Ecology, Justice and the End of Development
by
Wolfgang Sachs
Ecology, Justice and the End of Development
by Wolfgang Sachs
[This article originally published in: epd-Entwicklungspolitik 15/16/97 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web.]
1997 is a jubilee year for environmentalists all over the world. Ten years ago the world commission for the environment and development led by Gro Harlem Brundtland published its study on protecting nature and continuing development. Sustainable development means "development "that considers the needs of the present without limiting the possibilities of future generations for meeting their own needs."
After the golden decades of the post-war era with its explosion of worldwide production, the bitter insight received an official blessing that conventional development consumes like a fire all resources which future generations need for life. All of a sudden the future appeared in a different light. It was no longer the luminous epoch in which the fruits of development could be harvested but represented a potentially dry and depressing period in which the price for the excesses of the present would be paid.
Background
On this background, the Brundtland commission urged governments to consider the temporal dimension in current decisions. The commission emphasized justice between the generations, a concept which gradually gained international attention since the 1972 Stockholm conference. This concept, the cornerstone of a new ethical system, expanded the principle of justice within the human community along the time axis.
Although this canonical formulation underlined justice along the time axis, it neglected justice in the social realm. Limitations which the current generation imposes on its children and grandchildren play a greater role than limitations imposed on the powerless by the powerful within a generation. "Needs" and "generations" are socially neutral terms and allow no vertical distinctions. Neverthelsss such distinctions are important for justice within a generation.
Starting-point
What and whose needs should be satisfied? In a divided world, these hard-core issues decide whether development can be an integral element of a democratic project or ultimately lead to deepened social polarization. Is development directed at satisfying needs for water, land and economic security or does it satisfy the needs for plane travel and bank accounts? Is it oriented in the needs of survival or luxury? Are these needs of a global class of consumers or needs of the vast number of unpropertied persons? The Brundtland commission left these questions unanswered. The commission facilitated the acceptance of the concept of "sustainable development" in the circles of privilege and power but veiled the fact that sustainability is impossible without limitation of wealth. In other words, greater justice within a generation is a presupposition for the production of justice between the generations. (...)
The idea that justice can be realized through development is deeply anchored in the discourse of the post-war age. Its roots reach back to the european enlightenment when the peoples of the earth were first recognized as a humanity united by a common dignity and advancing to rule by reason and progress. Since the war, the idea first gained acceptance that equality could be realized in the world within a few decades. For example, the United Nations in the preamble to the UN Charter proclaimed its resolution "to promote social progress and a higher living standard in greater freedom... and to advance the economic and social progress of all people."
From a political perspective, two converging historical changes contributed to the worldwide consensus. On one side, after the horror of the war, the United States sought a new world order to guarantee peace. In its opinion, the outbreak of war in Europe was the result of the economic upheavals after the world economic crisis. Looking back to their own successful mastery of the economic crisis by the New Deal policy when Keynes advised stabilizing the economy through intervention of the state, they projected the necessity of economic growth controlled by public intervention on the whole earth. In his memoirs, President Truman recalled that the Four-Points program of technical support aimed "at transposing millions of persons in underdeveloped regions to self-help and ultimately lifting them out of colonial dependence to their own prosperity." To create a foundation for peace, economic development should be initiated worldwide.
On the other side with the decline of England and France as colonial powers, decolonialization and the genesis of nation-states began. With the transition into independence, most of these states saw their raison d'etre in economic development. After a long time of humiliation, they longed for acknowledgment and the fastest connection to the modern world. They were ready to completely change their societies and form themselves according to the image of the West. A rising income level and growing export revenues appeared as the promising way to equality with industrial countries. As a result of these two historical changes, a worldwide consensus arose which regarded "development" as an overarching goal uniting the North and South. On the international plane, the term justice was redefined as "catching up to the rich".
Landslide
Our century has already ended, declared the British Eric Hobsbawm. In his opinion, the "brief twentieth century" lasted from 1919 to 1991, from the collapse of the society of the nineteenth century to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the decades after the Second World War - under the continuing effect of past violence and in view of the threat by communist destabilization - the nation-states consolidarted and sought to assure the prosperity of their citizens. This close connection between territoriality, increased prosperity and governmental activity began to fall apart in the eighties and nineties.
Hobsbawm describes this as a "landslide". When the transnational economy established its world domination, it submitted to a universal institution since 1945: the territorial nation state. Increasingly such a state can only control a dwindling part of its affairs.
Fifteen years ago, the states were still gravitation centers nationally and internationally. In the North, the prosperity agreement was based on an economy that created jobs, a state that redistributed profits and workers who bought goods and paid taxes. In the South, the developing state mobilized all its productive resources and claimed to care for the needs of its population. In the international framework, a system of bi- and multilateral cooperation arose from the development consensus for closing the widening gult between owners and the unpropertied. Politics and the economy were essentially territorially limited. These social contracts are dissolving as the power of locations loses importance.
