Fictions of Sustainability The Politics of Growth and Post-Capitalist Futures (original) (raw)
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Sustainable development is failing but there are alternatives to capitalism (The Guardian)
In the face of worsening ecological and economic crises and continuing social deprivation, the last two decades have seen two broad trends emerge among those seeking sustainability, equality and justice. First there are the green economy and sustainable development approaches that dominate the upcoming Paris climate summit and the post-2015 sustainable development goals (SDGs). To date, such measures have failed to deliver a harmonisation of economic growth, social welfare and environmental protection. Political ecology paradigms, on the other hand, call for more fundamental changes, challenging the predominance of growth-oriented development based on fossil fuels, neoliberal capitalism and related forms of so-called representative democracy. The false answers of the green economy If we look at international environmental policy of the last four decades, the initial radicalism of the 1970s has vanished. The outcome document of the 2012 Rio+20 Summit, The Future We Want, failed to identify the historical and structural roots of poverty, hunger, unsustainability and inequity. These include: centralisation of state power, capitalist monopolies, colonialism, racism and patriarchy. Without diagnosing who or what is responsible, it is inevitable that any proposed solutions will not be transformative enough. Furthermore, the report did not acknowledge that infinite growth is impossible in a finite world. It conceptualised natural capital as a “critical economic asset”, opening the doors for commodification (so-called green capitalism), and did not challenge unbridled consumerism. A lot of emphasis was placed on market mechanisms, technology and better management, undermining the fundamental political, economic and social changes the world needs. In contrast, a diversity of movements for environmental justice and new worldviews that seek to achieve more fundamental transformations have emerged in various regions of the world. Unlike sustainable development, which is falsely believed to be universally applicable, these alternative approaches cannot be reduced to a single model. Even Pope Francis in the encyclical Laudato Si’, together with other religious leaders like the Dalai Lama, has been explicit on the need to redefine progress: “There is a need to change ‘models of global development’; [...] Frequently, in fact, people’s quality of life actually diminishes [...] in the midst of economic growth. In this context, talk of sustainable growth usually becomes a way of distracting attention and offering excuses. It absorbs the language and values of ecology into the categories of finance and technocracy, and the social and environmental responsibility of businesses often gets reduced to a series of marketing and image-enhancing measures.” Radical alternatives But critique is not enough: we need our own narratives. Deconstructing development opens up the door for a multiplicity of new and old notions and world views. This includes buen vivir (or sumak kawsay or suma qamaña), a culture of life with different names and varieties emerging from indigenous peoples in various regions of South America; ubuntu, with its emphasis on human mutuality (“I am because we are”) in South Africa; radical ecological democracy or ecological swaraj, with a focus on self-reliance and self-governance, in India; and degrowth, the hypothesis that we can live better with less and in common, in western countries. These worldviews differ sharply from today’s notion of development, challenging the dogmatic belief in economic growth and proposing in its place notions of wellbeing. They are internally diverse, but they express common fundamental values, including solidarity, harmony, diversity and oneness within nature. There are already thousands of initiatives practicing elements of such socio-ecological transformation: the reclamation of indigenous territories and ways of life in the Americas, the Zapatista and Kurdish movements for self-governance, solidarity economies, producer cooperatives, transition towns and community currencies in Europe, land, forest, and direct-democracy movements in Latin America and South Asia, the rapid spread of organic farming and decentralised renewable energy across the world, and others. Many of these form a basis for transformational politics, potentially supported by the case with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. This is what has been called plan C, a reinvigorated bottom-up project of the commons and communal solidarity. This would be an alternative to the failed plan A (austerity) and untested, but flawed, plan B (Keynesian growth based on further indebtedness). The inability or unwillingness of UN processes to acknowledge the fundamental flaws of the currently dominant economic and political system, and to envision a truly transformative agenda for a sustainable and equitable future, is disappointing. Even as civil society pushes for the greatest possible space within the post-2015 SDGs agenda, it must also continue envisioning and promoting fundamentally alternative visions and pathways. Radical wellbeing notions are unlikely to becoming prevalent in the current scenario. But it is not an impossible dream. As intertwined crises increase when even the green economy fails to deliver – as it inevitably must – people everywhere will be resisting and looking for meaningful alternatives.
