe (11), make production and consumption sustainable (12), combat climate change (13) and to conserve the oceans (14) and terrestrial ecosystems (15). They proposed to promote peaceful and inclusive societies (16).

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were the result of a long and gruelling process of debate and negotiation, which started in 2012, after the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They followed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), also agreed in New York at the ‘Millennium Summit’ of September 2000. The term ‘sustainable development’ itself became a development paradigm following the first UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992 (Lélé 1991, Scoones 2007). But the roots of the concept of sustainability are much older than that (as discussed in Chapter 2).

Table 1.1 The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Goal 1.	End poverty in all its forms everywhere
Goal 2.	End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Goal 3.	Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Goal 4.	Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Goal 5.	Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Goal 6.	Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Goal 7.	Ensure access to affordable, reliable sustainable and modern energy for all
Goal 8.	Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Goal 9.	Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
Goal 10.	Reduce inequality within and among countries
Goal 11.	Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
Goal 12.	Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Goal 13.	Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Goal 14.	Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Goal 15.	Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Goal 16.	Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Goal 17.	Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

Source: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Knowledge Platform, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld

The idea of sustainable development brings together two different streams of thinking. The first concerns the idea of development, an essentially twentieth-century concern with economic and social change. This was shaped by post Second World War decolonisation and has been a football kicked around by different political ideologies ever since. In the last two decades, development has increasingly been understood in terms of the reduction (or eradication) of poverty. The second idea concerns the impact of development on the environment. Concerns about the human impacts on nature and their implications for human flourishing are ancient (see Lane 2011), but in the second half of the twentieth century they came to the fore as a critical issue for government and society (Robin et al. 2013a, Warde et al. 2018).

Since the 1970s, these two sets of ideas have formed divergent poles in debates about global futures. They have grown in scope and intensity, pulling at each other like planets whose gravitational fields interlock. Can human demands on nature, driven by our search for basic needs and quality of life, be reconciled with the capacity of the earth’s environmental systems to provide what we demand? Can there be development that does not damage the biosphere? Such questions led to the first UN conference on the environment, in Stockholm in 1972, which was the critical first step in international debate about sustainability and the direct forerunner of the consideration of sustainable development in New York in 2015.

The beginning and end of this process lie in very different worlds. In 1972, the global population was approximately 3.7 billion, just over a third of them living in urban areas (37%, World Bank 2019). The world was locked in the Cold War, and the Vietnam War raged. Many countries were still seeking independence after decades of European colonisation (notably Portuguese territories such as Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique). Industrialised economies were enjoying the tail end of the post Second World War economic boom (before the 1973–75 recession). China was effectively a closed economy (Deng Xiaoping only opened the door to foreign investment in December 1978). There were no laptops and no email or Internet. The five largest companies in the USA were in car manufacture (General Motors, Ford), oil (Exxon Mobil), computers (IBM) and technology (General Electric, Fortune 2019). There was no recognition of climate change as something that might threaten human futures on any non-geological timescale.

By 2015, the global population had risen to about 7.4 billion, over half of it in urban areas (54%, World Bank 2019). The Iron Curtain had been down for two decades, and countries like China, India and Brazil had become leading players in an increasingly unregulated world economy. In place of the iron certainties of the Cold War came both a new openness and a new lawlessness as new states flexed their power and non-state actors (from corporations to terrorists) ignored government rules. The economic crash of 2008 had caused long-term damage to some economies (especially in the Eurozone), but the apparatus of free market capitalism (and the speculating banks that caused it) had not been restructured. The world’s most valuable company was Apple, with a market capitalisation of $725 billion (at that time almost twice the size of the second, Google, PwC 2015). Apple and Walmart (the retail giant) were in the Fortune ‘top 10’ alongside Exxon Mobil, Chevron, General Motors and Ford (Fortune 2017). In the wake of the Gulf War of 1990–1991; the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003); the 9/11 attack in New York in 2001 and civil war in Libya, Syria and Yemen, terrorism and the problem of refugees had come to dominate international news, governments and the United Nations. And climate change had become a burning political issue: the Paris Climate Summit in 2015 agreed measures to hold global average temperature rise below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Thinking about the environmental and social impacts of development has evolved and diversified in the last half century. In the 1980s (when the first edition of this book was written), the question of whether development could be done in a way that did not damage the environment seemed novel. Four decades on, these questions are much more familiar and have been addressed by an army of researchers working in every discipline from the physical sciences to the humanities. The idea of sustainable development has, like a lightning rod, channelled the associated debates.

In the 1970s, environmentalists were few; they were easily dismissed as dreamers and freed by the wealth circulating round the economies of industrialised countries to challenge the system that fed them. Now their concerns and their aspirations, their rhetoric and their principles, have become part of the mainstream. Ideas about sustainability are now routinely articulated by politicians of every hue and by business leaders and celebrities. Even that high priestess of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, famously observed in 1988 that ‘no generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy – with a full repairing lease’ (Thatcher 1988). Many politicians entered similar rhetorical territory, with some suggesting that ‘we are all environmentalists now’ (Hobson 2008).

But to think that the Sustainable Development Goals or the Paris Climate Agreement mark a ‘solution’ to the challenge of sustainability for humanity would be a mistake. Indeed, to imagine that they represented a ‘blueprint’ for achieving sustainable development (as the Secretary General of the UN optimistically described them) would also be a mistake. The problem with the idea of sustainable development is that it identifies a problem; it does not identify a solution.

The challenge of sustainable development remains just that: a massive challenge. The Global Goals, and the many steps that preceded them (analysed in Chapter 3 of this book), set out a vast terrain for debate and action. Can human aspirations be met within environmental limits, and if so, how? Here the debate splits wide open, with ideas ranging from gradualist strategies based on technical innovation and the reform of existing economic and cultural patterns, and radical strategies that propose a re-casting of structures of wealth and power and of relations between people and non-human life. Will free markets automatically deliver wealth to all by industrialisation and trickle-down (as if by some sort of innate logic) and do so without environmental damage, or do economic growth and environment have to be traded off against each other?

1.2 NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

On one side of debates about sustainable development lie the concerns of environmentalists about the scale of human impacts on nature. The classic expression of environmentalism, in the form of a mass social movement, came in the 1960s and 1970s. The headline issues then were those of industrial pollution (oil and pesticides, for example), species extinction and habitat loss (Guha 2000). Rachel Carson’s extraordinary book Silent Spring had been published in 1962, and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (published in 1949) had become a cult book in the same decade.

This first environmental revolution was centred in the industrialised countries of the global ‘North’ (even if some, like Australia and New Zealand, were as far south as you can get). Gradually, this northern environmentalism broadened its field of concern to consider questions of the global impact of development processes (McCormick 1989, Guha 2000). In doing so, it found common ground with ‘environmentalism of the poor’, which was the concern of growing movements in developing countries (Guha and Martínez-Alier 1997). Attention began to be drawn to the threats posed by development projects to local, indigenous and subsistence ways of life (Pearce 1992, Gadgil and Guha 1995, Guha 2000).

By the end of the twentieth century, environmental concern was explicitly global. Norther...