A Fresh Start for Sustainable Development

Development, 2013, 56(1), (52–57) © 2013 Society for International Development 1011-6370/13 www.sidint.net/development/ Thematic Section A Fresh Start for Sustainable Development ALAN ATKISSON ABSTRACT Having survived the financial crisis of 2008, sustainable development is now negotiating what author Alan AtKisson calls the ‘tectonic plates of world order’. Sustainable development, he argues, has become mainstream as a result of the Earth Summit and additional grassroots actions of the 1990s. To advance a sustainable future, he indicates the necessity of a global reset for sustainable development. Such a reset should reassert its more radical role for non-negotiable rights of people and planet – its primary position with regards to, rather than instead of, green economy or green growth. KEYWORDS sustainable development; sustainability; green economy; wellbeing In 2009, I wrote an essay with the provocative title ‘Pushing Reset on Sustainable Development’ and circulated it via a new think-tank group convened by the United Nations Division for Sustainable Development. The metaphor of ‘pushing reset’ was popular at the time – Hillary Clinton was ‘resetting’ US relations with Russia, for example – and the essay, later published as a broadside and a blog post, attracted attention and was relatively widely read (AtKisson, 2009). The essay analysed sustainability’s steady advance in corporate, government, and institutional settings over the past two decades, but it called for a significant change in strategy, away from increasingly economistic formulations, and towards a more integrated approach. Speaking the language of businesspeople and economists had helped shift sustainable development closer to the boardrooms and C-suites of the world. I had personally pursued (and attempted to convince others to pursue) that strategy since the early 1990s. This strategy, driven on many fronts, had been relatively successful for the movement as a whole. However, by 2009, the times and the needs had changed. To go further, I argued, sustainable development needed to return to its core ethical, social, and scientific roots. It needed to aim once again for the broader vision of a sustainable world. Four years later, I believe that such a reset of sustainable development is indeed under way – but it is happening very slowly, as though a giant finger was pushing down on a giant global reset button, at a steady but visually glacial pace. If you look carefully, and stare a long time, you can see it happening. The process of rethinking sustainable development, which arguably began at the COP15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, is unfolding over years. This article revisits the themes and arguments of my earlier essay and updates them in the light of recent past events, as well as expected future events, including the Rio+20 Development (2013) 56(1), 52–57. doi:10.1057/dev.2013.2 AtKisson: A Fresh Start for Sustainable Development Global Summit of 2012, the swift rise of terms such as ‘green economy’ and ‘green growth’ (and the controversies around them), and the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals that will be negotiated and launched by the United Nations during the coming two years. This ‘slow-motion reset’ of sustainable development marks a moment of opportunity, a chance for a fresh start in the way this venerable concept is framed, messaged, promoted, and practiced. But why is a ‘reset’ still necessary? How sustainable development became mainstream Over the past 20 years, practitioners of sustainability and sustainable development (the first is the destination, the second is the process of change that takes us there, but the terms are used interchangeably) pursued a pathway of increasing professionalism and mainstreaming. Sustainability practitioners sought, with ever-increasing success, to place the concept (and themselves) nearer and nearer to where fundamental decisions are made. Grassroots efforts in the 1990s to promote sustainability indicators, assessment, and management, for example, evolved into global processes such as national indicators programmes, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the Corporate Social Responsibility movement. In the past five years, these trends have exploded. Most major corporations and large institutions such as universities now have Chief Sustainability Officers (or something equivalent), and many have moved dramatically to embrace a family of concepts, practices, and metrics that place their operations in a more positive ethical and environmental light, while improving their financial performance as well. Governments, since the Earth Summit in 1992, increasingly embraced the call for sustainable development at the level of creating ministries, departments, plans, specialized aid programmes, indicators, and initiatives – none more enthusiastically than city governments in the wealthier parts of the world with their ‘Local Agenda 21’ programmes. ‘Green buildings’ became common and led to the building of whole ‘eco-cities’. Universities created formal programmes of study, resulting in master’s and doctoral degrees in sustainable development. Even the world’s largest consultancies now have sustainability departments employing thousands of associates who crunch numbers and develop strategies for the world’s largest businesses and government institutions. Certainly compared with its very marginal position at the edges of society in 1992, sustainable development is now decidedly mainstream by any reasonable measure. Sustainability proponents achieved this remarkable, rapid advance by embracing two fundamental strategic principles: 1. Significant changes are necessary to safeguard the future and to prevent calamitous loss or collapse in critical environmental and social systems. 