2013
The disembeddedness of the market economy from society and nature has resulted in the market becoming independent of society on the one side, and has created an inherent constraint on the other. This is described in Karl Polanyi's classic 'The Great Transformation,' about the capitalist market economy since the second half of the eighteenth century, after the industrial revolution (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). At present, this inherent but external constraint is more precisely defined as a constraint to permanent growth. But what is economic growth? Economic growth is measured as the increase in gross domestic product (GDP), although there is considerable scepticism about the meaningfulness of this indicator. This has triggered in recent years a debate about growth, zero growth, post-growth and degrowth, sustainability, prosperity and happiness. The economy grows when the volume of labour increases and when more natural resources (including territorial space) are used for an increase of GDP and for spatial expansion. Consequently, growth is more of the same, an extensive parameter. Growth also occurs when the productivity of labour increases. This is generally only possible when 'living' labour is replaced by 'dead' capital, and mostly supplemented by it. This applies to machinery and buildings, and is especially the case for spatial infrastructure that is 'built environment' or a 'spatial fix'. It is especially important when the energy of human labour and the energy from animal or plant biomass, as well as energy from wind and water to propel mills, is replaced by fossil energy. 2 The energy density of fossil fuels is very high and they can be used anywhere because they are easily transportable. Fossil fuels can also be used at any time, day or night, winter or summer. Radiation energy from the sun does not have these properties: no wonder that a new age, the industrial age, began with the use of fossil fuels. Growth now becomes an intensive parameter; increasing productivity occurs through a substitution process. The use of fossil energy instead of biotic energy enables an acceleration of all economic processes, a compression of time. Economic growth has proceeded in a cyclical manner since the beginning of the industrial age. Only in the 'golden years' of economic development from about 1950 to the mid-1970s did steady, crisis-free growth appear to be the rule, at least in the industrialised countries. However, this was an erroneous assumption. Growth does not exclude crises. The systemic crisis from 1929 onwards was no singular event: it is repeated in the twenty-first century. It is a historic rupture that affects
Journal of Archetypal Cosmology
The concept of the "green economy" was revived after the global financial crisis of 2007-2011, without any consensus on its definition. i Various interpretations of the financial crisis have surfaced to frame the different narratives on the green economy, with different remedies proposed. This paper provides a cosmological and discourse analysis of these diverse narratives of the green economy, namely green revolution, green transformation, green growth, green resilience, new developmentalism, and just transitions (decoupling). While the rational scientific method has been the dominant mode of research for the modern and postmodern eras, this paper seeks to contribute to the broadening of our current worldview to include more intuitive, imaginative, speculative, and visionary aspects. Insights from an emerging archetypal cosmology provide a critique of the underlying assumptions found in the current discourses on the green economy, and empower us to re-imagine sustainability. This emerging cosmology seeks to bring a corrective to the more dominant, rational-discursive, one-dimensional, one-size-fits-all free-market economic view of life and its misenchantment visible in (green) techno-science and the increased financialization of labor and nature. ii Anchored in the bioregion, the emerging cosmology re-imagines existing patterns of economics, polity, and socio-cultural life. It is through morphic resonance that these emerging life-sustaining habits germinate and grow, mitigating the capture of the state by the economically and politically elitist networks that often exacerbate injustice, poverty, exploitation, and degradation.
Green Growth: Ideology, Political Economy and the Alternatives
2016
The discourse of “green growth” has recently gained ground in environmental governance deliberations and policy proposals. It is presented as a fresh and innovative agenda centered on the deployment of engineering sophistication, managerial acumen, and market mechanisms to redress the environmental and social derelictions of the existing development model. But the green growth project is deeply inadequate, whether assessed against criteria of social justice or the achievement of sustainable economic life upon a materially finite planet. This volume outlines three main lines of critique. First, it traces the development of the green growth discourse qua ideology. It asks: what explains modern society’s investment in it, why has it emerged as a master concept in the contemporary conjuncture, and what social forces does it serve? Second, it unpicks and explains the contradictions within a series of prominent green growth projects. Finally, it weighs up the merits and demerits of alternative strategies and policies, asking the vital question: “If not green growth, then what?”
in The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. Wiley-AAG
Green capitalism is an approach to managing the relationships between economic activities and the environment that presumes a large degree of compatibility between capitalism and current efforts to reduce human impacts on the non-human world. It is founded on the principle that private property, entrepreneurial freedom and market exchange are the most efficient ways of dealing with natural resource use and environmental degradation. It is expected that once markets can account for the economic value of natural capital they will stimulate individuals and firms to reduce environmental impacts. The growing influence of green capitalism on policy-making has given rise to a large body of critical work. The strongest critiques have emerged from a broadly Marxian perspective. Critics argue that any attempts to reduce environment impacts will need radical economic and cultural changes that are not possible within a capitalist framework.
The focus of this thesis is on whether or not it is possible to decouple economic growth from the physical growth of the economy and its associated negative environmental pressures and pollution. The thesis demonstrates that it is possible to achieve significant levels of decoupling of economic growth from a range of environmental pressures such as greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and natural resource degradation, freshwater extraction, air pollution, waste and hazardous waste. By clearly differentiating between economic and physical growth and focusing on how to achieve significant decoupling this thesis advances the traditional debates and discourses about “growth”. This thesis shows that in theory and practice it is possible to achieve significant levels of decoupling, and thus environmental sustainability, whilst maintaining economic growth. This thesis examines the relative costs of inaction versus action on decoupling, concluding that the costs of inaction significantly outweigh the costs of action. It also examines whether a transition to environmental sustainabilty will lead to net job losses or gains, showing that, with effective policy, it can result in net employment gains. As such, this thesis provides a new integration to show that it is possible to reconcile the need to simultaneously achieve environmental sustainability, economic growth and job creation. This result has important implications for other important sustainability debates such as the climate change debates. These are explored in detail in this thesis. This thesis also demonstrates that many social sustainability goals – reducing poverty, inequality and corruption whilst improving access to education and health –correlate strongly with improved economic growth. Thus this thesis demonstrates that it is possible to create a new form of economic growth that is also environmentally and socially sustainable as called for in the seminal text on sustainable development "Our Common Future" in 1987. Finally, this thesis is a formal defense of and contribution to the academic field of ecological modernization which has hypothesized that it is possible to simultaneously pursue environmental sustainability, social justice and economic growth in ways that mutually re-enforce each other. This thesis provides significant evidence to support this central tenet of ecological modernisation. The research of this thesis has helped inform and contribute to several international book publications all of which show nations how to achieve significant decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures such as Cents and Sustainability:Securing Our Common Future by Decoupling Economic Growth from Environmental Pressures (Earthscan, 2010). Note: This thesis was submitted in May 2008 and was awarded in 2009. You can download all the chapters individually from the ANU digital thesis library here https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/49387