From opposition to orthodoxy: The remaking of sustainable development

Journal of Third World Studies, Fall 2001 by Carruthers, David

From - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3821/is_200110/ai_n8981375/

INTRODUCTION

Sustainable development now stands as the dominant discourse on the environment-development problematic.1 Because it promises to defuse longstanding tensions between environmental protection and economic growth, nearly everyone favors it, including individuals, firms, national and local governments, militaries, and the gamut of non-state actors. It has prompted so many business, government, academic, and nongovernmental publications and gatherings that it has been dubbed "the mantra that launched a thousand conferences,112 Accompanied by liberal democracy and free markets, sustainable development is now a pillar of contemporary universalism, embraced from the industrialized north, to the less-developed south, to the post-communist east.

However, the sustainable development of today bears faint resemblance to its point of origin. The language of sustainability was once a discourse of resistance, fusing radical environmental consciousness with a critical rethinking of a failed development enterprise. It provoked challenging questions about scarcity and limits, affluence and poverty, global inequality, and the environmental viability of westernization. By today, sustainable development has been transformed, stripped of its critical content, and reconfigured for compatibility with the larger priorities of the post-Cold War era.

This paper tells the story of a counter-hegemonic discourse turned on its head to help legitimize a grand universal project of neoliberal globalization. It proceeds in three parts. The first takes us back to the origins of the sustainable development discourse, in a critical rethinking of development informed by the radical environmentalism of the 1970s. The second chronicles the transformation of the discourse and its rise to hegemony. The third section raises questions about the viability of the new sustainable development, and offers a concluding glimpse at a variety of alternatives that might hold out hope for a more authentically sustainable path.

THE OLD SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A DISCOURSE OF RESISTANCE

From today's viewpoint, the conceptual origins of sustainable development are scarcely recognizable: an early-1970s environmental discourse about "the age of scarcity" and "the limits to growth."3 Sustainability has earlier roots in the resource management concept of sustained yield.4 As lunar spacecraft projected the first images of earth as a bounded sphere suspended in blackness, that concept became enmeshed with rising concern for the "carrying capacity" of finite ecological systems. Sustainability entered the environmental lexicon as part of an emerging reconceptualization of the relationship between human activities and nature's limits. Because fast-growing populations and economic processes (both capitalist and centrally planned) have in recent centuries proceeded on a de facto assumption of a boundless capacity for growth, the implications were ominous.

The new discourse of limits and scarcity, initially popularized by the Club of Rome and the Global 2000 reports, produced facile images of a "lifeboat earth" in great peril. Though often caricatured and dismissed as doomsaying, it fired the popular imagination, especially in the form of neo-Malthusian prognostications of explosive population growth, where the biological concept of carrying capacity was so tangibly apocalyptic.5 It also pointed toward finite terrestrial "inputs" to a production-consumption pipeline, as well as earth's finite capacity to absorb the "outputs" of waste heat and pollution. Bolstered by the oil shocks of the 1970s, scarcity on the input end

received the greatest initial attention. By the 1980s and 1990s, atmospheric pollution, acid rain, global warming, accumulating hazardous wastes, the depletion of the ozone layer, habitat destruction, and rising health threats refocused our attention increasingly on the output end; that is, on the biosphere's limited capacity to serve as a "waste sink" for the inevitable byproducts of all human production and consumption.

New thinking also prompted arcane academic analysis of the economic implications of thermodynamic processes, especially entropy, which was held up as theoretic evidence for the unsustainability of a political economy of infinite growth.6 The renegade school of "steady-state" economists broke ranks with their peers, challenging the core beliefs of the discipline.7 They preached not just an inherent tension, but an axiomatic incompatibility between environmental sustainability and the maximization of economic growth. Boundless growth was posited as a biophysical impossibility. Sustainability would ultimately require a "low throughput" economy.

Our principal concern here is with the impact of this revolution in environmental thinking on the relationship between the north and the south. How did the limits discourse play in the Third World, which comprises most of the planet's land and people? What did scarcity mean for the enterprise of development? I focus our attention on four answers: 1) duplication of the northern trajectory was no longer viable for the south, 2) distributional equity was now a matter of special salience, 3) broader disenchantment with the development enterprise was emerging at the same time, and 4) creative exploration was thus necessary to envision a development alternative.

First, in age of limits, the open-ended economic growth trajectory of the north would not be sustainable in the long run, not even ultimately for the rich countries. A political economy predicated on the assumption of infinite growth was, essentially, a dead end that the Third World would have to avoid. Consequently, an alternative, sustainable conception of development would have to be envisioned. For Herman Daly, the foremost spokesperson for the steadystate economy, qualitative development (or improvement) would have to become the global norm, rather than quantitative growth (or expansion). Sustainable development would have to be the opposite of sustained growth.8

Second, if there are limits on the planet's capacity to provide resources for production and to absorb waste heat and pollutants, then distributional justice would become the central global political issue. If there are biophysical limits to the total growth of the economic pie, then we cannot escape attending to the comparative size of the slices. In the north, this meant an uncomfortable recognition that northern affluence is the flip side of southern poverty. Northern "overdevelopment" and "overconsumption" demonstrated an unfair and lopsided distribution of global goods.9 The northern path would not be viable for the south. The planet could not handle, ecologically, the universalization of a European or North American mass-consumption lifestyle. "We have seen that a few can live like this-but only if the rest do not."10 Global sustainability would ultimately require facing up to the formidable political challenge of a significant redistribution of wealth and resource use.