2. These changes are wholly compatible with mainstream planning, management, and market-based investment processes, and will lead to new, more effective, and more profitable ways of managing global civilization, in every sector. Principle 1 remains truer than ever. Principle 2, I submit, entered shaky ground several years ago and is in the process of experiencing a full-blown earthquake. Sustainability entered the mainstream by pursuing a strategy of embracing mainstream patterns of analysis and decision making; however, many of these patterns have come to the end of their useful life and must be reinvented. Rapidly changing conditions are forcing them to adapt and evolve. This means, in turn, that efforts to promote sustainable development must evolve as well. The first tremors were felt during the financial crisis of 2008 – a ‘crisis’ that is now closing in on its sixth year. The world’s bankers and political leaders have been making up strategies for recovery as they go along, by trial and error, and the odds are that these trials (and errors) will continue for half a decade more, before a new equilibrium is reached in the structure and function of the global economy. Meanwhile, the voices of rising global powers such as China and India, the so-called ‘developing countries’ (lately rebranded as ‘emerging markets’), and occasional but disruptive social protest movements have gotten louder and 53 Development 56(1): Thematic Section 54 more forceful in their demands for change. From the intensifying fights over who should run the world’s multi-lateral institutions, to the conspiratorial whispers about replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the tectonic plates of world order are shifting. However, these shifts are not the only reasons for taking a fresh look at how we define and promote sustainable development. Against this shifting geopolitical background, sustainable development is simultaneously reaching the pinnacle of its influence in economic terms – and discovering that this pinnacle is far from adequate to the task at hand. The run-up to the Rio+20 conference of 2012 provided a dramatic demonstration. The world watched as a family of economic concepts and frameworks, including ‘green growth’, the ‘green economy’, ‘green jobs’, and others jostled for position as they scrambled to reach the top of the summit meeting. Green economy was the lead climber out in front. However, on arrival, the world rejected green economy’s simplistic bid for preeminence: it is now referred to, in formal UN contexts, as ‘the green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication’ – almost as if the phrase were all one word.1 A few months later, the OECD’s fourth world forum on indicators of progress featured national statisticians and leading economists affirming that the Gross Domestic Product’s time as the world’s overpoweringly dominant measuring stick is now coming to an end. On the iPads of the world’s prime ministers, GDP is increasingly being joined by new measures of social health, environmental degradation, and even subjective national wellbeing. National statisticians are self-described as a conservative, change-resistant bunch, but at the OECD world forum, they reported that they are embracing these new measures with great rapidity, because they see that these measures are moving from the margins to the centre of national and international discourse. Recent events such as these are themselves indicators that while sustainable economics remains vitally necessary, it should no longer be seen as a privileged or sufficient way to talk about sustainable development. Proponents of the ‘green economy’ and its GDP-friendlier cousin ‘green growth’ have bent over backward to add social dimensions to their promotional language and flagship initiatives, but these simply do not satisfy the desire that the world seems to be expressing for sustainable development’s broader, more inclusive vision of the future. We do not just want an economically greener world, said most of the assembled nations and civil society voices in Rio last year, we also want a world that is more fair, just, peaceful, and alive. One of the principal worries driving the world’s steady global press on the reset button is the very real risk that economistic interpretations of sustainable development may result in a catastrophic failure to reach the actual goal of sustainability. Over-reliance on ‘green economy’ can go terribly wrong in three ways. One, it is all too easy for a ‘green economy’ to not be green at all, in pure biophysical terms. Green growth, untempered by serious calculations about the amount of carbon dioxide that will wind up in the atmosphere, or the amount of biodiversity that will be left to help maintain ecosystem balance, may turn out to create a world that is climatically dangerous and