A BRIEF HISTORY OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

by Seema Paul

Sustainable development is one of the most fundamental challenges confronting humanity. While everybody agrees about the need for sustainable development, operationalizing this consensus goal in public policy is extremely difficult because there is as yet no commonly accepted definition of the term. Of the numerous definitions to be found in literature, the least controversial definition, or the one most commonly accepted, states that sustainable development is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to develop. (Our Common Future published by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development) Before examining the different interpretations of sustainable development, let us first take stock of the historic origins of the term, and its commonly accepted definition. Traditionally, the goal of public policy was progress. Progress was taken to be a movement away from a less than perfect past into a future that would take people closer to an idyllic state this state never quite defined, except in relation to the past and hence progress was taken to be a continuous movement to a better future, with no specific end goal. Being tied to the economic state (rather than moral or philosophical), progress meant more and more growth i.e. greater goods and conveniences available to humanity. The notion of progress as something that is possible endlessly into the future was first challenged in 1972 in a report called The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome, an international association of scientists, business executives, public officials and scholars. The report challenged the idea of progress that compares the present with the past, and considers the future an endless possibility for further growth and improvement, on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge the obvious truth that resources are finite, and hence growth dependent on resources can not be endless. The implicit message of The Limits to Growth was that growth needed to be replaced with no growth. While Limits to Growth emphasized what should not be done (i.e. growth), it did not define what the goal of public policy should be. Two key reports: The World Conservation Strategy1 , published in 1980 by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), and Our Common Future (also known as the Brundtland Report after the chairman of the committee), published by the UN appointed World Commission on Environment and Development seven years later, provided the answer as sustainable development and thus the concept of sustainable development was born. The World Conservation Strategy was aimed at policy-makers, development practitioners and conservationists. It defined conservation in human terms as the management of human use of the biosphere so that it may yield the greatest sustainable benefit to present generations while
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The World Conservation Strategy was prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, now called the World Conservation Union (IUCN), in cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the United Nations Environment Programme and other UN agencies, such as Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cu ltural Organization (UNESCO).

maintaining its potential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations. Development, it said, was the modification of the biosphere and the application of human, financial, living and non-living resources to satisfy human needs and improve the quality of human life . . . For development to be sustainable it must take account of the social and ecological factors as well as economic ones: of the living and non-living resource base, and of the long-term as well as the short-term advantages and disadvantages of alternative actions. It was the World Commission on Environment and Development, however, that brought the idea of sustainable development into broader discourse, although it was not until the UN Conference for Environment and Development or the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that the concept was thrust into centre stage of the global public policy debate. Our Common Future the report of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development was the third in a series of reports to focus discussion in the world scientific community. Born of a UN (i.e. intergovernmental) process, Our Common Future not surprisingly reflected a political compromise, as is the nature of intergovernmental processes. Faced with the no-growth lobbyists on the one hand, who believed that the Planet was running out of resources and increasingly being faced with pollution, and the pro-growth economists from the developing world, who had strongly challenged The Limits to Growth, the Brundtland Report argued neither in favour of limits nor of development, but rather, sustainable development. Sustainable development, the [Brundtland] report said, meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Clearly, the report reflected the ideas first proposed in The World Conservation Strategy. Responding to the debate between no-growth and pro-growth lobbies, the Brundtland report added: The concept of sustainable development does imply limits not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technology and social organization can be both managed and improved to make the way for a new era of economic growth. In other words, the report advocated the idea of sustainable growth. The term sustainable development had been coined by non-economists (IUCN and Brundtland Commission), yet by favouring sustainable growth, Our Common Future had taken the side of economists. In the coming years, it was a group of economists, however, who, while pledging allegiance to sustainable development, challenged this interpretation of sustainable development as sustainable growth. In other words, the debate between pro-growth and anti-growth groups did not end. This new set of economists included people like Herman Daly, Robert Goodland and Salah El Serafy. While trained in traditional economics, they viewed economic system as being a sub-set of the global ecosystem, on which, they firmly believed, the economic system was dependent. Traditional economists, on the other hand, always treated natural resources as being a sector of the economy, and not something larger than economics itself. The ecological economists, as this group of economists came to be called (as distinct from environmental economists who are traditional economists that specialize in the study of environment as a sector of the economy), took the debate of the Club of Rome to a new level. While the key argument of the Club of Rome was to substantiate their claim that no further growth could be tolerated rested on limitation of resources, the ecological economists, in acknowledging this, made a further point that the limits to Earths sink capacity2 also bolstered