Such pronouncements caused unease for southern officials. The overwhelming emphasis had for decades been on the maximization of economic growth and the explicit hope of thereby duplicating the irresistible, high-consumption northern lifestyle. From the southern perspective, if there is only so much net growth left for the planet to absorb, then the south should have priority.

Growth in GNP in poor countries means more food, clothing, shelter, basic education, and security, whereas for the rich country it means more electric toothbrushes, yet another brand of cigarettes, more tension and insecurity, and more force-feeding through advertising .... [The] upshot of these differences is that for the poor, growth in GNP is still a good thing, but for the rich it is probably a bad thing.11

Thirdly, and independently of rising environmental concern, the dogged pursuit of economic growth for its own sake was losing credibility in development circles anyway. For over two decades "development" had been treated as essentially synonymous with "economic growth"; the full range of state- or market-led development policies were oriented toward the maximization of economic growth at any cost.12 Yet by the mid-1970s, it was inescapably clear throughout the Third World that decades of economic growth had produced only small pockets that vaguely resembled the broad-based development of the north. For the vast majority of southerners, economic growth--even dramatic, sustained, high levels of growth-had not produced significant material improvements in the quality of their lives. To the contrary, many millions more found themselves stranded on the immiserating fringes of modernizing societies. The development process itself had displaced them from traditional lands and ways of life, but without corresponding opportunities for absorption into the modern cash economy. Dispossession, marginalization, hyper-urbanization, and the explosion of precarious settlements and informal economies became symbols of a development enterprise that had gone tragically wrong, betraying its most fundamental promises. 13 In this climate of disenchantment and frustration, the modernization and growth strategies of the postwar era were placed on the defensive. Critical perspectives on underdevelopment found more solid footing, both north and south.14 The most dramatic posited a polar world in which the wealth of the core countries accrued necessarily at the expense of the periphery, offering little hope for southerners to ever break free of the chains of neo-colonial subordination and dependence.15

Fourth, this critique of the development enterprise, when coupled with the emerging environmental perspective, began to inform a creative quest for a sustainable alternative. New formulations-grassroots development, pro-peasant development, eco-development, bottom-up development, people-centered development, and so forth-opened up myriad paths in the quest to conceive an alternative, ecologically-sustainable, socially-just development trajectory for the south.16 While these sustainable development proposals varied, they shared certain general features. All were at some level modeled on humanity's best example of sustainability: low-impact hunter-gatherer and base agricultural societies. They shared a Gandhian emphasis on equity, basic needs, self-reliance, locality, and place-local control over the use of local resources. Likewise, there was a general preference for smallness in the scale of the enterprise, emphasizing community- and village-based designs. There was a natural affinity for "appropriate" or "intermediate" technologies, designed with local inputs and knowhow, much cheaper than the capital-, import-, and energy-intensive technologies of the modern sector, but still offering dramatic improvements upon indigenous tools and techniques. Finally, they placed a high value on political decentralization and political openness, to enable popular participation, and to incorporate local knowledge and traditions of stewardship.

Interestingly, these radical critiques and creative efforts did resonate upward somewhat to the mainstream development institutions. The grim failures of growth-oriented strategies prompted a nominal policy reorientation on the part of most major development entities. The World Bank, the USAID (Agency for International Development), many United Nations agencies, and others were by that time expressing an official preference for "basic needs" strategies. They saw the lack of distributional equality as having widely undermined the growth-- based model. The new official policy priorities of international and multilateral development agencies were, on the surface, based in sustainable grassroots development, both for urban popular classes and in pro-peasant and rural development initiatives. 17

Efforts to envisage and support sustainable alternatives appeared in many corners of the Third World. The most prominent took the form of topdown, "integrated rural development" initiatives, which were later criticized for their failure to confront corrupt and inequitable power structures; the high-visibility cases fell far short of their stated goals.18 Still, leaders in a smaller number of countries, from Tanzania to Nicaragua, from Papua New Guinea to Burkina Faso, carried out experimentation with appropriate technologies, sustainable designs, and grassroots development. Most exploration along these lines, then and now, remained the province of non-governmental

organizations (NGOs). Especially prominent have been groups such as London's Intermediate Technology Development Group, San Francisco's Earth Island Institute, Oxfam, and London's International Institute for Environment and Development. However, NGO and grassroots initiatives remained comparatively marginal, certainly in official southern policy circles. Southern leaders were instead centrally occupied with the drive to reconfigure the rules of international trade and finance toward a fairer and more equitable "New International Economic Order."19 That struggle came to an abrupt end in 1982, when the Third World debt crisis exploded on the scene, irrevocably altering the north-south relationship. By that time, the remaking of sustainable development was almost under way.

THE NEW SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A DISCOURSE OF HEGEMONY

Given the relatively obscure origin of the concept as traced above, the question I pose here is the following: how in a very few years did a comparatively marginalized, genuinely radical idea, carried out in practice by idealists in a handful of creative pockets of grassroots experimentation in remote corners of the rural Third World, become utterly transformed in meaning, and rise to prominence as the near-universal ordering principle for environmental and development policy across most of the world?