very brown. Second, privileging the economic approaches to sustainable development could be reduced to oldfashioned neoliberal economics, and we could be left waiting for market forces, including ‘visible hands’, as well as invisible ones, to produce all the necessary transformations. This approach may work to spread information technologies, but it is unlikely to be adequate for the eradication of poverty and for insuring the human rights of all people, everywhere, on an appropriately short time scale. Finally, even if green economic approaches are wildly successful in making the world’s industries and jobs clean and earth-friendly (and let us pray that they are), it is all too possible to imagine a world that is technically sustainable from a standard-of-living and resource-and-pollution perspective, but whose people suffer the scourge of despotism and repression. In short, achieving a global green economy could be wonderful – but it is not enough. We still need sustainable development. AtKisson: A Fresh Start for Sustainable Development Making sustainable development radical again The phrase had, from birth, two aspects: ‘sustainable’ and ‘development’. These contrast with, for example, ‘green growth’, which has two parallel aspects of its own. A thing may be considered green (a super-efficient, low-emissions diesel car, for example) without meeting the real criteria for sustainability: fitting within the resource and ecosystem capacities of the planet (aka the ‘planetary boundaries’), while being universally accessible, theoretically, over time, to all people. Not everyone may want a car in the future, but now, most do. And so to be sustainable, cars should be made in ways that do not destroy nature while being something that everyone – once poverty is eradicated – could have the choice to enjoy. Then there is ‘growth’. If we mean by that imprecise word the ever-increasing harvesting of material resources from the planet’s living ecosystems and store of minerals and hydrocarbons, then ‘green growth’ (much less ‘sustainable growth’) is patently impossible. We may argue about how much of a thing remains to be harvested (fish, say), but we would be foolish to deny that the amount available to be harvested is limited. There are no other planets in the vicinity with extra oceans still teeming with fish. Green growth reveals itself here as a very specific strategy, limited to those places where significant unharvested resources remain to exploited; where there exists significant poverty and a historic gap in living standards relative to the rest of the world; and where methods exist to harvest those resources and use them, using industrial methods that are far cleaner and more efficient than those used by previous generations. The Republic of Korea, for example, is helping countries such as Vietnam and Mongolia find and implement new green growth strategies, and this makes perfect sense. Such countries need and deserve old-fashioned growth in material standards anyway; they are going to pursuit it; and if wealthier countries can help them do it in ways that stretch resources and improve outcomes at lower cost, this should be applauded. For much of the rest of the world, however, ‘green growth’ is hardly decoupled from the growth of carbon dioxide emissions, land degradation and other ills. Countries such as mine – I am a dual citizen of the United States and Sweden – need plenty of development, but policies that facilitate the continued growth of their resource consumption and impact on ecosystems are nothing short of disastrous. For the goal of sustainability to be realized, most countries need to pursue multi-decade programmes of qualitative and transformative change in their energy and industrial systems, land and water use patterns, education and policy related to lifestyle expectations, and more. In a phrase, they need sustainable development. In fact, such needs and prescriptions have always been integral to sustainable development, though it has always required a certain amount of courage to state them publicly. In the early days, sustainability practitioners used to name them all the time. However, our successful pursuit in recent years of ‘Principle 2’ above – strategically promoting the notion that we can meet global social and environmental goals, while improving civilization’s balance sheet, with some relatively straightforward (albeit ambitious) reforms to business as usual – has made our movement more timid, on average. Having talked our way into the boardrooms and onto the balance sheets of the world, we do not want to be kicked out again for articulating views perceived as ‘unrealistic’ or ‘radical’. However, sustainable development is radical. Poverty eradication is radical. Dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is radical. Gender equality and women’s empowerment is radical. The goals of sustainable development are idealistic, not realistic. However, here is something to remember. Although these goals are radical, they are not marginal: they are enshrined in numerous global agreement texts, including Rio+20’s The Future We Want. Remembering the sustainable development vision At this juncture, with the world on the verge of adopting new Sustainable Development Goals, a 55 Development 56(1): Thematic Section reminder about basic definitions is in