Sustainability schizophrenia or “actually existing sustainabilities?” toward a broader understanding of the politics and promise of local sustainability in the US (original) (raw)
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Desarrollo sustentable: de falacia a fraude Resumen Hasta principios de los noventas, algunxs académicxs y la opinión pública occidental estaban progresando en el desarrollo de una ética medioambiental que podría derivar en una plataforma política medioambiental activa. El Compromiso por el Desarrollo Sustentable de la ONU en 1987 inhibió este proceso transformando el problema medioambiental de un problema político y ético a un problema técnico, económico y científico. El discurso del Desarrollo Sustentable se ha vuelto una pseudo-ideología que ha eliminado el posible potencial revolucionario del pensamiento “verde” radical. Para combatir el triunfante orden neoliberal es necesario avanzar en una nueva alternativa dialéctica que sustituya la estrategia medioambiental radical por el derrotado proyecto Comunista. Palabras clave : política medioambiental, ética medioambiental, filosofía de la ciencia, movimientos « verdes », Islam
Journal of Business Ethics, 2003
The debate on sustainable globalized development rests on two clearly stated economic assumptions: that "development" proceeds, solely and inevitably, through industrialization and the proliferation of capital intensive high-technology, towards the creation of service sector economies; and that globalization, based on a neoliberal, capitalist, free market ideology, provides the only vehicle for such development. Sustainability, according to the proponents of globalized development, is merely a function of market forces, which will generate the solutions for all problems including the environmental dilemmas that loom over the globe today. The social focus of globalized development is clearly the "individual" and the much-touted goal of development in the context of these debates, is the emancipation of the individual from want. This glorification of the individual, so characteristic of the Enlightenment, has defined all aspects of modernity, leading to approaches that are self-focused and that give little thought to the needs of society or even the social context. The increasing impoverishment of human life and the growing environmental degradation, however, provide a poignant counterpoint to this onrush of capital interests, demanding a reassessment of sustainability separate from the logic of industrialization and globalized development. This paper examines the unfolding of the logic of capitalism, which underlies the structure of the Rostowian model of development and the problems in the assumptions underlying today's globalized development process. The evident impossibility of sustainability in the current growth-based market system leads to the examination of alternatives including a reflexive understanding of the choices and the inclusion of opportunity costs, related to the social, environmental and economic aspects of decision making. The integration of all factors of production into the logic of development provides a sustainable alternative to the current system.
Reconsidering Sustainable Development
Twenty-five years after it entered the mainstream of global development discourse, “sustainable” remains a vague concept. Adopted by the powerful and the powerless, the term has been used to describe everything from consumer products to entire economic systems. Meanwhile, conciliatory democratic politics have suffered under a heavily money-influenced political process. This paper critiques conventional views on the definition of sustainability, and the proposed solutions that emerge therefrom. Ultimately, even the most useful concept in sustainable development discourse —the “three-legged stool” of social, ecological, and economic concerns—remains inadequate. The failure to implement the three-legged stool in practice indicates that contradictions between desired outcomes in each leg are an inherent and perpetual problem for society. Modern sustainability discourse, in its focus on ideal outcomes, fails to provide guidance for what to do when these contradictions occur. In promoting deliberative democratic decision-making for government, business, and civil society as a means towards sustainability, the author emphasizes sustainability as a process, not an achievement, even if that process relies on some widely accepted sustainability indicators to gauge its direction. By paying attention to the limits and failures of current models of societal decision-making (including the ways economic structures delimit behavioral options), sustainability discourse can elaborate a successful alternative: widespread, multi-level, nested, and interacting deliberative democratic processes that address the usage and pollution of natural resources. This paper also analyzes urbanization as a contentious subject within sustainability discourse, and as a key element in deliberative democratic development and the iterative mitigation of environmental problems.
Sustainability, Capitalism and Resistance
2015
After the initial years of the sustainability debate, it is time to make a balance of experiences and lessons accumulated so far, trying to understand what are the implications for the future. The main conclusion is that it is not possible to reform the capitalist mode of production to accommodate a sustainable relation between humans and nature. Capitalism is the origin of alienation from nature, but alienation being maintained and reinforced gave rise to unsustainability. Unsustainability is, thus, consequence of the continuation of capitalism. Despite of that, there has been some inconsistency between sustainable development initiatives and the core notion of incompatibility with capitalism. Such inconsistency results from a still incomplete interpretation, what can be explained by the history of sustainable development. The operationalization of sustainable development involves global and local strategies, which are both part of the same process of systematic opposition to capitalism. That opposition seeks to create "spaces of sustainability", which are physical and social domains without conflicts between nature and society. Spaces of sustainability are, in essence, "spaces of resistance".
JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE POLITICS, 2019
The article interrogates sustainable development as the dominant presumably alternative paradigm of development and functioning of societies that declaratively transcends the ecological and societal limits of the older models. It argues that the dominant understanding of sustainable development that promotes limited incremental changes to the capitalist development model can best be understood as the result of its gradual systematic co-optation and integration into the dominant neoliberal governmentality atthe global and local levels. By analysing the gradual neoliberalization of sustainable development in the global and the Slovenian context it argues that these contexts are interdependent concerning the consolidation and resilience of the neoliberal vision of sustainable development in the face of multiple and multidimensional economic and environmental crises. By specifically focusing on the case of Slovenia it demonstrates and reflects on the crucial role of actors that formally and informally represent the public interest such as the state and the organized civil society in re-legitimizing and upholding the neoliberal vision(s) of sustainable development in the context of crises.
The Rhetoric of Sustainability: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy?
Sustainability, 2010
In 1991, development economist and American public intellectual Albert O. Hirschman wrote the Rhetoric of Reaction . In this book, which was prescient of more contemporary popular books such as Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine [2] and James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State [3], Hirschman proposed a way to understand the kinds of arguments made by conservatives about proposals for change. His compelling trilogy of modes of arguments included arguments of perversity, futility, and jeopardy. I argue here that this schema can additionally be used as a way to understand the limits that are seen to exist to approaching sustainable development. I will demonstrate the pervasiveness of arguments that our best attempts to move toward sustainability in our cities today may present threats that are just as grave as those of not acting. This exercise serves two purposes. One is to urge those who would call themselves sustainability scholars to think critically and carefully about the lines of thought and action that may separate different sustainability motivations from the far reaches of interdisciplinary work in this field. The other is to suggest that, because of the persistence of certain kinds of arguments about the impossibility of sustainability, suggestive of deep and enduring instincts of doubt through human history, we should be skeptical of the legitimacy of these claims about the limitations of achieving sustainable development.