The first step was taken in December 1983, when the Secretary-General of the United Nations selected Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland to head up a commission to study the problems of environment and development. The work of the Brundtland Commission (the WCED, or World Commission on Environment and Development) made a vital contribution to the evolution of environmental thinking. The WCED's report put the idea of sustainable development in the global spotlight. But this version of sustainable development had wriggled free of the constraints of its birth in a discourse of scarcity, limits, and the failures of development.

Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable-to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits-not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technological and social organization can be both managed and improved to make way for a new era of economic growth.20

The Brundtland report recast the debate on the environment-development nexus, giving unprecedented prominence to the principle of sustainability. Part of its impact lies in its timing, and in the changing character of environmental consciousness. The environmentalism of the 1970s had stressed local pollution and habitat issues and national regulatory policy. But by the late 1980s, popular awareness of the global dimensions of environmental problems had expanded dramatically. International connections were now tangible, the linkages highly popularized: Chernobyl's far reaching impact, northern hamburgers and tropical deforestation, skin cancer and the ozone hole, fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect, industrial pollutants and acid rain, pesticide exports and the "circle of poison," unregulated transnational corporations and toxic nightmares like Bhopal.

The Brundtland definition of sustainable development possessed a conceptual ambiguity that made it palatable to the widest possible audience. It was broad enough to capture the energy of this environmental reawakening and to resonate with the increasingly international nature of popular thinking about environmental problems. Its central concern for equity with present and future generations retained sufficient idealism to garnish the support of ecological purists and advocates for distributive justice. Yet its vague, contradictory stance on ecological limits and economic processes weakened that very threat, leaving just enough wiggle room so that pro-growth economists, business leaders, and governments could also comfortably embrace the concept.

Once launched, this de-fanged version of sustainable development was carried in a smooth trajectory right on into Rio de Janeiro, in June 1992, where it took a leading role under the brightest lights of the world stage, at the "Earth Summit, " or UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development). By the end of the Rio summit, the new sustainable development had a written constitution: Agenda 21.21 Endorsed by the official participants, this agreement is a comprehensive "action plan" that identifies environmental threats and defines the roles of various actors to realize common goals. We are most concerned here with its perspective on the relationship between sustainability and the global economy. Where Brundtland was vague, Agenda 21 boldly shed any vestige of the discourse of scarcity and limits. In order to achieve the broad support of national governments, the drafters recognized that economic growth would have to be recast from villain to hero. To dissolve the tension between open-ended growth and the limits of a finite biosphere, growth must be redeemed as the savior, essential to the global environmental solution. I focus here on three of the most important components of this complex conceptual achievement: poverty alleviation, free trade, and technological innovation, all presented as mutually enhancing.22

First, summit participants paid special attention to those categories of environmental degradation caused directly by poverty itself-the population, land, and resource pressures endemic in much of the Third World. The rural poor, driven by dire necessity, overcut, overfish, deplete, degrade, or are displaced to destructive urban settlements. If poverty is the environmental problem, then lifting people out of poverty is the solution. The best means to that end is the promotion of economic growth-the boundless expansion of the economic pie.

Second, participants had to confront the potentially conflictive relationship between trade and the environment. Consensus at Rio was built on the argument that environmental protection is a luxury that can best be afforded once relative affluence is attained. According to the prevailing Ricardian orthodoxy, free trade by comparative advantage maximizes benefits to all trading partners. Trade thus creates the wealth that enables later environmental repair. To promote poverty alleviation and general wellbeing, free trade should be the engine of renewed economic growth. Entrepreneurship and competitive markets should be supported domestically and internationally. Government restrictions on trade should be minimized to promote innovation and efficiency, and to maximize the free flow of goods and services. Care must be taken to ensure that only legitimate environmental and social concerns are protected by state action; protectionist impulses must not be permitted to disguise themselves in a green cloak. Third, administrative and technological innovations would offer humanity's best hope for liberation from the constraints of a finite biosphere. That faith finds a deep resonance with the western legacy of control over nature, defended in environmental debates by "cornucopian" thinkers like economist Julian Simon.23 The Brundtland report had provided the groundwork, by redefining limits not as absolutes, but as matters of technological capacity. By the 1990s, the age of scarcity seemed to have passed. Technological innovation had gotten us out of the tight corners of the 1970s, seemingly vindicating the cornucopian promise.24 On the input side, new technologies and substitutions had relieved shortages; we now had oversupplies and falling prices. Innovations in recycling and pollution abatement promised progress on the output end for cleaning up polluted airsheds and watersheds. Sustainable development would thus rely on technological fixes, requiring continued innovation, public and private support for research and development of green technologies, and attentiveness to southward technology transfer.

Agenda 21 erased the line between "sustainable development" and "sustained economic growth." Once poised as polar opposites, these concepts were now practically synonymous. Liberated from the distasteful implications of scarcity and limits, sustainability had come full circle, back to an essential belief that open-ended growth will lift all boats. So reconstructed, the new sustainable development could fit neatly into place-an interlocking piece of the puzzle of a changing north-south relationship. The 1990s were a decade of triumphalism for the north, as it shook off old doubts about the virtues of growth and technology, and restored confidence in the

universal applicability of the western path. Sustainable development could now stand alongside neoclassical capitalism and liberal democracy-the picture of hegemonic universalism.

