Sustainable Development : Mapping Different Approaches

Sustainable development, although a widely used phrase and idea, has many different meanings and therefore provokes many different responses. In broad terms, the concept of sustainable development is an attempt to combine growing concerns about a range of environmental issues with socio-economic issues. To aid understanding of these different policies this paper presents a classification and mapping of different trends of thought on sustainable development, their political and policy frameworks and their attitudes towards change and means of change. Sustainable development has the potential to address fundamental challenges for humanity, now and into the future. However, to do this, it needs more clarity of meaning, concentrating on sustainable livelihoods and well-being rather than well-having, and long term environmental sustainability, which requires a strong basis in principles that link the social and environmental to human equity. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Received 31 July 2002; revised 16 October 2003; accepted 3 December 2003 Sustainable Development: A Challenging and Contested Concept T HE WIDESPREAD RISE OF INTEREST IN, AND SUPPORT FOR, THE CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABLE development is potentially an important shift in understanding relationships of humanity with nature and between people. It is in contrast to the dominant outlook of the last couple of hundred years, especially in the ‘North’, that has been based on the view of the separation of the environment from socio-economic issues. For most of the last couple of hundred years the environment has been largely seen as external to humanity, mostly to be used and exploited, with a few special areas preserved as wilderness or parks. Environmental problems were viewed mainly as local. On the whole the relationship between people and the environment was conceived as humanity’s triumph over nature. This Promethean view (Dryzek, 1997) was that human knowledge and technology could overcome all obstacles including natural and environmental ones. This view was linked with the development of capitalism, the industrial revolution and modern science. As Bacon, one of the founders of modern science, put it, ‘The world is made for * Correspondence to: Bill Hopwood, Sustainable Cities Research Institute, 6 North Street East, University of Northumbria, Newcastle on Tyne NE1 8ST, UK. E-mail: william.hopwood@unn.ac.uk Sustainable Development Sust. Dev. 13, 38–52 (2005) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/sd.244 Mapping Different Approaches 39 man, not man for the world’. Environmental management and concern amongst most businesses and governments, apart from local problems and wilderness conservation, was at best based on natural resource management. A key example was the ideas of Pinchot in the USA (Dryzek, 1997), which recognized that humans do need natural resources and that these resources should be managed, rather than rapidly exploited, in order to ensure maximum long-term use. Economics came to be the dominating issue of human relations with economic growth, defined by increasing production, as the main priority (Douthwaite, 1992). This was the seen as the key to humanity’s well-being and, through growth, poverty would be overcome: as everyone floated higher those at the bottom would be raised out of poverty. The concept of sustainable development is the result of the growing awareness of the global links between mounting environmental problems, socio-economic issues to do with poverty and inequality and concerns about a healthy future for humanity. It strongly links environmental and socio-economic issues. The first important use of the term was in 1980 in the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN et al., 1980). This process of bringing together environmental and socio-economic questions was most famously expressed in the Brundtland Report’s definition of sustainable development as meeting ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’ (WCED, 1987, p. 43). This defines needs from a human standpoint; as Lee (2000, p. 32) has argued, ‘sustainable development is an unashamedly anthropocentric concept’. Brundtland’s definition and the ideas expressed in the report Our Common Future recognize the dependency of humans on the environment to meet needs and well-being in a much wider sense than merely exploiting resources: ‘ecology and economy are becoming ever more interwoven – locally, regionally, nationally and globally’ (WCED, 1987, p. 5). Rather than domination over nature our lives, activities and society are nested within the environment (Giddings et al., 2002). The report stresses that humanity, whether in an industrialized or a rural subsistence society, depends for security and basic existence on the environment; the economy and our well-being now and in the future need the environment. It also points to the planetwide interconnections: environmental problems are not local but global, so that actions and impacts have to be considered internationally to avoid displacing problems from one area to another by actions such as releasing pollution that crosses boundaries, moving polluting industries to another location or using up more than an equitable share of the earth’s resources (by an ecological footprint (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996) far in excess of the area inhabited). Environmental problems threaten people’s health, livelihoods and lives and can cause wars and threaten future generations. Sustainable development raises questions about the post-war claim, that still dominates much mainstream economic policy, that international prosperity and human well-being can be achieved through increased global trade and industry (Reid, 1995; Moffat, 1996; Sachs, 1999). It recognizes that past growth models have failed to eradicate poverty globally or within countries, ‘no trends, . . . no programmes or policies offer any real hope of narrowing the growing gap between rich and poor nations’ (WCED, 1987, p. xi). This pattern of growth has also damaged the environment upon which we depend, with a ‘downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation’ (WCED, 1987, p. xii). Brundtland, recognizing this failure, calls for a different form of growth, ‘changing the quality of growth, meeting essential needs, merging environment and economics in decision making’ (WCED, 1987, p. 49), with an emphasis on human development, participation in decisions and equity in benefits. The development proposed is a means to eradicate poverty, meet human needs and ensure that all get a fair share of resources – very different from present development. Social justice today and in the future is a crucial component of the concept of sustainable development. There were, and are, long standing debates about both goals and means within theories dealing with both environmental and socio-economic questions which have inevitably flowed into ideas on sustainCopyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 13, 38–52 (2005) 40 B. Hopwood et al. able development. As Wackernagel and Rees (1996) have argued, the Brundtland Report attempted to bridge some of these debates by leaving a certain ambiguity, talking at the same time of the priorities of meeting the needs of the poor, protecting the environment and more rapid economic growth. The looseness of the concept and its theoretical underpinnings have enabled the use of the phrases ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’ to become de rigueur for politicians and business leaders, but as the Workshop on Urban Sustainability of the US National Science Foundation (2000, p. 1) pointed out, sustainability is ‘laden with so many definitions that it risks plunging into meaninglessness, at best, and becoming a catchphrase for demagogy, at worst. [It] is used to justify and legitimate a myriad of policies and practices ranging from communal agrarian utopianism to large-scale capital-intensive market development’. While many claim that sustainable development challenges the increased integration of the world in a capitalist economy dominated by multinationals (Middleton et al., 1993; Christie and Warburton, 2001), Brundtland’s ambiguity allows business and governments to be in favour of sustainability without any fundamental challenge to their present course, using Brundtland’s support for rapid growth to justify the phrase ‘sustainable growth’. Rees (1998) points out that this allows capitalism to continue to put forward economic growth as its ‘morally bankrupt solution’ to poverty. If the economy grows, eventually all will benefit (Dollar and Kraay, 2000): in modern parlance the trickle-down theory. Daly (1993) criticized the notion of ‘sustainable growth’ as ‘thought-stopping’ and oxymoronic in a world in which ecosystems are finite. At some point, economic growth with ever more use of resources and production of waste is unsustainable. Instead Daly argued for the term ‘sustainable development’ by which he, much more clearly than Brundtland, meant qualitative, rather than quantitative, improvements. Development is open to confusion, with some seeing it as an end in itself, so it has been suggested that greater clarity would be to speak of ‘sustainable livelihoods’, which is the aim that Brundtland outlined (Workshop on Urban Sustainability, 2000). Another area of debate is between the views of weak and strong sustainability (Haughton and Hunter, 1994). Weak sustainability sees natural and manufactured capital as interchangeable with technology able to fill human produced gaps in the natural world (Daly and Cobb, 1989) such as a lack of resources or damage to the environment. Solow put the case most strongly, stating that by substituting other factors for natural resources ‘the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe’ (1974, p. 11). Strong