The power of locations does not only diminish in an economic regard. The collaboration of satellite broadcasts, jobs abroad, cyberspace and plane travel contribute to the uncoupling of space and community. A transnational sphere of reality is forming which scorns borders and ignores national territories. The discovery of the globe as an economic arena in which capital, goods and services can move without giving great attention to local and national communities announces the death of the idea of a politics established on reciprocal rights and duties of citizens. (...) While globalization removes barriers between the nations, it simultaneously erects new barriers within the nations. On the other hand, the basis of developing states is beginning to totter under the influence of this change. These states often allied with the forces that work toward globalization and act with increasing indifference toward the majority of their citizens who remain outside the worldwide system. As a consequence of this change, the promise of a development for everyone which once represented the binding link joining the states together collapses and leaves behind a legitimation deficit.
Where "development" still included the hope for redistribution of wealth and power in favor of the poor, "globalization" orients the actions of states toward creating better possibilities for owners in their struggle for international rank and influence. In other words, the rights of corporations appear in the center of politics in the era of globalization, not human needs. Therefore governments withdraw from the development consensus...
The landslide undermined the national consensus and the international development consensus. For decades, it was regarded as self-evident that governments of the North would directly or indirectly expand their support of the countries of the South to lead them on the path of development. With the rise of the neoliberal worldview, this engagement is disappearing and the demands of the South for more justice die away unheard.
Progress
That idea on which the UN was founded and according to which "the social progress of humanity" is an affair of international public responsibility is no longer accepted. Today private investors are celibrated as bringers of salvation of humanity. If in the time of the development discourse the state was the motor of changes, this role in the time of the globalization discourse is assumed by transnational corporations. Therefore international organizations focus their attention on a worldwide "game plan" while redistribution between governments is hardly considered any more.
According to the neoliberal view, greater justice - if it is recognized at all - signifies the expansion of the rule of the law of supply and demand to the whole globe. Instead of growing development cooperation, better investment possibilities seem to promise catching up to the North. Thus when the call for the "right of development" resounds nowadays, it is probably the cry of national elites with their demand for better access to the global circulation of capital and goods and not the call for greater solididarity with the majority of the world's population beyond the bustle of the world market.
The future held out in the image of "development" represents an endless process of continuous improvement. Tomorrow, it is said, the conditions will be better than the conditions today as long as the society is moving and a national course is navigated. In the decades after the Second World War, development reincarnated the idea of material progress originating from the late eighteenth century for implementation through planning and technology within a few decades.
Like progress, development is also never finished. Within this setting, justice could be defined nationally and internationally as the constantly increased sharing of more and more people in a continuously increasing profit. The famous metaphor of the cake becoming larger and larger making possible larger and larger pieces illustrates how justice is understood when humanity is seen as a single net profit community: as an inclusion in a global growth process. Such a conception rests on the basic assumption dominant in western thought since the late eighteeenth and early nineteenth century that the economic process by its nature is an affair with black numbers, that is that the accumulated profits far exceed all the burdens caused by this process.
Collapse
This optimistic belief in the future - after being shaken by the catastrophic events of this century in central Europe - has completely collapsed through what is euphemistically called the ecological crisis. Without being a transitional phenomenon even in the most remote sense, the appearance of bio-physical limits of economic growth redefines the conditions for the creation of wealth for the coming century. From the local to the global scale, the resources (water, wood, oil, minerals and so forth), surfaces (the land for mines, settlements and infrastructure) and waste sinks (soil, oceans, atmosphere) which nature makes available to us are either decreasing or have fallen out of balance. From now on, material progress has to proceed under complex restrictions. Although economic growth has persisted for a few generations limited to a minority, its finiteness is already obvious.
Climate change is the most obvious example. However other striking limits point in a similar direction. A global equality on the level of highly industrialized countries would seriously endanger the hospitality of the biosphere for humankind. Under these conditions, the message implicit in the metaphor of the expanding cake appears false. The prospects for greater justice can no longer be grounded in the prospect for continuous growth.
Even when one admits that there is no firm relation between the monetary and physical size of an economy, the conventional economy is structurally oligarchic and can only be democratized at the expense of biospheric disruption. From this vantage point, it is misleading to assume that economic growth can end in black numbers. On the contrary, growth represents the accumulation of negative side effects so that considering it balanced requires imagination. In another metaphor dear to supporters of growth, the rising flood will first burst all the dams before it raises all boats.