This historical moment resulted from a confluence of events. First, the collapse of Soviet communism seemed to vindicate the superiority of neoclassical capitalism, delegitimizing the state's role in economic management. It placed the left on the defensive globally, including the environmental movement.25 Simultaneously, the Asian "tigers" seemed to prove that the chains of dependency and subordination could be ruptured, redeeming ascent to the First World as a viable goal. More importantly, they engendered a myth of free-market success based on free trade, minimal government intervention, open economies, and export-led growth. Mythical lean tigers charged forward while bloated, statist "elephant" economies elsewhere in the developing world languished. Experts on East Asian political economy struggled to contain the damage from this grievous misrepresentation.26 But their words of caution arrived too late to the corridors of global finance. Duplication of the mythical Asian miracle became the universal prescription for the debtors of the Third World, to be realized by strict neoliberal restructuring, enforced by northern creditors and institutions. As the debt crisis exploded, debtor nations found themselves with little latitude for policy choice. Faced with the pressing need for fresh capital to keep their economies afloat, most readily complied with the mandates of structural adjustment handed down by the creditor nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.27 Privatization, deregulation, "shock therapy" tariff reduction, capital mobility, and harsh fiscal austerity became the universal prescriptions for healing the debtors and salvaging westernization.

The new sustainable development thus arrived on the international scene at a propitious moment. Because neoliberalism is predicated on openended expansion and growth over equity, it cannot confront limits in nature. But the new sustainable development eliminated the conflict between neoliberal axioms and nature's limited resource and absorption capacities. It stepped easily into place as component of a universalizing project-a bundle of policies, myths, and faith, invoked to redeem a global duplication of the northern path to the high consumption lifestyle. With lean-state, free-market economies and democratic polities, the less-developed and post-communist worlds could again strive to duplicate the ascent to the First World.28 Expanding markets and open economies provide for a new era of growth. Growing economies create resources and incentives to solve environmental problems. Economic liberalization bolsters political liberalization-a family of democratic partners in pursuit of peace and prosperity for all. The homogenization of the world has been saved. Moreover, sustainable development has shed its Third World skin, and can now encompass all development processes-north, south, east, west; local, national, global; private, public, and non-profit. It is embraced by Third World and post-communist governments, frustrated by the failures of developmentalism, saddled with the environmental legacies of rapid industrialization, and desperate to save the dream of ascent to the First World. Because the new sustainability no longer threatens other priorities, First World governments are just as pleased as their southern counterparts to grant it a high institutional and policy profile. So too have supranational bodies, including the United Nations, the OECD, the World Bank, the European Union, and the North American Free Trade Area.29 Because it emphasizes technology, private initiative, and enhanced market competition, business leaders have also responded, eager to shake off the image of rapaciousness and be refashioned as defenders of nature.30 Finally, sustainable development is most concretely a reality in the transnational universe of NGOs, from the smallest local grassroots organizations in the shantytowns and villages of the Third World, through the middle terrain of supportive intermediary organizations, up to the gleaming offices of the wealthy international organizations of the north.31

It is little wonder that sustainable development today holds such broad appeal. How could it be otherwise? It is universally applicable. It dissolves the old conflict between growth and limits. It eliminates confrontation over who is entitled to the lion's share of remaining growth. It averts the question of northern overconsumption. It promises the compatibility of environmental preservation with the maximization of growth. It supports technological development and scientific progress. It

offers equity for both present and future generations. And it plays a mutually supportive role with the other western universals-free markets and democratic politics.

TOWARD AUTHENTIC SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT But what if the most basic premises of the new sustainable development are mistaken? The new wisdom holds that it is not only compatible with neoliberal restructuring, but the two are mutually enhancing. What if neoliberalism is in fact inimical to sustainability? Sustainable development, "the `buzzword' of environmentalists, politicians, business leaders, and strategic planners alike-would appear to cloak an agenda that is just as destructive, just as undermining of peoples' rights and livelihoods as the development agenda of old."32 Many observers have raised these concerns, fearing potentially tragic consequences for humans, nature, and our shared future.33 While a decisive environmental critique of global neoliberalism lies beyond the scope of this essay, I seek to highlight here some of the most pressing areas of concern.

The first is equity. The sustainable development discourse recognizes both distributional and inter-generational equity in principle. Indeed, environmental equity with future generations is its centerpiece. But neoliberalism in practice, in the form currently promoted by structural adjustment policies of austerity and deregulation, and by the expansion of free trade regimes such as NAFTA and the WTO (World Trade Organization), fundamentally deepens socioeconomic inequality, both globally, and within countries. Dramatically rising socioeconomic polarization has been an indisputable feature of neoliberal reform, in virtually all contexts in which it has appeared. Sustainable development may assert distributive equity in word, but in practice it is wedded to policies which clearly undermine it. Both distributive and inter-generational equity are threatened by a second concern: the fundamental ecological-economic problem of negative externalities. In uncorrected market exchanges, the selling prices of goods do not incorporate the full social and ecological costs of their production. In the absence of a serious global "ecological tax reform" or global standards for "true-cost pricing," the benefits of globalized production will accrue disproportionately to those players most effective at externalizing negative costs. From the devastation of chemical-, energy-, and water-intensive corporate agriculture (deforestation, erosion, pesticide poisoning, aquifer depletion, salination), to the poisoned neighborhoods surrounding export-processing zones, to the world's disappearing fisheries, the big winners in the globalizing economies of the neoliberal age are those most skilled at taking nature's inputs and absorptive capacities for free. This is the opposite of sustainability.

