Summary Governance Of Global Sustainability (AB_1229)
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Governance Of Global Sustainability (AB_1229)
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Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
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Governance Of Global Sustainability (AB_1229)
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Overview - Governance of Global Sustainability
Lecture Reading Quiz Seminar
WEEK 1
Week 1 Seminar
What is the importance of governing sustainability?
Sustainability improves the quality of our lives, protects our ecosystem and preserves natural resources
for future generations.
What is the conceptual difference between: Nature preservation, environmentalism and sustainable
development?
- Nature preservation: focused on preserving nature and biodiversity. Started with a concern for
the protection of seabirds and keeping certain species from becoming extinct.
- Environmentalism: is a movement and ideology that aims to reduce the impact of human
activities on the earth and its various inhabitants
- SD: economic development that is conducted without depletion of natural resources, and
without interfering with future well-being.
Mainstreaming refers to the process of ensuring that environmental management, protection and
conservation are integrated into sustainable development planning and management. ... Its four key
pillars are economic growth, sustainable development, good governance, and security.
MSD characteristics
● Does not challenge dominant/capitalist industrialized model
● Emphasis on the market for achieving sustainability
● Describes green economy as a way out / Green economy is a version of capitalism (Eco growth
but green)
● Emphasises on free markets and self regulation of business actors
● Rejections of environmental limits to growth
● Technological optimism
● Win-win solutions to poverty and environmental destruction
● Ecological Modernization as a manifesto
What are the core features of the mainstream sustainable development (MSD) approach?
- Economic and market-based approach ⇒ Market-based instruments for environmental
management are policy interventions that provide incentives for producers and consumers to
change behavior, more efficiently use resources, and reduce their negative environmental
impacts.
- Techno-centrism ⇒ is a value system that is centered on technology and its ability to control
and protect the environment
- Closed-system frameworks ⇒ hold that rational use of resources, personal motivation, and
individual capabilities determine organizational success and that other actors in the
environment figure minimally.
- Focus on economic development
- ‘greening’ of business corporations
- Technological regulation
- Participation of citizens, focused on human needs
Adamas (2009) Chapter 2 - The origins of sustainable development
, ● An understanding of the evolution of sustainable development thinking must embrace the
way essentially metropolitan ideas about nature and its conservation were expressed on the
periphery in the twentieth century, initially on the colonial periphery and latterly within
the countries of the independent developing world. This focuses attention in particular on
the rise of international environmentalism in the second half of the twentieth century
● This chapter does this by selecting nine themes, overlapping in time. The first is the rise of
environmentalism as a global concern. The second is the development of nature preservation,
and later of conservation, both in industrialized countries and their global empires. The third
theme is the institutionalization of global environmental concern through international
organizations. The fourth is the importance of ecological ideas about the ‘balance of
nature’, the fifth the place of ecology in tropical (especially colonial) development and the
sixth the growth of ecological managerialism. The seventh theme is the growth of concern
about the ecological impacts of development, and the eighth is the rise of perceptions of
global environmental crisis, and particularly the perceived threat of human population
growth. The final theme is the increasingly international organization of scientific concern
about the environment, particularly in the form of the Man and the Biosphere Programme of
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
1.Global environmentalism
● Ideas of environmental crisis, environmental limits and environmental management,
developed in the colonial periphery, where full-throated capitalist and imperialist expansion
met tropical societies and ecosystems for the first time, became the familiar basis for
twentieth-century environmentalist concern, and an important source of ideas about
sustainable development.
2.Nature preservation and sustainable development
● In many ways, wildlife or nature conservation has been the most deep-seated root of
sustainable development thinking.
3.International environmental organization
● An important factor in the development of the idea of sustainable development was the
creation of global organizations, not simply links between colonial metropole and colonies.
● The new international organizations were strongly based in industrialized countries, reaching
out to the developing world.
4.Ecology and the balance of nature
● Ecology has contributed to thinking about sustainability in a series of related ways. First,
ecological theory has underpinned much broader thinking about the environment and human
impacts upon it. This relationship, and particularly the idea that there is some kind of ‘balance of
nature’, is reviewed in this section. Second, ecology has been particularly important in
thinking about tropical environments and therefore the development of colonial territories
and developing countries. This is discussed in the next section. Third, there is a close resonance
between the acquisition of scientific understanding and the application of that knowledge
to both environmental management and development.
● Ecology’s most obvious contribution to sustainable development has been its scientific
description and analysis of the living environment.
● Economics reflected evolving understanding of the dynamics of resources, particularly in the
distinction between renewable (flow) and non-renewable (stock) resource
● In this form, too, ideas about the dynamics of natural systems and their response to human
management fed into thinking about sustainable development.
5.Ecology and tropical development
, ● The tropics were an important hearth of innovation in biological science, and particularly
ecology, in the twentieth century
● The science of ecology had its immediate roots in the temperate habitats of northern
Europe (Denmark, Germany and the UK) and the USA, and the challenge of describing and
analysing vegetation.
