Sustainable Development – what’s in a name?

1. Sustainable Development– what’s in a name? René Kemp UNU-MERIT Phd Programme Innovation Studies and Development (2006-2007)

2. Harris • Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, the idea of development as we know it today barely existed • Economic growth became the original development model, asking for structural adjustment in developing countries • But such policies failed to provide basic needs to all and created many problems in themselves • This led to the notion of SD

3. Sustainable development • Was the central term of the WCED (1987) report Our common future • Sustainable development came to be formulated as a different kind of growth, one that is not harmful to the environment and brings wealth to people all over the world • In this meaning sustainable development is about conservation rather than preservation

4. Principle-based approaches • Non-declining natural capital (daly) or non-declining welfare (Solow) • Avoiding over-exploitation of renewable resource systems, maintenance of biodiversity, atmospheric stability • Distributional equity, adequate provision of social services • Political accountability and participation

5. Gibson’s principles of SD • Human-ecological systems integrity: Build human-ecological relations to maintain the integrity of biophysical systems in order to maintain the irreplaceable life support functions upon which human well-being depends. • Sufficiency and opportunity: Ensure that everyone has enough for a decent life and that everyone has opportunities to seek improvements in ways that do not compromise future generations' possibilities for sufficiency and opportunity. • Equity: Ensure that sufficiency and effective choices for all are pursued in ways that reduce dangerous gaps in sufficiency and opportunity (and health, security, social recognition, political influence, etc.) between the rich and the poor. • Efficiency and throughput reduction: Provide a larger base for ensuring sustainable livelihoods for all which reducing threats to the long term integrity of socio-economic systems by avoiding waste and reducing overall material and energy use per unit of benefit. • Democracy and civility: Build our capacity to apply sustainability principles through a better informed and better integrated package of administrative, market, customary and personal decision making practices. • Precaution: Respect uncertainty, avoid even poorly understood risks of serious or irreversible damage to the foundations for sustainability, design for surprise and manage for adaptation. • Immediate and long-term integration: Apply all principles of sustainability at once, seeking mutually supportive benefits.

6. In defining SD one should avoid two extremes • One is what might be called “mere sustainability” – simply ensuring that economic production can remain steady or increase • The other one is to include every desirable goal in it: environmental conservation, improved health and education, gender equity, participatory democracy, peace and international cooperation – as this is not analytically useful (it does not help to address tradeoffs, deep-rooted social conflicts and already-existing environmental damage)

7. Robinson sees a need for different definitions • “any attempt to define the concept precisely, even if it were possible, would have the effect of excluding those whose views were not expressed in that definition” • Open definitions of sustainable development help communities and groups of actors to define sustainability programmes and action that befits their concern. Without such flexibility, no action may come from such interactions or only actions which meet official sustainability aspects, such as global warming

8. My own view • Is to let communities define SD (based on their values, moral positions, informed by understandings afforded by science about effects and consequences) • To have environmental policies and other sectoral policies (education, science, etc.) in the pursuit of SD • I am not against official sustainability concerns and targets, laid down in sustainability strategies at the national or local level, but a too narrow range of goals may act as a straightjacket. • When used there should be mechanisms to adapt top-down policies

9. The reason being that • Sustainable development is not about making progress in terms of 3 or 4 parameters but about achieving a positive process of social change that proceeds in such a fashion that it avoids generating internal contradictions that would undermine the possibility of further advance • What is to be sustained is not a predetermined environmental feature but a process of development that implies improvement or advance, with multiple benefits – environmental ones but also economic benefits and social benefits. • flexible interpretations allows for a multitude of actors -- possibly the whole of society -- to be involved, allowing for locally adapted solutions

10. The vagueness of SD is often deplored From a governance perspective such disagreement is an essential part of sustainable development, one that makes operationalisation and implementation difficult simply because: • there are different ideas of what sustainable development amounts to for actors in various sectors (e.g., energy, transport, agriculture, food systems, waste management); • existing solutions tend to be sustainable within these sectors rather than across the whole of society: • new developments bring new risks that cannot be anticipated; • it is a long-term, open-ended project that precedes and supersedes limited term, democratically elected governments; • it involves trade-off decisions on highly contested issues that cause dilemmas

11. Sustainability is not an end-state to be reached • Sustainability cannot be translated into a blueprint or a defined end state from which criteria can be derived and unambiguous decisions can be taken to get there (Mog) • The non-sustainability of present systems can be used as a guide • High-input agriculture agriculture • Over-depletion in world fisheries • Fossil-fuel based energy use

12. What science can do • Operationalise elements of SD • Offer tools for evaluation and critical analysis • Assess the (non)sustainability of existing and future systems • Highlight consequences of action • Offer models of adaptive management at the programme level and national level • While accepting that sustainability is itself the emergent property of a conversion about what kind world we collectively want to live in now and in the future (Robinson)

13. What have we learned? • SD can be taken to mean, sustained economic growth which is not at the expense of important environmental qualities but contributes to well-being, especially of the poor. • Sustainable development is an inherently indeterminate and contested concept, which cannot be translated into a blueprint from which criteria can be derived and unambiguous decisions can be taken to get there. • Sustainable development is both about protection and creation • Core requirements and general rules must be accompanied by context-specific elaborations • Transparency and public engagement are key characteristics of decision making for sustainability

14. Source: Mesarovic

15. SD helps us reflect upon what we want – accepting that our wants are varied and conflicting • It is a core element of a reflective society which is conscious about risks, system-wide effects (externalities) in which governance modes are geared towards continued learning

16. The perspective of transition management helps societies to work towards alternative systems, in a reflexive manner, through the exploration of multiple paths and strategically chosen experiments and top-down instrument choices fostering learning at different levels. It helps to work towards a sustainability transition even when no one knows what a sustainable society would actually look like and the very idea of achieving sustainability is illusory

17. Possible questions • Does the notion of SD have value? • Can you work with it? • Should there be a common definition? • Is sustainability a non-scientific concept (as Robinson says)? • Can the sustainability of a project or instrument be assessed? • What role for innovation? • Does it make sense to talk about sustainable technologies?