Increased capital mobility is a third major point of concern. In structural adjustment and in the negotiation of trade agreements, global neoliberalism has been predicated on the continued loosening of state restrictions on capital. Because most environmental policy is regulatory and because governments (local and national, north, south, east, and west) are pitted against one another in competition to attract and hold footloose capital investment, critics fear a deregulatory "race to the bottom." To offer investors the most attractive terms, the natural incentive is toward downward harmonization of environmental, labor, and public health standards. Anti-WTO protests in Seattle and elsewhere may have raised the profile of these issues, but in the predicted absence of an enforceable, global corporate code of conduct, neoliberal globalization will continue to impel producers to move the most humanly exploitive and ecologically destructive portions of the production process to desperate Third World and post-communist locales.

Inequity, externalization, and capital mobility work together to enable a great global act of self-deception. The rising abundance and falling cost of consumer goods in the north (and in the First-World enclaves of the south) directly reflect rising inequality. The fruits of middle-class buying power are being subsidized by the externalized ecological damage of hazardous, unregulated production in the Third World, and by the misery of workers in the "global assembly line." For producers, the payoff of a globalized system of production is that it masks the connection between benefits and costs; those who enjoy the former are delinked from the distant souls who pay the latter. Moving production offshore does more than reduce the burden of wages, infrastructure, taxes, or environmental and health compliance. By rewarding production methods

that externalize negative costs in distant places, the world's affluent consumers are shielded, delinked from the ecological and human consequences of their consumption. Finally, neoliberalism has not provided satisfactory answers to the hardest questions raised decades earlier. Is it genuinely ecologically viable to assume, on a bounded planet, the infinite expansion of economies, of populations, of GDP, of commerce, of international trade, of waste heat, of pollution? Of growth on all indicators, without end? We saw how the architects of the new sustainable development massaged the infinite-growth issue. But the challenges of its originators were answered more by omission than by evidence or by conceptual triumph. Since the gaps between rich and poor continue to widen dramatically, is not distributional justice even more pressing than it was in the age of scarcity? Given the rising and disproportionate ecological impact of the resource-consuming, highly-polluting northern lifestyle, can the planet physically support 4 or 5 billion more people walking as heavily on the earth as do a relative handful of North Americans today?34 If the northern path is to be universalized, who will be left to pay the ecological costs? Can we really construct a global political economy in the shape of a pyramid, and then hold out as the goal for everyone to occupy its apex?35

The new sustainable development discourse sidesteps these questions, placing its faith in poverty alleviation, the expansion of trade, and technological innovation. Because neoliberalism has yielded such unsatisfying responses on poverty and trade, a lot rests on technological salvation. In the short run, such innovations have indisputably cheated the dire predictions of the limits-togrowth- era. Still, some of this progress is illusionary-a function of delinked costs and benefits. Significant northern environmental purity, for example, has been purchased by a southward migration of negative ecological impacts in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, forestry, fisheries, and so on. It is also important to remember that the greatest achievements have been realized only on the input end of the productive process, allowing us to squeeze greater mileage out of diminishing resources. Technological innovations on the output end have not yet cheated the laws of thermodynamics. Few viable suggestions have appeared for the most vexing issues on the north-south agenda: water, oceans, air, greenhouse gases, climate change, the accumulation of toxic and radioactive wastes, the depletion of the ozone layer, species extinctions.

The new discourse has not satisfied the original spokespersons of the age of scarcity.36 Brundtland-Rio wordsmithing notwithstanding, we have not dissipated the fundamental economic-ecological questions they first raised thirty years ago. Today's limits are not the simple, rigid, fixed caricature of an earlier era's simplistic doomsaying. But the premise of global neoliberalism is boundless growth. And boundless growth is still not likely to prove sustainable.

Today's sustainable development is premised on precisely the same economic injustices and biophysical impossibilities as the dominant discourse it once rose to oppose. It was originally born in popular struggle, a rallying cry to envision a more just future for the victims of a failed developmentalism. Its domain was the rural village and the urban ghetto of the dispossessed. It brought together activists and scholars, northerners and southerners, practitioners and thinkers, in a visionary search for diverse, local, ecological, just, and democratic alternatives to the ruinous verticalization and homogenization of the world. The creative quest for a more sustainable, equitable, and participatory future did not stop just because the nomenclature changed meaning. The real struggle for sustainable development-the one actually practiced, on the ground, by millions of people, everywhere on the planet-has continued without pause. Far from the gleam of international diplomats, corporate boardrooms, powerful donor agencies, and supranational conferences, a "really existing" sustainable development survives and thrives exactly where it always has-at the grassroots, in the same fields and neighborhoods, and in the same hands and minds in which its original promise was born.

Indigenous and peasant ecological movements are active by the tens of thousands, from Africa, to Latin America, to Asia and the Pacific. The defense of biological diversity has been woven together with the defense of cultural diversity and the rescue of traditional ecological knowledge.