order. Sustainable development is the practice of aiming development towards sustainability. At least, that is what it should be – and what it recently has not really been. Sustainability is a system state that can be fairly easily defined and even quantitatively described for a vast array of ecological, economic, and social systems. Rising crime rates or falling education rates are not sustainable; social and economic development grinds to a halt or reverses. Decaying ecosystems are not sustainable; water sources disappear and previously free ecosystem services (e.g., pollination) start costing measurable money. Entrenched poverty is not sustainable; it breeds terrorism, inter-tribal conflict, environmental destruction, and civil war. Analyses of this type are now elementary and easily supported by reams of research. And yet, one is still hard-pressed to find this elementary understanding of sustainability’s absolute requirements in the context of many sustainable development initiatives. The problem with sustainable development in recently years is that it has not been properly coupled to its actual goal: the achievement and maintenance of sustainability in every major system on which the health, wellbeing, and stability of our world (human and natural) depends. It has instead been linked increasingly to a piece of the vision that was considered not just important, but also easier to sell: a greener economy. To revive the vision of sustainable development – to make it radical once again – we need to refocus it on the long-term vision: a sustainable world. Global green economy + wellbeing for all = sustainable world 56 To be clear: there is nothing wrong with creating a ‘green economy’. Precisely as recognized by the Rio+20 outcome document, it is an ‘important tool’ – actually an essential one. We need a green economy, but in the language of basic logic, a green economy is a necessary but far from sufficient condition. Moreover, it cannot strategically take us where we need to go; the world needs and wants far more than this. For these reasons, we should no longer allow the green economy, or any other economistic definition of sustainable development, to stand in the spotlight and monopolize the stage. To achieve real sustainable development, as I wrote when promoting a ‘reset’ in 2009, ‘the solo voice of economics must be joined by the strong voices of social and natural science, principled political leadership, idealistic citizen activism, cultural questioning of consumerist habits and values, and much more’. And what should those multiple voices be calling for? The list is long, it has been written many times, and it has been relatively well captured again by The Future We Want. However, just as a great variety of necessary economic changes have been successfully folded up into the phrase ‘green economy’, we might also find it useful to compress the social and human dimension of sustainable development. Here is a proposal: wellbeing for all. Wellbeing is the word towards which practitioners all over the world are already turning as a way of summing up the humanistic goal of their research work or policy activism. ‘Wellbeing for all’ captures, in a lovelier phrase, that negotiated qualifier around green economy: ‘in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication’. ‘Wellbeing for all’ also means education, freedom of expression, equality, justice, access, and opportunity for people everywhere. We can let this phrase signify the universality and humanity of our vision, knowing that folded up within it are the aspirations, health, freedom, and happiness of up to ten billion people. If we wed these two simple but all-inclusive phrases together – ‘green economy’ and ‘wellbeing for all’ – and if we clearly set our sights not on halfway measures but on meeting the real, nonnegotiable needs of both people and planet, we just might revive that ‘new and brighter world of hope’ described in the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development in 2002. This is the vision that should be enshrined in the new Sustainable Development Goals, and lifted up for every eye to see. Re-embracing this vision, committing to its ‘unrealistic idealism’ without apology, is the kind of fresh start that sustainable development needs. AtKisson: A Fresh Start for Sustainable Development To achieve this bigger, brighter, more compelling vision (even if the phrase ‘sustainable development’ has never shimmered in purely linguistic terms), we will need to foster a great deal of learning, encourage an enormous change in mindset, inspire a tremendous adherence to ethics. Transformative social and economic change in the direction of idealistic outcomes does not come easily; it emerges from hard work, courage, and commitment over decades. We who work for a sustainable world have always known this. We must know it again. Note 1 The phrase is used 19 times in the Rio+20 outcome document The Future We Want (2012). Reference Alan AtKisson (2009) ‘Pushing Reset on Sustainable Development’, October, Paper #1 in the ‘Sustainable Development Insights’ series, published by the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Long-Range Future, Boston University; and the Sustainable Development Knowledge Partnership, initially convened by the United Nations Division for Sustainable Development, Boston, MA. 57