Championing sustainable development in contested times
This article was written by Professor Mark Everard, IES Vice President, in response to the changing political context that is affecting many IES members and environmental professionals worldwide. This article highlights key messages from a longer piece written by Mark, and the text has been abridged. It provides Mark’s perspective and represents personal views of the author to stimulate thought and discussion. It is not an opinion of the Institution of Environmental Sciences as an organisation.
As a membership organisation, we provide a convening space where members can share their views and engage in healthy debate, so if you have a perspective on these (or any other) issues, please get in touch. We intend to publish a short series of papers from different IES members, leading to a discussion event later in the year where members can share their views.
Background
Two major but conflicting conceptual influences emerged into the policy arena and wider public understanding during the 1980s, the influence and pervasion of both spreading globally in the following decade.
The first of these influences was monetarism. In the 1970s, a trend towards progressive commercial liberalisation under a free-market capitalism model was substantially accelerated by the work of US economist Milton Friedman, ‘liberating’ profit-making from government intervention through deregulation and wider fiscal and other policies rejecting state control. Collectively termed ‘monetarism’, this approach won Friedman a Nobel Prize in 1976 and had significant influence on US policy under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, in the UK during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, and reshaped modern capitalism at a pan-global scale significantly through the expanding influence of multinational corporations.
Neoliberalisation was to change our understanding of money, reframing its primary purpose as investment to make more money in a deregulated state in which environmental and social concerns were largely reconceptualised as net costs and constraints.
The second major conceptual influence emerging throughout the 1980s was that of sustainable development. The Ramsar Convention, signed in 1971, explicitly recognised that the sustainability of the world’s wetlands depended on ‘wise use’ by those inhabiting them, as a prior ‘fortress conservation’ model of incarcerating them behind barbed wire was manifestly failing. This conceptual approach to interdependence of ecological, economic and social development fed through to the 1981 World Conservation Strategy and onwards, with the ‘triple bottom line’ model achieving wider societal and political awareness following publication of ‘Our Common Future’ (the ‘Brundtland Report’) by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987.
A great deal of rhetoric flowed in the following decades about a systemic commitment to sustainable development, all the while the wrecking ball of monetarism prising apart short-term profit-taking from environmental and social considerations whilst headline metrics such as GDP (gross domestic product) were concerned only with financial throughput as if that were a proxy for lasting societal wellbeing, security and opportunity.
Often, attempts to express these wider values in monetary terms have failed to reflect that they are inherently incommensurable with money, constituting primary capitals underpinning the generation of financial capital but also of intrinsic value.
The resurgence of neoclassical markets
In the light of this uneasy co-existence and fractional resolution of policies founded respectively on monetarism and sustainable development principles, contemporary political shifts either side of the Atlantic give major cause for concern.
The withdrawal of the US from the World Health Organisation, its intent to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, cancellation of international aid programmes, and withdrawal of support from security agreements in Europe are part of a wider and still unfolding package of measures unilaterally rejecting consensus about a need to tackle environmental and social threats on a global stage. Within the US itself, stated intentions to ramp up extraction of oil and other primary industries display at best ignorance, and at worse cavalier disregard, about the adverse implications for environmental stability and the health and equity impacts that will ensue. Monetarism rules supreme once again, with the withdrawal or undermining of programmes not generating short-term profit, with many companies following suit.
The UK is no model of robust commitment to sustainable development with a ‘growth, growth, growth’ agenda including relaxations in prior net zero and other environmental commitments, as well as social constraints including limiting objections to planning proposals. The building of a third runway at Heathrow Airport had formerly been opposed on the basis of incompatibility with the Paris Agreement, yet approval appears to have now been steamrollered through for narrow financial reasons. The Government has suggested that hard-won progress resulting in a legally mandated requirement for biodiversity net gain (BNG) may be abandoned as a constraint on built development. Meanwhile, controls on the adverse environmental consequences of farming activities appear to be under review, and water service company bills have risen by a record percentage as a reward for manifest historic failures to invest in infrastructure whilst water service companies have taken money out of the businesses in the form of substantial, often tax-free dividends.
Sadly, this is not new as, in 2013, the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron was reported via sources in his own Conservative political party to have ordered aides to “get rid of all the green crap” from energy bills in a drive to bring down costs, abandoning a hollow promise to run the greenest government ever. The influence of narrow monetarist thinking still runs deep in the minds of many political elites, and is embedded deeply in many business assumptions and norms as well as shareholder expectations.
Sustainable growth
In short, we are facing a resurgent era of unconstrained neoliberalism, rolling back environmental and social protections hard-won over a half-century. Let us be absolutely clear that this cannot lead to the shiny outcome of ‘growth’ it claims to serve.
The growth agenda and sustainable development may be misrepresented as in opposition by those who are ignorant or wilfully self-regarding with respect to short-term profit-taking, but the reality is that they are close bedfellows. At its core, sustainability simply means the capacity to continue. If development practises undermine the social and environmental capital upon which they depend, there is no way that this self-extinguishing trajectory could be genuinely construed as growth.
Wider dimensions of sustainable development are not merely germane but vital to securing a trajectory of growth that does not ultimately exhaust itself. Dissociating ‘growth’ from foundational sustainable development principles is, ultimately, an oxymoron.
In a world facing climate, biodiversity, pollution, equitable and other grave challenges at truly global scale, for which solutions necessarily requiring global collaboration, sustainable development is the ultimate democratic goal, potentially uniting us as an antidote to self-regarding unilateralism trends.
The role of the environmental sciences
Science is concerned with a quest for understanding and the application of best consensual knowledge to guide wise decision-making. The environmental sciences are therefore foundational to understanding and policy formulation for sustainable development. They represent the knowledge, and quest for improved knowledge, of the things that bind us as a collective human society.
Standing up for the importance of environmental science as a robust evidence base for policy formulation and delivery to meet human needs ethically, responsibly, safely and efficiently at this contested time is vital. It is entirely relevant to a wisely conceived model of growth, also informing the basis of good business as sustainability pressures will increasingly impinge on former freedoms whilst also presenting new profitable opportunities in a much-changed world.
Whilst social media has positive roles to play in democratising knowledge and making it readily accessible and communicable, it has also enabled a tsunami of untruthfulness, frequently now unchallenged or else uncritically accepted with the filters now removed from many social media platforms, promulgating misinformation (content that is incorrect), disinformation (content that is wilfully incorrect) and conspiracies.
The more pervasive the misinformation and disinformation, the greater they will be promulgated digitally, tainting opinion and acceptance of self-interested deceptions. The underpinnings of environmental and other forms of science have never been more necessary as a robust foundation for society to draw together to address the many linked and daunting sustainability-related crises it now faces.
Championing progress towards a sustainable future
Let us not understate the reality: the resurgence of monetarism and dilution of societal and environmental protections is a war of two world views that have been in uneasy coexistence and partial accommodation over the past five decades.
Ultimately, environmentalism and a wider commitment to advancing sustainable development never was a mere ‘job’, but a values-led mission. Don’t expect to get paid to rock the establishment, but now is the time to make voices heard; to stand up as a champion for the environment and its vital supportive capacities.
The evolving concept of sustainable development, most simply appreciated as a pathway of development that does not ultimately extinguish itself through ecological collapse and societal breakdown, is a vital agreement that has been accepted and enshrined in rhetoric around the world.
The framing of the ‘Brundtland definition’ of sustainable development, “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, contains a deep and explicit commitment to intergenerational equity. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to stand up to champion and defend this ideal and its underpinning scientific realities in the face of this contemporary ‘war of the worlds’.