Efforts to incorporate both new and inherited cultural experience, knowledge about resources, and values of smallness, stewardship, and place have been manifest in agroecology, aquaculture, agroforestry, seed banks, appropriate technology, and similar grassroots sustainability initiatives.37

Ecological feminism shares a similar sensitivity to the wisdom of the world's disenfranchised. Many Third World women work closely to the land, sustaining their households with the most basic human connection to nature. They harbor an intimate and sensitive relationship to local ecological systems, one often suppressed or violently denied by the masculine, western drive towards conquest and triumph over nature.38 Carried by NGOs and grassroots groups into the field, feminist ecology bridges the gap between theory and practice. Numerous threads of radical ecology have likewise been liberated from both northern and southern points of academic origin to inform alternative, ecologically sound social orders, policies, and practices. Not to brush over significant differences among them, social ecology, deep ecology, bioregionalism, postmodern localism, ecologism, and other proposals for radical decentralization share values of place, scale, nonviolence, solidarity with future generations, social justice, popular participation, and ecological balance.39

North America's environmental justice movement has unveiled profound racial and class inequities in exposure to environmental hazards, offering a powerful symbol of grassroots mobilization to blue-collar workers, Native Americans, farmworkers, and communities of color.40 Now globally, the lens of environmental justice is helping to expose a world economy that strives to contain the negative costs of production in the communities of the politically and economic excluded. With its emphasis on equality, justice, and participation, it readily meshes with the popular struggles of Third World farmers, shantytown dwellers, factory workers, debtors, indigenous people, and others whose lives have been tapped to subsidize distant affluence. As a banner of resistance, it has yielded new cross-national strategies and coalitions, north and south.41

In the academic world, a renegade group of economists still struggles against disciplinary convention to construct a field of ecological economics, whose international association and publications strive toward practical applicability.42 Like their steady-state forebears of a generation earlier, they challenge the sacred assumptions of their field. They strive to better comprehend and reconcile the relationship between natural and economic systems, in the areas of green accounting, national accounts, ecological tax reform, and other policy areas that might one day yield essential methods for making market exchanges more accurately reflect their true ecological costs.

Another group of mostly southern thinkers, writers, and activists has launched an intellectual "post-development" movement, building directly on decades of critical re-evaluation of developmentalism.43 Unapologetic critics of development, they explicitly seek to write its epitaph. In creative and passionate prose and in real-world practice, they brazenly reject the development enterprise of the past five decades, denouncing it as illusion, failure, and epic tragedy. Appalled by the arrogance, violence, and presumptive universalism of the westernizing project, they stand firmly against the homogenizing juggernaut of neoliberal globalization. They are proud defenders of human diversity, celebrating and re-valuing the complex and varied fabric of life, practice, knowledge, and human experience. We could extend or debate this list, but these diverse movements and struggles share certain key features. They provide continuity with the efforts of earlier generations, articulating the enduring values of genuine sustainability. They stand on conceptual and practical bridges linking the local with the global. They share a guarded stance toward co-optive, mainstream environment and development enterprises and organizations. The goal is often to create sustainability through actual practice, not through an explicitly political project. The quest for sustainable design frequently takes place not at the level of state policy, but in local pockets of creativity. That quest for autonomy often translates into isolation, and consequently, most of today's "really existing" sustainable development initiatives barely register

a flicker on the radar screen of international attention. However, to focus on the smallness of any given initiative is to miss the larger picture. Woven together, these movements present a rich tapestry of counter-hegemonic struggle. They are the most dynamic, vibrant, promising face of contemporary popular environmentalism. The discourse of sustainable development may have been usurped from its real-world practitioners. But the homogenizing globalization it now portends is being met from below with a countervailing force of "myriad small resistances"-local, diverse, sophisticated, and visionary.

NOTES

1. Douglas Torgerson, "The Uncertain Quest for Sustainability: Public Discourse and the Politics of Environmentalism," in Frank Fischer and Michael Black (eds.), Greening environmental policy: the politics of a sustainable future (New York: St. Martin's, 1995); John Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

2. Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 235.

3. Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: New American Library, 1972); Herman Daly (ed.) Toward a Steady-State Economy (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman); Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, "The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem," in Daly, Toward a Steady-State Economy; William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman).

4. The maximum allowable harvest of a renewable resource that can be sustained indefinitely; e.g., game animals, forests, fisheries, kelp beds.

5. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968).

6. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy and matter can be neither created nor destroyed, only changed in form. The second, or entropy law, asserts that this process can proceed in only one direction, from a usable to a

nonusable state. Production and consumption thus invariably return equal amounts of "high-entropy" waste heat and pollution to the environment. For the economic implications, see Daly, Toward a Steady-State Economy; Ken Boulding, "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth," in Daly, Toward a Steady-State Economy; Georgescu-Roegen, "The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem."

7. In a steady state economy, first conceived by J.S. Mill, production and consumption rates are equalized, as are births and deaths. See Daly, Toward a Steady-State Economy.

8. Ibid.; See also Herman Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Herman Daly and Kenneth Townsend (eds.), Valuing the Earth: Economy, Ecology, Ethics (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1993).

9. Ted Trainer, Abandon Affluence! (London: Zed Books, 1985); Alan burning, How Much is Enough? (New York, Norton, 1992); The Ecologist, Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons, (Philadelphia: New Society, 1993); Tom Athanasiou, Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1996).