Sink capacity is the earths capacity to recycle the waste generated by growth

this belief this. Since sink functions are common property to a greater extent than are source functions, this overuse is less correctible by the automatic market adjustment, they stated. Dr. Robert Goodland pointed to five key pieces of evidence that the earth was at the limits of growth : global warming, ozone hole, widespread land degradation, declining biodiversity and high rate of appropriation of the net primary product of terrestrial photosynthesis by humankind. (For more information, read The Case That the World Has Reached Limits by Dr. Robert Goodland in Population, Technology and Lifestyle, edited by Robert Goodland, Herman E. Daly and Salah El Serafy, Island Press). The ecological economists with Herman Daly as a key leader challenged the interpretation of sustainable development as sustainable growth. His interpretation of sustainable development was development without growth in throughput beyond environmental carrying capacity, with throughput being defined as population times per capita resource consumption.( Valuing the Earth, Economics, Ecology and Ethics, by Herman Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend.) Since the source and sink functions of the Planet were limited, the economic subsystem of Planet Earth had to be of a size that the Planet could sustain not only for the present but for future generations also. The economy, in other words, had to achieve a steady state, and it could not be continuously growing, otherwise it would overwhelm the Planet. The obvious weakness of the argument for a steady-state economy (no further growth) was widespread poverty, especially in developing countries. Who could deny the need for the South to develop? As the preparations for the UN Conference for Environment and Development (Earth Summit, 1992) advanced further, and the developing countries lobbied harder to put poverty on the agenda for discussion at Rio, the concept of sustainable development evolved to the next stage. Hitherto, the advocates of steady-state economy had interpreted sustainable development as development (increasing value of output) without growth (i.e. holding throughput population times resource consumption constant). In other words, as long as technological development permitted qualitative improvement in services, development was permissible; however, increase in throughput was not a permitted route to development. The locus of this debate was always kept at the global level, and rarely were academics willing to delve at any length into the issue of inequalities within the world and the need of the poor nations to develop. The advocates of a Steady State Economy acknowledged in 1992 that the definition of sustainable development as development without throughput growth would not cure poverty. While quantitative improvement in the efficiency with which resources are used would be helpful, it would not be sufficient to alleviate poverty. The need for growth in the South was obvious, and acknowledged. In their 1992 publication: Population, Technology and Lifestyle , Robert Goodland, Herman Daly and Salah El Serafy stated that, Poverty reduction will require considerable growth, as well as development, in developing countries. But ecological constraints are real, and more growth for the poor must be balanced by negative throughput growth for the rich. This marked an important step in the evolution of the concept of sustainable development among Northern academics and public policy practitioners. While acknowledging the need for growth in the South, they called on the North to free up the environmental space both reducing the use of natural resources and limiting the pollution overload so the growth in the South could be balanced by negative throughput growth for the rich. At the global level, they continued to insist that the Earth needed a steady-state economy. Tinbergenand Hueting (1992) put it plainest: no further production growth in rich countries.

Over ten years on, after the Johannesberg World Summit for Sustainable Development, it is clear that while sustainable development has become a permanent and key phrase in the modern public policy lexicon, we are far from achieving it at the global level. Certainly, the countries in the South continue to pursue growth as they need to, but have countries in the North actually freed up the ecological space for them to do so? And are countries in the North or South ready to pursue a model where growth in the South is not fuelled by export of its natural resources? To some extent, advancement in the information technology sector allows for a new model of development, in which the South does not premise its growth on exporting its natural resources, and in which countries like India are well placed to benefit. But what about Africa? Is this model workable in the near future, and is the global community committed to pursuing it? The issue of climate change is one of the crucial tests of the global communitys willingness to pursue the sustainable development model that allows for growth in the South as the North reduces its consumption, thus freeing up ecological space. The North needs to cut down its carbon emissions immediately if the Planet to be saved from the extremely serious consequences of climate change in the near future. But the Kyoto Protocol a critical first step towards implementing concrete action on this agenda by the North is far from being operationalized. The Bush administration in the United States a country that needs to demonstrate leadership has abandoned the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, the Bush administration clearly believes in growth and more growth for its own country which is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and consumes resources at a level unmatched by other countries. Predicting the future of sustainable development is very hard, although the goal remains ever desirable. The discussion above should not be taken to imply that there is consensus on the definition of sustainable development as development without throughput growth at the global level and where poverty in the developing countries is balanced by reductions in growth and throughput in the North. Far from it. Even today, there are multiple definitions and interpretations of sustainable development. The definition above is the one considered reasonable by this writer. There continue to be groups and interests, however, that consider growth a fundamental premise for sustainable development, whether for the North or South, and that do not accept the need for a steady-state economy at the global level. The absence of a consensus on the definition of sustainable development is perhaps inbuilt in the concept itself given that as Daniel Esty has contended sustainable development is an oxymoron emphasizing both to sustain and to develop, and therefore prioritizing one or the other yields very different results. (Greening the GATT. Institute for International Economics, Washington DC, 1994). The practical consequences of the conflict of development (growth) versus environmental sustainability is that little progress has been actually achieved in reconciling these two objectives. (The Illusion of Progress: Unsustainable Development in International Law and Policy: Earthscan, London)