SUSTAINABLE development has become the new catch phrase. Every
international agency -- from the World Bank to UNICEF -- and
almost every country is talking about it. But what does this
mean? For environmentalists, sustainable development denotes a
radical change from the past. But as a Western joke now goes,
sustainable development for multinational companies, many of
which have also embraced the concept, means simply "sustained
growth" or "sustained profits". Every agency now has its own
definition of sustainable development.
"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs
of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs". This is a
definition offered by the famous World Commission on Environment
and Development in its report Our Common Future. Economists
have also provided a definition of sustainable development as
being an economic process in which the quantity and quality of
our stocks of natural resources (like forests) and the integrity
of biogeochemical cycles (like climate) are sustained and passed
on to the future generations unimpaired. In other words, there is
no depreciation in the world's "natural capital", to borrow a
concept from financial accounting.
But what is the operational substance behind such
definitions? Who is going to ensure the rights of future
generations when, given the highly divided world we live in, a
large proportion of even the present generation cannot meet all
its needs. Given such a social and political context, the above
definitions also fail to say whose future generations' needs are
being sought to be protected and preserved. Are we talking only
of the future generations of the rich or also of the poor?
These definitions are all, at best, rhetorical and woolly.
Eminent Indian economist, Sukhamoy Chakravorty, in a
lecture that he delivered to the Centre for Science and
Environment a few weeks before his demise, had pointed out that
the success of the phrase "sustainable development" lies in the
fact that it says nothing precise and, therefore, means
anything to anybody. For a logging company it can mean
sustained projects; for an environmental economist it can mean
sustained stocks of natural forests; for a social ecologist it
can mean sustained use of the forest; and, for an
environmentalist it can mean a clean heritage for our children.
But surely confusion cannot be more productive than clarity.
More than these pious definitions, it is important to
understand the political content of sustainable development.
Sustainability can never be absolute. A society which learns
faster from its mistakes and rectifies its behaviour will
invariably be more sustainable than another society which takes a
longer time. And a society which fails to incorporate the lessons
of its mistakes into its behaviour patterns even after the point
of irreversibility has been reached, is obviously a society
which is pursuing a totally unsustainable process of development.
Learning from one's mistakes is crucial to the process of
sustainable development because no society -- today, tomorrow or
ever in the future -- can claim to be so knowledgeable that it
will always manage and use its natural resources in a perfectly
ecologically sound manner. That will always be a near
impossibility. Changing social, political, cultural,
technological and ecological conditions will exert new pressures
on the natural resource base and the possibility of its misuse or
overuse will always remain. It can, therefore, be argued that
sustainable development will be the outcome of a political order
in which a society is so structured that it will learn fast from
its mistakes in the use of its natural resources and rapidly
rectify its human-nature relationships in accordance with the
knowledge it has gained.
The important question, therefore, is: which political order
will lead to conditions which encourage a society to learn fast
from its mistakes in the use of its natural resources? It is
obvious that such a society will be one in which decision-
making is largely the prerogative of those who will also
suffer the consequences of those decisions. If decisions are
taken by a distant national bureaucracy or a transnational
corporation to use a particular resource, and a local community
living next to that resource is suffering in the process, it
is unlikely that the decision-makers will change their
decisions fast. But if the resource is being overused or misused
by a local community which is dependent on it for its survival,
and cannot easily relocate itself to another environment (in
other words, it is a settled community rather than a frontier
community), the declining productivity of the resource would
sooner or later force the local community to change its ways.
Sustainability, therefore, arises not out of mushy
headed concepts like care for future generations but out of hard
political issues like, one, patterns of resource control, and,
two, levels of democracy within the decision-making group.
Greater the participation, openness and democracy within the
members of the decision-making group, greater will be the
chances of those who are suffering within the decision-making
group -- whether the decision is taken by a community or a
nation as whole -- to get a fair hearing and decisions changed
accordingly.
Sustainability thus demands the creation of a political
order in which, firstly, control of natural resources rests to
the maximum extent possible with local communities who are
dependent on those resources; and, secondly, decision-making
within the community is as participatory, open and democratic
as possible. The more this happens, the more we will
move towards sustainable development.
The bedrock of sustainable development is composed of
freedom and democracy -- a system of governance which gives
freedom to a community or a nation, within an universally
accepted social framework that prescribes penalties for harming
another community or nation, to control the use and management of
its natural resources so that it can determine its own way of
economic and social development. Each society will experiment and
learn from its own mistakes. Sustainable development cannot be
thrust upon by an external agent -- whether it is the World
Bank, the United Nations or the forestry department of a
government -- simply because it believes, at any point in time,
that it has learnt all the lessons there are to learn. That
will surely be a process towards unsustainable development.
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