10. Ted Trainer, Abandon Affluence!, p. 248.

11. Daly, Toward a Steady-State Economy, pp. 11-12.

12. Generally as measured by annual increases in GNP or GDP (Gross National or Domestic Product).

13. The betrayals of development have been chronicled by many scholars, including Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive (London: Zed Books, 1999); David Barkin, Distorted Development (Boulder CO: Westview, 1990); Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary (London, Zed Books, 1992); The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?; Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press); Gilbert Rist, The History of Development (London: Zed Books).

14. Charles Wilber (ed.), The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment (New York: Random House, 1973); Ronald Chilcote and Mark Edelstein, Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond (New York: Halstead, 1974).

15. Andrea Gunner Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution? (New York: Monthly Review Press); Samir Amin, Unequal Development (Hassocks: Harvester, 1969); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

16. Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness (New York: Pantheon, 1969); E.F Shumacher, Small is Beautiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Richard Brown, "Appropriate Technology and the Grassroots: Toward a Development Strategy from the Bottom Up," The Developing Economies, 15, n3 (September 1977); Amritananda Das, Foundations of Gandhian Economics (Delhi: Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 1979); Irma Adelman, "Beyond ExportLed Growth," World Development 12, n 9 (1984); Bernhard Glaeser, Ecodevelopment: Concepts, Projects, Strategies (Oxford: Pergamon); David Korten

and Rudi Klauss (eds.), People-Centered Development (West Hartford CT: Kumarian Press, 1984).

17. Merilee Grindle, Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California, 1977); Escobar, Encountering Development.

18. Ibid.

19. Steven Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California, 1985).

20. WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development), Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8.

21. Daniel Sitarz, Agenda 21:The Earth Summit Strategy to Save our Planet (Boulder CO: Earthpress, 1993).

22. This discussion oversimplifies the dynamics at Rio and overstates the consensus. The summit was an immense, complex event, presenting a broad and conflictual array of government and popular concerns. For more thorough critiques of the resulting agreements, see David Korten, "Sustainable Development," World Policy Journal 9, nl (Winter 1991-92); Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, "Beyond the Myths of Rio: A New American Agenda for the Environment, World Policy Journal 10, nl (Spring 1993); Herman Daly, "Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem," In Daly and Townsend, Valuing the Earth; The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?; Wolfgang Sachs, Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1993).

23. Julian Simon, "Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News:' Science 208, n27 (June 1980); The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

24. For an interesting discussion of Simon's victorious scarcity bet with neoMalthusian Paul Ehrlich, see Athanasiou, Divided Planet.

25. The catastrophic environmental legacy of communism tarnished proposals for state-based correction of ecological market failures and demolished the argument that capitalism was the main environmental culprit. Less popular attention was paid to ethnonational and political factors undergirding the failure of the Soviet experiment, or to the excessively "growthmanic" character of communist development; see Kenneth Townsend, "Steady-State Economies and the Command Economy" in Daly and Townsend, Valuing the Earth; see also Athanasiou, Divided Planet.

26. With partial exceptions, development in the Asian NICs (newly-industrializing countries, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong) was characterized by deep and systematic state intervention, state investment in human capital, comparative equity in land and education, and strategic policy management, overseeing a cautious shift from import substitution to export promotion. See Colin Bradford, "East Asian 'Models': Myths and Lessons," in John Lewis and Valeriana Kallab (eds.), Development Strategies Reconsidered (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1986); Frederic Deyo (ed.), The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, "No More NICs," World Policy Journal 10, nl (Spring 1988); Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress (San Francisco:

Food First, 1990); David Gereffi and Donald Wyman (eds.), Manufacturing Miracles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990): Stephen Haggard, Pathways from the Periphery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Robert Wade, Governing the Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

27. William Canak (ed.), Lost Promises: Debt, Austerity, and Development in Latin America (Boulder, Westview, 1989); Susan George, The Debt Boomerang (London: Pluto Press, 1992); Walden Bello, Dark 14ctory: The United States, Global Poverty, and Structural Adjustment (San Francisco: Food First, 1994); Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (eds.), The Case Against the Global Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996).

28. James Weaver, Michael Rock, and Kenneth Kusterer, Achieving Broad-Based Sustainable Development (West Hartford CT: Kumarian Press, 1996).

29. See OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), Sustainable Development: OECD Policy Approaches for the 21st Century (Washington: OECD, 1997); Commission of the European Communities, Toward Sustainability: A European Community Programme of Policy and Action in Relation to the Environment and Sustainable Development (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1993); Progress Report From the Commission (Brussels, 10.01.1996 COM (95): 624final. For critical analysis of the World Bank's sustainability initiatives see Bruce Rich, Mortgaging the Earth (Boston: Beacon, 1994); Jonathan Fox and David Brown (eds.), The Struggle for Accountability (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998); Daly, Beyond Growth; Dryzek, Politics of the Earth.

30. Daniel Rubenstein, Environmental Accounting for the Sustainable Corporation (Westport CT: Quorom Books, 1994), Paul Shrivastava, Greening Business (Cincinnati: Thomas Executive Press, 1996); Steven Schmidheiny, Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Steven Schmidheiny and Federico Zorraqu'n, Financing Change: The Financial Community, Eco-efficiency and Sustainable Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Theodore Panayotou, Green Markets (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1993).