The new truth that the ecological crisis urgently imparts is not the discovery that growth damages nature but the fact that unintended consequences can no longer be kept at a distance. Value creation, particularly in the age of fossil energies and raw materials, is always the art of externalizing costs and internalizing profits. Profit skimming is much easier when a gradiant keeps profits in the center and allows costs to fall to the periphery. What is counted as valuable in the official statistics appears as a loss in the imaginary statistics of future generations, remote countries or impoverished people. In the whole history of progress, time, space and social hierarchy have always been the essential dimensions for shifting costs from one's eyes and mind. For a century, burdening future generations with part of the negative effects of economic progress along the time axis was not accepted practice. Overexploitation of fossil reserves, erosion of the soil, loss of diversity of species and climate changes will in all probability diminish the chances of future generations for living a flourishing life at least in the sense of present standards. Massive distances preserved the centers from feeling the negative effects of mining, monoculture and deforestation. At last, in many countries of the South, consumer groups have succeeded in shifting the environmental costs to those who deny their livelihood from the fruits of nature. Building dams, mining ores, underground water, drilling and industrialization of agriculture often expel small farmers, artisans and primitive peoples because the eco-system from which they live is destroyed.
Globalization costs
Today the distances are shriveling which once separated places of accumulation from places of exploitation and victors from victims. Costs that were presumably shifted to the future already make themselves felt in the present. Seen geographically, only a few areas are still left for exploitation. From a social perspective, the powerless are spreading to the thresholds of the rich. Here and with globalization in general, the world has become smaller, both in the positive and with regard to the problems. The old thermodynamic truth that production produces both prosperity and waste becomes increasingly ominous since a globalization of waste production is connected with the globalization of materialist production. The term "worldwide risk society" (U. Beck) corectly paraphrases the present historical situation. The risks produced with economic growth seem to grow faster than the produced wealth. Therefore at the beginning of the twenty-first century, justice will involve the reduction of risks and the redistribution of wealth.
In Truman's time, the worldwide development project still appeared as a global undertaking with black numbers. No kind of suspicion stirred that the journey to modernization could be overrun by rising waves of risks. Under the new historical conditions, the concept of justice should be separated from the concept of development. The term "development" expresses a noble hope whose roots extend back to the first half of the nineteenth century in the time of origin of socialist thought. Under the impression of extraordinarily fast technological advance, socialists found that justice could not be realized without a certain level of technological progress. Starting from that understanding, progressive people of all shades have tried to spread progress to improve the situation of the poor, first in Europe and then in the rest of the world.
This beginning is irrefutable. However on closer examination, it proves dangerously one-sided. With the new historical conditions, the violation of an upper limit for nature-intensive development means that justice can no longer be realized. Chemical-intensive agriculture, the automobile society and meat nutrition are examples. These areas of development are structurally oligarchic. They cannot be generalized without risking the possibilities of everyone.
On account of the fact that twenty percent of the world's population with the highest income claim eighty-five percent of the ancient forests of the world, seventy-five percent of the ores and seventy percent of the energy, their lifestyle cannot be cited as a model for a justice to be realized. On the contrary, if one considers the natural limits of the encumbrance of the environment, these twenty percent collaborate in excluding the less privileged parts of the world population from natural resources. Engagement for justice gains a completely new color. Denouncing the rich is imperative.
Conventional development thinking implicitly defines justice as a problem of the poor. In view of the abyss separating the rich from the poor, development experts see this chasm first of all as a deficit of the poor, not as an error of the powerful. They emphasize raising the living standard of the poor to the level of the rich. Their work focuses on lifting the lowest part instead of capping the top.
Justice
With the emergence of the bio-physical limits of growth, the classical idedas of justice which were bound with a perspective of eternal authority and not with the perspective of incompleteness received a new meaning. Justice involves changing the rich, not the poor. The striving for justice in a worldwide risk society must include the capping of the peaks or their alteration instead of lifting the lowest part of the pyramid.
On the background of a drastic global inequality in access to resources, the North (together with its foreign posts in the South) needs structural adjustment. Besides the redistribution of wealth, the North is challenged to structure its production and consumption in a way that doesn't deny countries of the South .
If one slightly modifies the Kantian imperative, the statement makes sense that a society can only be sustainable when its action can in principle be the maxim for the actions of all other societies. Jestice requires self-observation. The principle of the equal access of all people to the resources of the world is the standard for how far one's own society is a fair partner in the world.
Recently a study concluded that industrialized countries must reduce their resource consumption ten fold within the next fifty years if they want to be good neighbors. Undoubtedly this enormous challenge would mean changes in civilization supporting both technological gifts and new public values. Justice had true standards before the dreams of endlessness spread uncontrollably. These standards must again become the axis in the era of post-development. In the future, justice will consist in taking less instead of giving more.
The less powerful countries today need more space to thrive. Self-limitation on the part of the richer countries is the condition both for justice within a generation and for justice between the generations. In short, whoever demands justice must speak about the true standards. The anniversaries of 1997 will degenerate to lukewarm events if this truth is tactfully ignored.