● However the attention of ecologists was soon extended to the study of the diversity of
nature overseas. This engagement simply carried forward the close and reciprocal links that had
existed between science and exploration in the tropics through the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
6. Ecological managerialism ⇒ refers to a particular type of environmental management carried out by
“professional-technical workers” who are trained in environmental science and policy schools at
Western universities, which emphasize “sound scientific and technical” solutions to environmental
crises.
● As the idea of development planning began to take root in post-war Africa, ecology was
seen to provide not only valuable environmental data for planning, but a model for the practice
of development itself.
● Rationalization is the process by which human reason frames and allows ordering and control of
both nature and society. The attraction of the science of ecology in development planning was
its power to rationalize both comprehension of development ‘problems’ and action. Science
provided knowledge that could be used to control environment, economy and society in such
a way that ‘developmental’ change could be directed in desired directions.
7. The ecological impacts of development
● By the 1960s and early 1970s, there was growing understanding of the adverse ecological
impacts of development, particularly on the part of the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the International Biological Programme (IBP) and the
Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB). This duly led to attempts to identify specific
formulae for avoiding or minimizing these impacts, in an essentially techno centrist search
for ‘environmentally benign’ development.
● Adverse environmental impacts of development had to be understood and dealt with
during the process of planning development if problems were to be avoided.
● Environmental Impact Assessment is part of this
8.Environmental limits, population and global crisis
● The rise of environmentalism in the industrialized world in the 1960s had enormous
significance for debates about the role of ecology and conservation in development, and
was also influenced by those debate.
● the perception that there were environmental issues of global significance was a distinctive
and novel feature of the ‘new environmentalism’
● ‘’ limits to growth ‘’
9.Global science and sustainable development
● The final thread in the story of the roots of sustainable development is the establishment
of specific international scientific organizations with the state of the global environment
as a fundamental party of their remit.
Summary
● Ideas about sustainable development that emerged in the 1980s had deep roots.
Important themes include the development of environmentalism, concern for nature
preservation, the development of international environmental organizations, the
, development of the science of ecology (and ideas about the balance of nature and the need
for science-based ecological management), concern about global population growth and the
development of global scientific networks.
● The tropics, which were the focus of much of the environmental concern and development
action in the late twentieth century, were also important to the development of
environmentalism at much earlier periods, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
● Nature preservation is important to sustainable development both as a source of the impulse
to balance human need and human claims on nature, and also because of the role of
international conservation organizations (especially the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Conservation Union) in generating the thinking
that stimulated the formulation of the concept of sustainable development, and
organizing the meetings where it was first set out.
● Goals of SD ⇒ to provide resources for the use of present populations without compromising
the availability of those resources for future generations, and without causing environmental
damage that challenges the survival of other species and natural ecosystems.
● The science of ecology contributed to development, and development planning, in various ways,
particularly in the period following the Second World War.
● Ecological ideas such as ‘the balance of nature’, the concept of the ecosystem and maximum
sustainable yield provide an essential underpinning of concepts of sustainable development.
● The balance of nature ⇒ a state of equilibrium in nature due to the constant interaction of the
whole biotic and environmental complex, interference with this equilibrium (as by human
intervention) being often extremely destructive — compare erosion.
● Concern about limits to growth and global population growth were fundamental to the
environmental revolution of the 1970s, and provide the background to the emergence of formal
statements of the idea of sustainable development. Global scientific collaboration, notably in
the International Biological Programme, provided an authoritative, apolitical and effective
arena within which ideas of sustainable development could develop and be discussed in the
1970s.
Adamas (2009) Chapter 5 - Mainstream sustainable development (MSD)
● The mainstream has been essentially reformist, and convergent in its propositions.
● It has sought to refocus existing development initiatives and policy action rather than
transform their principles or practice.
● It has joined two positive-sounding concepts (‘sustainability’ and ‘development’).
● In doing so, it has sought ‘to resolve the conflict between an economy based on everlasting
growth and a planetary environment of permanent high quality’
● Sustainable development has been built on the premise that these could be reconciled if
the economy were organized around productive activities that do not harm the
environment.
● 3 important groupings of thought within it:
○ market environmentalism
○ ecological modernization
○ environmental populism
● The most important feature of MSD is that it shares the industrialism of the modern
world system, including the processes of modernization, economic growth and
nation-state building.
● Developmentalism underpins ideas about the proper direction of economic change in
industrialized countries, and acts as a model for ‘developing’ countries.
● MSD does not challenge the dominant capitalist industrializing model. Instead it opens
debate about its methods and outcomes. Thus Our Common Future focused on better
planning techniques, more careful use of state capital and more careful use of economic
appraisal to reduce development that causes ecological disruption.
● Part and parcel of the mainstream’s acceptance of developmentalism lie in its emphasis
on the market as an institution for achieving sustainability.
Market environmentalism
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