31. While roughly 100 heads of state attended the Earth Summit, over 1400 NGOs were represented; Ken Conca, Michael Alberty, and Geoffrey Dabelko, Green Planet Blues (Boulder CO: Westview, 1995, p. 6). Many observers have argued that the rapid proliferation of such organizations demonstrates an emerging international civil society; see Ronnie Lipschutz, "Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society," Millennium 21, n3 (1992); Paul Wapner, Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); Julie Fisher, The Road from Rio: Sustainable Development and the Nongovernmental Movement in the Third World (Westport CT: Praeger, 1993).

32. The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?, p. vi.

33. Careful and sophisticated environmental critiques of neoliberalism abound, demonstrating a wide variety of perspectives. On the imperfections of the globally integrated economy see Herman Daly and John Cobb, For the Common

Good (Boston: Beacon, 1989). Daly expands on the biophysical implications of expanding trade in Beyond Growth. Other important critiques include Barkin, Distorted Development; Angus Wright, The Death of Ram6n Gonzdlez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford CT: Kumarian Press, 1995); Durning, How Much is Enough?; Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, "Beyond the Myths of Rio"; Bruce Campbell, Moving in the Wrong Direction (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 1993); The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?; Richard Hofrichter (ed.), Toxic Struggles (Philadelphia: New Society, 1993); Sachs, Global Ecology; Bello, Dark Victory; Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage? (Boston: South End Press, 1994), Mander and Goldsmith, The Case Against the Global Economy; Athanasiou, Divided Planet; Majid Rahnema (ed.), The Post-Development Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997); Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997).

34. For efforts to measure the relative ecological impact of northern and southern lifestyles, see burning, How Much is Enough?; The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?; Escobar, Encountering Development; Athanasiou, Divided Planet.

35. C. Douglas Lummis, "Equality," in Sachs, The Development Dictionary.

36. See the responses of Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits (Post Mill VT: Chelsea Green, 1992); William Ophuls and A. Stephen Boyan, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1992); Daly and Townsend, Valuing the Earth; Daly, Beyond Growth.

37. Miguel Altieri, Agroecology (Boulder CO: Westview, 1987); Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 1991); Dharam Ghai and Jessica Vivian, Grassroots Environmental Action: People's Participation in Sustainable Development (New York: Routledge, 1992); Winona LaDuke, "A Society Based on Conquest Cannot be Sustained: Native Peoples and the Environmental Crisis:' in Hofrichter, Toxic Struggles; Victor Toledo, "The Ecology of Indian Campesinos: A Development Alternative,: Akwekon XI, n2 (Summer 1994); David Barton Bray, "Peasant Organizations and the Permanent Reconstruction of Nature," Journal of Environment and Development 4, n. 2 (Summer 1995); David Carruthers, "Indigenous Ecology and the Politics of Linkage in Mexican Social Movements:' Third World Quarterly 17, n5 (1996).

38. Shiva, Staying Alive; Vandana Shiva, Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health, and Development Worldwide (Philadelphia: New Society, 1994); Rosi Braidotti et al., Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development (London: Zed Books, 1994); Valentine U. James (ed.), Women and Sustainable Development in Africa (Westport CT: Praeger, 1996); Rekha Mehra, "Involving Women in Sustainable Development," in Dennis Pirages (ed.), Building Sustainable Societies (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York, Routledge,

1996).

39. On social ecology see Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (San Fran

cisco: Chesire Books, 1982); and Remaking Society (Boston: South End, 1990); Andrew Light (ed.), Social Ecology. after Bookchin (New York: Guildford, 1998). On deep ecology see Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Books, 1985); Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (Boston: Shambala, 1990). On bioregionalism see Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Wsion (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985). On postmodern localism see Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed Books, 1998). On ecologism see Hector Leis and EduardoViola, "Towards a Sustainable Future: The Role of Ecologism in the North-South Relationship," in Fischer and Black, Greening Environmental Policy. For other proposals for radical decentralization, see John Dryzek, Rational Ecology (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology (London: Routledge, 1992); Bron Taylor: Ecological Resistance Movements (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).

40. Robert Bullard (ed.), Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Robert Bullard (ed.), Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books 1994); Hofrichter, Toxic Struggles; Bunyan Bryant, Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, Solutions (Washington: Island Press, 1995); Laura Westra and Peter Went (eds.), Facing Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995); Daniel Faber (ed.), The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States (New York: Guildford, 1998).

41. Martin Khor, "Economics and Environmental Justice: Rethinking North-South Relations:' in Hofrichter, Toxic Struggles; Chris Kiefer and Medea Benjamin, "Solidarity with the Third World: Building an International Environmental Justice Movement," in Hofrichter, Toxic Struggles; Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism.

42. Thomas Prugh et al., Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival (Solomons MD: ISEE Press, 1995); Robert Costanza, Olman Segura, and Juan Martinez-Alier (eds.), Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics (Washington: Island Press, 1996); Daly, Beyond Growth.

43. Shiva, Staying Alive; Shiva, Close to Home; Sachs, The Development Dictionary; Sachs, Global Ecology; Escobar, Encountering Development; Richard Peet and Michael Watts (eds.), Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1996); Rahnema, The PostDevelopment Reader; Rist, The History of Development; Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism.

By David Carruthers*

*David Carruthers is a member of the Department of Political Science, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182.