SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT / SUSTAINABILITY
Pedro L. Lomas
As a reaction against the geographical expansion after WW2, mechanisms for the reconstruction of Europe, aid to development and colonial distribution were instrumental to the rise of ‘development policies’ (see growth/de-growth/post-growth), that promised a path of socioeconomic progress for countries adopting the capitalist model (Rostow, 1960). Such an optimistic vision of capitalist development rested, among other things, on Kuznets’ curve hypothesis, according to which, despite a tendency in the early stages of development for income inequality to rise, at more advanced stages the levels of inequality return to the prosperity of society as a whole (Kuznets, 1955).
In environmental circles, this narrative evolved on similar lines until, in the 1960s and 1970s, the consequences of development policies began to become harshly evident and many papers were published questioning their effects on the environment and the impossibility of unlimited growth (Boulding, 1966; Carson, 1962; Meadows et al., 1972).
International institutions recognised the need to seek a narrative that would reconcile the ruling model with the environment. Thus the term ‘sustainable development’ was coined, defined as “…development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987). The debate was fundamentally centred on safeguarding inter-generational equity in the use of natural resources, and was often presented in terms of environmental, economic and social sustainability as the three main pillars of sustainability.
As observed by Naredo (1996), this term remained poorly defined owing to the effort to reconcile economic growth with the idea os sustainability, two concepts that refer to different abstract domains and lines of reasoning. Since then, countless attempts have been made to implement ‘sustainable development’ in practice, that can be classed under two major paradigms (Cabeza Gutés, 1996): weak or strong.
1. Weak sustainability
World economic and political orthodoxy still largely relies on the idea of economic growth as a means to attaining sustainability. This perception sees the depletion of certain resources offset by other forms of capital (Solow, 1991). Two main schools, albeit sharing some common ground, are seen to adhere to this idea of sustainability: 1) the school of thought built on market management; 2) the school of thought that, not denying the relevance of the latter, and assuming the bulk of its arguments, prefers to rely on expert knowledge and technology, of an ecomodernist bent.
(1) Some authors delegate decision-making to the dominant economy’s tools. Sustainability is upheld as the situation granting continuity to future generations rendering economic wellbeing conditions similar to those of today (maintaining the overall value of the available capital stock), through taking into account a new type of capital known as natural capital (natural assets), and providing a whole range of services (ecosystem services) for human wellbeing. The idea consists in integrating the ecosystems within economic reasoning. Viewed from this angle, the sustainability problem has two sides (Dasgupta, 2021; UN/EC/FAO/IMF/OECD/WB, 2021): a) appropriately assessing (quantifying, evaluating) capital stock and the benefits (services) obtained therefrom, to incorporate these to the conventional economic cost-benefit reasoning and green macroeconomic accounting; and b) ensuring that the value of annual investments in natural capital stock should cover, at least, annual costs of deterioration. The UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), the economics of biodiversity, or ecosystem services are but a few examples of this sustainability narrative.
(2) Other authors rely, explicitly or implicitly, on the idea of a hypothetical environmental Kuznets curve in which, in the first stages of its development, any economy will employ a growing quantity of resources and, therefore, pollute more (the poor causing the most pollution and depleting the most resources). However, as development progresses past a given point, innovation and technological development as well as scientific knowledge enable economic growth to become independent of natural resources and their associated pollution (the rich using fewer resources, polluting less and enjoying the luxury og being ‘green’), leading to the de-coupling and/or de-materialisation of the economy. The narratives accompanying the European Green Deal, the Green New Deal or the Circular Economy are examples of this view of sustainability.
2. Strong sustainability
The foregoing paradigm has been criticised from a multitude of more or less complementary approaches that, generally speaking, invert the above proposition, considering the economy and society as sub-systems limited by ecosystems’ structure, functioning and dynamics.
These views deem technology to be constrained by limits that are difficult to surpass. Among these are the laws of thermodynamics (limits to efficiency or to reclycling) (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971) or the existence of the rebound effect or Jevons’ paradox (the best technologies provoke increments in the use of resources and the ensuing pollution) (Polimeni et al. 2008). In addition, these theories understand natural capital as a complementary form of other forms of capital and, hence, not perfectly replaceable (Ehrlich, 1989). They also believe that their focus completely ignores several decades of discussion on the nature and measure of this capital -the Cambridge Controversy (Lazzarini, 2011)-,from which springs the incommensurability of ecosystemd nd capital, as well as the incompatibility of aggregating nature’s measures with respect to capital (plurality of values and evaluation languages).
In this panorama, some authors defend the stationary-state economy, in which the objective is to maximise the stock of persons and artifacts, while minimising the flow of matter and energy necessary to its maintenance (Daly, 1991). Other authors are considering approaches whose objective is other than growth, rejecting the idea of nature as a form of productive capital, deploying a multitude of strategies such as de-growth, doughnut economics, prosperity without growth, or the prosperous way down, among others.
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